Tag Archives: Education

How this Googler lifts up Indigenous communities

Maria Running Fisher Jones first learned about balancing checking accounts and filing taxes at age 7 — thanks to her primary school teacher. Though finance didn’t end up being her calling in life, education has been a consistent theme throughout her career. She first studied education, even earning her master’s degree, but ended up finding a home in law.

Now as senior corporate counsel in Google Cloud, Maria also takes time to partner with Googlers and people in her community to raise awareness of issues that are impacting Indigenous communities in the United States, like the one she grew up in, and expand opportunities for Indigenous-owned businesses. I chatted with Maria over Google Meet to hear her story and learn about how education has always been a cornerstone in her life.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I was raised by a single mother on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Northwestern Montana, a community struggling with a 69% unemployment rate. The estimated poverty rate of Native Americans living on reservations is nearly double the national average and the highest in the country.

My family saw education as a way to lift ourselves and our community — a way to learn and gain access to connections to give back. My mother ingrained the value of education in me deeply: I vividly remember a time when she wouldn’t allow me to participate in a basketball game because my grades had slipped. Even worse, my mother made me tell my coach and teammates the reason I was to miss the game. It’s those life lessons that have brought me to where I am today.

The more I learned about the tech industry, the more I discovered how much it could be used for good.

How did you get into law?

I didn’t initially anticipate practicing law as a career. Entering college, I was set on a degree in education with a plan to teach high-school English, thanks to the influence of my primary school teachers.

While studying for my master’s in education, I became particularly interested in educational disparities, like why are some children afforded a better education and more resources than others? I began researching laws to educate myself and started to realize that a law degree could help me affect positive change. In some sense, I really fell into a law degree by virtue of following my passions and natural curiosity.

What shaped your interest in tech?

Technology, its importance and impact in the world, wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about while in Montana. Instead of video conferences and emails, I was picking up the phone to connect through a landline or showing up to have a cup of coffee.

But the more I learned about the tech industry, the more I discovered how much it could be used for good. I saw how this was the future and how it could connect my family and community to opportunities in a more equitable way. It’s why I participated in a Wi-Fi connectivity project with GAIN, Google’s Aboriginal and Indigenous Employee Resource Group. It’s how I found the ability to connect my education degrees to tech law. At Google, I’ve been able to do both.

How do you connect your work at Google to the causes you care about?

Giving back and engaging in community is critical in my life. Leaving the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana is still something that pains me to this day. Leaving family has always been a challenge for me, but sharing my culture and raising awareness on issues facing Indigenous people has filled the void of missing home. Since joining Google, I’ve had the opportunity to provide awareness through various channels, including a Talks at Google interview with activist Kimberly Loring HeavyRunner and a Careers on Air virtual event celebrating Google’s Aboriginal and Indigenous communities.

Native Forward, the U.S.’s largest scholarship program for Native students with more than 16,000 recipients from over 500 Tribes, provided the funding to support my law school education. Recently, I was part of a group of Googlers who reviewed its scholarship applications, and I donate monthly via our internal platform that allows for company matching.

In addition to the work I do at Google, I also started a company, TPMOCS, in 2014, specializing in handcrafting children’s moccasins. We employ Native American artisans in rural communities and give a portion of profits to organizations on reservations supporting children in need.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

During a trip back home to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, I spent time with family and elders, and had a traditional naming ceremony for my children. I also had time to reflect on my life choices. Some, if given the chance, I would do over, but one that I’ve never second guessed is joining Google. As I speak at events, I’d like Indigeous youth and young professionals to know that you too can pursue a career in tech and still remain true to yourself. Representation matters and working at Google provides me with a platform to highlight interests and issues close to my heart. Google welcomes our voices.

How this Googler lifts up Indigenous communities

Maria Running Fisher Jones first learned about balancing checking accounts and filing taxes at age 7 — thanks to her primary school teacher. Though finance didn’t end up being her calling in life, education has been a consistent theme throughout her career. She first studied education, even earning her master’s degree, but ended up finding a home in law.

Now as senior corporate counsel in Google Cloud, Maria also takes time to partner with Googlers and people in her community to raise awareness of issues that are impacting Indigenous communities in the United States, like the one she grew up in, and expand opportunities for Indigenous-owned businesses. I chatted with Maria over Google Meet to hear her story and learn about how education has always been a cornerstone in her life.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I was raised by a single mother on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Northwestern Montana, a community struggling with a 69% unemployment rate. The estimated poverty rate of Native Americans living on reservations is nearly double the national average and the highest in the country.

My family saw education as a way to lift ourselves and our community — a way to learn and gain access to connections to give back. My mother ingrained the value of education in me deeply: I vividly remember a time when she wouldn’t allow me to participate in a basketball game because my grades had slipped. Even worse, my mother made me tell my coach and teammates the reason I was to miss the game. It’s those life lessons that have brought me to where I am today.

The more I learned about the tech industry, the more I discovered how much it could be used for good.

How did you get into law?

I didn’t initially anticipate practicing law as a career. Entering college, I was set on a degree in education with a plan to teach high-school English, thanks to the influence of my primary school teachers.

While studying for my master’s in education, I became particularly interested in educational disparities, like why are some children afforded a better education and more resources than others? I began researching laws to educate myself and started to realize that a law degree could help me affect positive change. In some sense, I really fell into a law degree by virtue of following my passions and natural curiosity.

What shaped your interest in tech?

Technology, its importance and impact in the world, wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about while in Montana. Instead of video conferences and emails, I was picking up the phone to connect through a landline or showing up to have a cup of coffee.

But the more I learned about the tech industry, the more I discovered how much it could be used for good. I saw how this was the future and how it could connect my family and community to opportunities in a more equitable way. It’s why I participated in a Wi-Fi connectivity project with GAIN, Google’s Aboriginal and Indigenous Employee Resource Group. It’s how I found the ability to connect my education degrees to tech law. At Google, I’ve been able to do both.

How do you connect your work at Google to the causes you care about?

Giving back and engaging in community is critical in my life. Leaving the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana is still something that pains me to this day. Leaving family has always been a challenge for me, but sharing my culture and raising awareness on issues facing Indigenous people has filled the void of missing home. Since joining Google, I’ve had the opportunity to provide awareness through various channels, including a Talks at Google interview with activist Kimberly Loring HeavyRunner and a Careers on Air virtual event celebrating Google’s Aboriginal and Indigenous communities.

Native Forward, the U.S.’s largest scholarship program for Native students with more than 16,000 recipients from over 500 Tribes, provided the funding to support my law school education. Recently, I was part of a group of Googlers who reviewed its scholarship applications, and I donate monthly via our internal platform that allows for company matching.

In addition to the work I do at Google, I also started a company, TPMOCS, in 2014, specializing in handcrafting children’s moccasins. We employ Native American artisans in rural communities and give a portion of profits to organizations on reservations supporting children in need.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

During a trip back home to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, I spent time with family and elders, and had a traditional naming ceremony for my children. I also had time to reflect on my life choices. Some, if given the chance, I would do over, but one that I’ve never second guessed is joining Google. As I speak at events, I’d like Indigeous youth and young professionals to know that you too can pursue a career in tech and still remain true to yourself. Representation matters and working at Google provides me with a platform to highlight interests and issues close to my heart. Google welcomes our voices.

How Education Plus keeps schools safe online

From virtual classes to in-person lessons, the best learning environments may look different. But they have a few things in common: inspiring teachers, engaged students and a safe space to learn.

Over the last few years, spurred by COVID-19, millions of new users have come online to collaborate, create and learn. Because we support millions of education users every day, we think a lot about creating safe, digital-learning environments. It's only when users are safe online that learning can begin. It’s why our products are safe and secure by design, and why we continue to invest in this area.

We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact study around Google Workspace for Education Plus, our most comprehensive edition of Google Workspace for Education. The study took a look at the security, administrative benefits and cost savings associated with it, and this is what it found: Education Plus helps reduce cyber threats, and the time to remediate them, for educational institutions worldwide.

Additionally, Forrester found organizations using Education Plus were more efficient in administration, and eliminated the need to invest in other education technology providers. You can download The Total Economic Impact Study to read the entire report, and we’ve included some highlights below:

  • 95% reduction in phishing incidents: Security and email filtering in Education Plus reduces phishing attempts by 95%, allowing IT staff to focus less on mitigating threats and more on optimizing security.
  • 98% less time addressing phishing attacks: Quickly prevent, detect and remediate security incidents with our investigation tool. Email filtering in Education Plus helps IT staff focus on optimization instead of obstacles.
  • 300 hours saved annually on administrative tasks: Education Plus helps administrators produce administrative, educational and security reports up to 80% faster with the investigation tool and Vault.
  • $73,000 in time saved from improved security: The time usually spent searching for and deleting phishing emails and resolving incidents saved 35 weeks of IT time.

Get hands-on with Education Plus, and
understand the impact

Want to see how Education Plus could benefit your organization? Check out our new Education Plus Impact Calculator to calculate potential benefits and cost savings. Simply answer a set of 10 questions and you’ll receive a downloadable, custom impact report for your institution.

Gif of Google Workspace for Education Plus impact calculator. The user answers four administrative efficiency questions and sees a monetary amount on the next screen of how much they could save in collaboration costs.

And whether you’re just learning about Education Plus or an existing customer, we’re announcing a new product demo experience for the premium features of Google Workspace for Education. Available to anyone, experience the real product interface and how your institution could use premium features including the investigation tool, security dashboard, advanced admin controls, Google Meet and originality reports.

Gif of Google Workspace for Education Plus product demo focused on Google Meet. The user sees a Google Meet interface, and is prompted to use the “Q&A” feature to ask a question to the rest of the Meet attendees.

Ready to create a safer digital learning experience for your school? Learn more and calculate the potential benefits and cost savings with our Education Plus Impact Calculator and product demo experience.

Natural Language Assessment: A New Framework to Promote Education

Posted by Kedem Snir, Software Engineer, and Gal Elidan, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Research

Whether it's a professional honing their skills or a child learning to read, coaches and educators play a key role in assessing the learner's answer to a question in a given context and guiding them towards a goal. These interactions have unique characteristics that set them apart from other forms of dialogue, yet are not available when learners practice alone at home. In the field of natural language processing, this type of capability has not received much attention and is technologically challenging. We set out to explore how we can use machine learning to assess answers in a way that facilitates learning.

In this blog, we introduce an important natural language understanding (NLU) capability called Natural Language Assessment (NLA), and discuss how it can be helpful in the context of education. While typical NLU tasks focus on the user's intent, NLA allows for the assessment of an answer from multiple perspectives. In situations where a user wants to know how good their answer is, NLA can offer an analysis of how close the answer is to what is expected. In situations where there may not be a “correct” answer, NLA can offer subtle insights that include topicality, relevance, verbosity, and beyond. We formulate the scope of NLA, present a practical model for carrying out topicality NLA, and showcase how NLA has been used to help job seekers practice answering interview questions with Google's new interview prep tool, Interview Warmup.


Overview of Natural Language Assessment (NLA)

The goal of NLA is to evaluate the user's answer against a set of expectations. Consider the following components for an NLA system interacting with students:

  • A question presented to the student
  • Expectations that define what we expect to find in the answer (e.g., a concrete textual answer, a set of topics we expect the answer to cover, conciseness)
  • An answer provided by the student
  • An assessment output (e.g., correctness, missing information, too specific or general, stylistic feedback, pronunciation, etc.)
  • [Optional] A context (e.g., a chapter in a book or an article)

With NLA, both the expectations about the answer and the assessment of the answer can be very broad. This enables teacher-student interactions that are more expressive and subtle. Here are two examples:

  1. A question with a concrete correct answer: Even in situations where there is a clear correct answer, it can be helpful to assess the answer more subtly than simply correct or incorrect. Consider the following:

    Context: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
    Question: “What is Hogwarts?”
    Expectation: “Hogwarts is a school of Witchcraft and Wizardry” [expectation is given as text]
    Answer: “I am not exactly sure, but I think it is a school.”

    The answer may be missing salient details but labeling it as incorrect wouldn’t be entirely true or useful to a user. NLA can offer a more subtle understanding by, for example, identifying that the student’s answer is too general, and also that the student is uncertain.

    Illustration of the NLA process from input question, answer and expectation to assessment output

    This kind of subtle assessment, along with noting the uncertainty the student expressed, can be important in helping students build skills in conversational settings.

  2. Topicality expectations: There are many situations in which a concrete answer is not expected. For example, if a student is asked an opinion question, there is no concrete textual expectation. Instead, there's an expectation of relevance and opinionation, and perhaps some level of succinctness and fluency. Consider the following interview practice setup:

    Question: “Tell me a little about yourself?”
    Expectations: { “Education”, “Experience”, “Interests” } (a set of topics)
    Answer: “Let’s see. I grew up in the Salinas valley in California and went to Stanford where I majored in economics but then got excited about technology so next I ….”

    In this case, a useful assessment output would map the user’s answer to a subset of the topics covered, possibly along with a markup of which parts of the text relate to which topic. This can be challenging from an NLP perspective as answers can be long, topics can be mixed, and each topic on its own can be multi-faceted.


A Topicality NLA Model

In principle, topicality NLA is a standard multi-class task for which one can readily train a classifier using standard techniques. However, training data for such scenarios is scarce and it would be costly and time consuming to collect for each question and topic. Our solution is to break each topic into granular components that can be identified using large language models (LLMs) with a straightforward generic tuning.

We map each topic to a list of underlying questions and define that if the sentence contains an answer to one of those underlying questions, then it covers that topic. For the topic “Experience” we might choose underlying questions such as:

  • Where did you work?
  • What did you study?
  • …

While for the topic “Interests” we might choose underlying questions such as:

  • What are you interested in?
  • What do you enjoy doing?
  • …

These underlying questions are designed through an iterative manual process. Importantly, since these questions are sufficiently granular, current language models (see details below) can capture their semantics. This allows us to offer a zero-shot setting for the NLA topicality task: once trained (more on the model below), it is easy to add new questions and new topics, or adapt existing topics by modifying their underlying content expectation without the need to collect topic specific data. See below the model’s predictions for the sentence “I’ve worked in retail for 3 years” for the two topics described above:

A diagram of how the model uses underlying questions to predict the topic most likely to be covered by the user’s answer.

Since an underlying question for the topic “Experience” was matched, the sentence would be classified as “Experience”.


Application: Helping Job Seekers Prepare for Interviews

Interview Warmup is a new tool developed in collaboration with job seekers to help them prepare for interviews in fast-growing fields of employment such as IT Support and UX Design. It allows job seekers to practice answering questions selected by industry experts and to become more confident and comfortable with interviewing. As we worked with job seekers to understand their challenges in preparing for interviews and how an interview practice tool could be most useful, it inspired our research and the application of topicality NLA.

We build the topicality NLA model (once for all questions and topics) as follows: we train an encoder-only T5 model (EncT5 architecture) with 350 million parameters on Question-Answers data to predict the compatibility of an <underlying question, answer> pair. We rely on data from SQuAD 2.0 which was processed to produce <question, answer, label> triplets.

In the Interview Warmup tool, users can switch between talking points to see which ones were detected in their answer.

The tool does not grade or judge answers. Instead it enables users to practice and identify ways to improve on their own. After a user replies to an interview question, their answer is parsed sentence-by-sentence with the Topicality NLA model. They can then switch between different talking points to see which ones were detected in their answer. We know that there are many potential pitfalls in signaling to a user that their response is “good”, especially as we only detect a limited set of topics. Instead, we keep the control in the user’s hands and only use ML to help users make their own discoveries about how to improve.

So far, the tool has had great results helping job seekers around the world, including in the US, and we have recently expanded it to Africa. We plan to continue working with job seekers to iterate and make the tool even more helpful to the millions of people searching for new jobs.

A short film showing how Interview Warmup and its NLA capabilities were developed in collaboration with job seekers.

Conclusion

Natural Language Assessment (NLA) is a technologically challenging and interesting research area. It paves the way for new conversational applications that promote learning by enabling the nuanced assessment and analysis of answers from multiple perspectives. Working together with communities, from job seekers and businesses to classroom teachers and students, we can identify situations where NLA has the potential to help people learn, engage, and develop skills across an array of subjects, and we can build applications in a responsible way that empower users to assess their own abilities and discover ways to improve.


Acknowledgements

This work is made possible through a collaboration spanning several teams across Google. We’d like to acknowledge contributions from Google Research Israel, Google Creative Lab, and Grow with Google teams among others.

Source: Google AI Blog


Expanding accessible learning with Google for Education

The need for accessible tools and equitable learning environments has become more critical than ever, as the number of students with disabilities is on the rise, including those with specific learning disabilities.

Google for Education uses built-in accessibility features to help support the needs of all students, to help foster inclusive environments so that students can learn individually and as a group. Our accessibility features provide individualized support while giving students the resources they need to learn in a collaborative way.

Captions as a tool across Google products

We aim to build helpful features across all our products. One of those features is captions, which are useful not only for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, but also if a room is loud, or a student just needs additional support focusing, or if someone needs support in a different language. Captions are available in Google Meet in six languages, and you can change the font size and placement on the screen. You can also access and add captions to videos in YouTube, Google Drive and Chrome. For Android users, captions are also available through Live Transcribe.

Gif of multiple types of captions across Google products

Building accessibility tools into Chromebooks

Our accessibility features are easy to use and built directly into Chromebooks, like Select-to-Speak, the ChromeVox screen reader and magnification, that enable every individual to do their best work. Now we’ve added more dictation improvements, like the ability to speak into any text field on the Chromebook simply by clicking on the mic icon in the status area. You can also press Search + d to dictate, and you can now edit using just your voice.

More customization options in Google Workspace for Education

We recently announced more customization for accessibility settings in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings, so users can set accessibility settings for each product individually. And soon, we’ll build upon that by consolidating the Docs settings for screen reader and braille support into a single setting, with a single checkbox. We’ll also soon be adding improvements to voice typing in Google Docs, voice typing for speaker notes in Google Slides, and captions in Google Slides, including adding automatic punctuation and the ability to access from all browsers.

For people who are blind or low vision and use screen readers, you can nowtype a keyboard shortcut (ALT + number, 1-7) that verbalizes the content of a Calendar event. This way, Calendar details can be heard on demand, instead of through time-consuming navigation.

Working with partners to expand accessible tools

We’re supporting teachers through our own tools and partnerships with organizations that share our mission. Many of these apps and extensions integrate with Google tools like Classroom, Google Workspace for Education, and Chromebooks.

This includes Texthelp, a company which makes extensions and tools that help people learn, understand and communicate through the use of digital learning and accessibility tools. Students can use tools like Read&Write to help with reading support, and Equatio to help with creating math equations digitally. Created by an occupational therapist, SnapType breaks down the barriers to education by helping students feel more confident and independent. Students challenged by handwriting or visual impairments can keep up in class with their peers by using SnapType to easily take a picture of their assignment and then type or dictate their schoolwork.

We’re also continually working to update our Help Center articles for screen reader users, including how to use a screen reader with Google Calendar, how to use a screen reader with Google Drive, and how to make your document or presentation more accessible. Stay up to date on the latest accessibility features from Google for Education.

Helping all New Yorkers pursue a career in tech

As New York emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech sector continues to play a critical role in the city’s economic recovery. While hiring has slowed in many of the city’s industries, tech is still among the fastest areas of job growth. In fact, there were more openings for tech positions during the pandemic than in any other industry.

We believe the city’s good-paying tech jobs should be within reach of all New Yorkers. That’s why earlier this year we announced the Google NYC Tech Opportunity Fund — a $4 million commitment to computer science (CS) education, career development and job-preparedness to make sure every New Yorker, today and in the future, has the chance to get into tech.

With over 680,000 good-paying tech jobs, New York has more tech workers than any other U.S. city. That means for every one Googler in New York, there are over 50 additional tech jobs here. So we’ve extended our support for tech in New York beyond our own hiring to the city’s overall tech employment pipeline — starting from the classroom all the way to the office.

We’ve had some early success: We’ve trained 1,200 New York City high school students through our CS education programs like Code Next and the Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI). Meanwhile, Grow with Google has partnered with over 530 organizations to train more than 430,000 New Yorkers on digital skills with the help of organizations like public libraries and chambers of commerce. We also launched an apprenticeship program where over 90% of participants nationally landed quality jobs in tech, including at Google, within six months of completing the program. And we’re supporting New York-based startups through Google’s Black Founders Fund and Latino Founders Fund.

With the Google NYC Tech Opportunity Fund, we’re going a step further. We’ve identified key areas we believe Google can help address larger systemic issues and where we’ll focus our investments.

Support for teaching early tech skills

P-12 students with access to CS classes in school are nearly three times more likely to aspire to have a job in the field. But to offer these courses, schools need teachers who are trained in computational skills. After supporting a CS teacher training program at Hunter College in 2021, we committed an additional $1.5 million to The City University of New York (CUNY) and Hunter College to help them train more CS teachers and incorporate computational thinking into their curricula.

New York City's public libraries are essential learning environments for many, especially in under-resourced communities. Thousands of teens use the city’s three library systems annually to get college and career mentoring, build digital literacy, borrow books and more. So we granted a total of $1.5 million to Brooklyn Public Library, The New York Public Library and Queens Public Library to help them create special teen centers. These spaces will offer access to technology, resources and programs teens need to develop essential career skills for the future.

Resources for job seekers

We’re also providing a $1 million Google.org grant to the New York City Employment and Training Coalition (NYCETC) to assemble a consortium of leaders in tech education and workforce development, and to seed a grant fund for organizations that support BIPOC job seekers in NYC.

As part of this effort, we also offer free Google Career Certificates for community colleges, such as The State University of New York’s (SUNY) online center. Over 10,000 New Yorkers have already completed a Google Career certificate and built up their qualifications for high-demand tech jobs.

By taking steps to support students and those already in the workforce, we can help ensure all New Yorkers have access to career opportunities so the tech sector in New York really looks like New York.

Show what you know with the new ChromeOS administrator certification

Around the world, ChromeOS admins are hard at work, collectively managing 50 million students and educators using Chromebooks and other ChromeOS devices. Some of them are looking after huge fleets across entire school districts, and others are just starting out.

Whatever size or type of organization they support as ChromeOS admins, we’re here to make life a little easier for them with a range of new policies and updates. We’re also announcing a new Professional ChromeOS Administrator certification, to recognize and reward their ChromeOS expertise.

Configure policies using Google Groups

We’re always adding new policies in Google Admin Console, and now have more than 600 to help customize and curate environments for different schools’ and organizations’ unique needs.

To make it easier to configure apps and extension permissions, we’ve introduced group-based policies for new and existing Google groups. Now if an admin needs to install an app for a specific set of users — who may or may not belong to different organizational units — they can simply add them to a group instead of moving them into a new organizational unit.

Here’s how it could play out in a school. Imagine a small group of students needs access to an app for Science Club. These students are from different grades, so they belong to different organizational units — let’s call them Third Grade, Fourth Grade and Fifth Grade. Instead of setting the app policy as “Allow Install” for all kids in those grades (and then hoping the right kids will install the app themselves), you can create a group-based policy that sets the science app to “Force Install” onto the devices of students in Science Club.

On the flip side, if a group of students were getting distracted by an app or abusing it, you could create a custom group to block their access — without having to disable it for all students.

Group-based policies not only reduce the time and effort involved in configuring apps and extensions, but also help avoid the forced install of apps to entire organizational units, saving valuable disk space and network bandwidth.

Gif showing the benefits of group based policy in Google Admin Console

Become a certified ChromeOS administrator

We’ve long been asked about creating a certification for proficiency in administering for ChromeOS, much like our certification for Google Workspace admins. Certifications not only are great for training, but also help with career development and progression and help establish professional credibility. According to the Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report, certified IT professionals earn more than non-certified peers, and the more certifications, the higher the salary. Today, we’re introducing a new Professional ChromeOS Administrator certification. It’s a great opportunity for people to demonstrate their skills as a ChromeOS IT admin, and earn a badge that proves proficiency to peers and prospective employers.

Designed for enterprise and education systems administrators, and junior engineers with at least one year of holistic IT infrastructure experience, the three-hour exam has 50 multiple choice questions and 30 hands-on lab questions. Test-takers have 90 minutes to complete each section. The exam assesses the ability to perform actions from Google Admin Console, including configuring ChromeOS policies and understanding the tenets of ChromeOS.

For the next 12 months, to help organizations build highly skilled and effective teams, Google is waiving the $125 fee and offering the Professional ChromeOS Administrators exam for free to all enterprise and education IT admins. The exam is English only to start, and will be offered in Japanese in early 2023.

Find more information about repairing devices

With 40 million students and educators using Chromebooks, it can be challenging for school IT administrators to find information about which devices they can repair. As part of the Chromebook repair program, we’re partnering with companies like Acer and Lenovo, and now CTL, to spotlight more Chromebooks that are repairable. On our site, schools can easily identify which Chromebooks have commonly repaired components, and find information on how to get them repaired. We’ll continue to expand the program globally soon.

Preparing learners for growing industries with higher ed

Ensuring today’s workforce has the skills required for an evolving labor market requires creative approaches. That’s why we’ve been working with higher education to help students and people already in the job market reach their earning potential. Educational institutions in all 50 states, including over 300 universities, community colleges and career and technical education high schools, have incorporated Google Career Certificates to help people begin promising careers in growing fields.

Today, we’re announcing Industry Specializations, a new addition to the Google Career Certificates program. We’ve joined forces with leading universities so people can learn from top experts at Google and world-class faculty in an affordable and accessible way — no experience or application required. The university-built Specializations will provide Google Career Certificate graduates and new learners with additional expertise and skills for jobs in some of the fastest-growing industries.

Learners can build on their skills and access new career opportunities by enrolling in a Specialization to prepare for entry-level jobs like:

Plus, top institutions are working with us to reach even more people with the Google Career Certificates. UCLA Extension, one of the first and largest continuing education providers in the country, is offering the Google Career Certificates to any learner, at no cost, through UCLAxOpen. Stanford Digital Education is partnering with the Bay Area Community College Consortium to provide in-person and virtual instruction programs to deliver the Google Career Certificates across the Bay Area. And the SkillUp Google Career Certificate program at Rutgers University provides alumni with free access to the Google Career Certificates through their career services office.

Many of these partnerships are happening state-wide:

  • The Technical College System of Georgia launched the Google Career Certificates as a non-credit option to all 22 of their colleges.
  • The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education is working with member universities across the state to implement the certificates as a non-credit offering to undergraduates, and will extend access to the community by offering them through university workforce and continuing education offices.
  • The North Carolina Community College System has developed credit-bearing courses around the Google Project Management and Data Analytics Certificates and has made them available in their central course catalog for all 58 colleges.
  • In addition to these states, community college systems in Connecticut, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Virginia are offering Google Career Certificates to help support learners’ employability.

By completing a Google Career Certificate and an Industry Specialization, learners will earn a credential from Google and from the participating university. They will also gain access to jobs through our employer consortium, which includes more than 150 companies — such as Adobe, Deloitte, Lowe’s, Verizon and Google — that are eager to hire talent in these fields.

We’re proud to work with higher education institutions to create additional accessible and flexible pathways for economic mobility. To learn more about these opportunities, visit grow.google/certificates. And if you are an academic institution interested in partnering with us, more information can be found on our website.

This retreat led to an award-winning research proposal

Editor’s note:Google’s Computer Science Education Research (CS-ER) awardsprovide one year of funding for scientific research and pilot-stage ideas focused on improving CS learning and teaching. Today’s post is authored by Dr. Ain Grooms and Dr. Stefanie Marshall, whose research in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education received a 2022 CS-ER award. Learn more about our other 2022 CS-ER award recipients.

On a cloudy day, we checked our inboxes to find a special invitation from Dr. Tamara Pearson, the director of Spelman College’s Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM.

Her note said she was partnering with Google to sponsor a three-day “Care and Create” retreat in Napa, California, for 10 Black women CS researchers. We eagerly packed our bags, excited to share space with other academics who were passionate about improving CS teaching and learning. The moment we arrived in Napa, we knew this retreat was special.

The Care and Create retreat did just as its name promised: It created a trusting, supportive and caring environment for Black women researchers. There was time for reflection — as a group and individually — about the space we take up and the space we give up as Black women in academia who study educational equity. And there was time for self-care, which sparked further conversations about how little quality time we routinely take for ourselves. In society and in our professional and personal lives, Black women are often positioned as caretakers or “othermothers.” But for three days in Napa, we finally had a small, intimate space to be seen and cared for as whole beings. The retreat allowed us to embrace, first, our value as Black women, while also honoring the value we bring to the research field.

We are thrilled that our research proposal, which was born out of this retreat, is the recipient of Google’s 2022-23 Computer Science Education Research (CS-ER) award. Our study will explore how states have created policy infrastructures to support equity-focused CS education. We hope our research findings will help create more access to CS learning opportunities, specifically for underserved youth across the U.S. We will conduct this research study over the next year alongside other CS-ER award recipients. As the first all-women CS-ER cohort, we are grateful to be in community with these researchers. Learn more about our work and our stories.

One researcher’s take on Google’s mentorship program

As a sophomore at Howard University, Leslie Coney discovered what would soon become her “superpower” while she and a friend were washing their hands in the bathroom. Attempting to use the hand dryer, they noticed it worked without issue for Leslie, but not for her friend, who had darker skin. Leslie shared this experience with a professor, who introduced her to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the study of how humans interact with technology.

Leslie started questioning who was actually considered when designing, building and testing technologies. This kicked off her computer science (CS) research journey in Human Centered Design and Engineering, specifically exploring how Black people can influence and are impacted by technology.

Today, Leslie is a PhD student at the University of Washington with a focus on Black maternal health. She’s also a recent graduate of Google’s CS Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP). Through mentorship and peer-to-peer networking, CSRMP supports undergraduate and graduate students from historically marginalized groups pursuing computing research. The program aims to increase the diversity of PhD graduates in computing-related fields and ensure the broader community of CS researchers includes the experiences, perspectives and concerns of people worldwide. Since 2018, CSRMP has hosted more than 730 students across more than 230 institutions. And our next class of nearly 300 students starts in just a few weeks.

Reflecting on her CSRMP experience, Leslie shared more about its impact on her career and her advice for future participants.

How did you get into the research field?

I focused on building community, seeking guidance from my professors and taking advantage of as many resources as possible both on and off-campus. For example, I received funding through Google’s Conference Scholarships program to attend conferences like Tapia and Grace Hopper Celebration, where I connected with other Black women researchers.

How did CSRMP prepare you for the next step in your research career?

My mentor helped me think critically about my research interests and what makes a program and advisor a good fit for me. He encouraged me to ask the tough questions when figuring out where I could be most successful in graduate school. He also helped me better understand what rigorous research looks like in academia and what to expect as a PhD student.

Were there any challenges you had to overcome during your time in CSRMP?

I wasn’t the most comfortable in my pod at first, given that I was the only Black woman in the group. My experience at a Historically Black University influenced me to focus my research efforts on the Black community — which was something I was proud of but nervous to share with folks who aren’t Black. There is an unnecessary pressure placed on researchers from marginalized groups to validate why centering marginalized experiences is sufficient and valuable. However, my CSRMP mentor and podmates reaffirmed this decision and supported my pursuit. Also, there are very nuanced experiences in academia that are specific to Black women, and while my mentor couldn't fully prepare me for them, he still encouraged me to seek relationships that could close that gap.

You just published your first piece! Tell us about it.

Yes, I did! My article, “Why you being WEIRD to me?: reflections of a black researcher on WEIRD-ness in HCI,” started out as a final assignment last fall. I was tasked with writing about common threads throughout readings on diversity, or the lack thereof, in HCI. Afterward, a peer and fellow Black woman researcher invited me to write something for the next edition of the Association for Computing Machinery XRDS series. Writing the paper was so much fun — I got to exercise my critical thinking muscles, incorporate cultural references and prioritize accessibility so people outside academia could engage, too.

What advice do you have for students who are underrepresented in CS research and getting started in this field?

More likely than not, you gravitate toward your lived experiences. So be confident in your identities and take advantage of programs like CSRMP to help you back up those lived experiences with practical knowledge. Next, treat the graduate school application process like dating — once you’re accepted, the ball is in your court to decide whether or not that program is a good fit for you. You have to be sure that you will feel safe and supported being yourself and conducting your research. Lastly, pace yourself and have fun! A PhD is a long commitment, so be sure to find a balance between work and play.

Congratulations to all the students who graduated from CSRMP in the first half of 2022. We look forward to supporting future students like Leslie, who are taking charge in computing research. Applications are now open for the January 2023 mentorship cycle — spread the word and apply by October 26, 2022.