Tag Archives: forms

Taking learning beyond classroom walls with new features for Back to School

Posted by Dina Kachintseva, Classroom Software Engineer and Felix Wang, User Experience Designer

As any teacher would tell you, the classroom isn’t the only place where learning happens — it’s just the tip of the iceberg. From parents who help students with homework, to extracurriculars, field trips and more, there are so many ways students can learn beyond the walls of the classroom. This is why today we’re announcing new features to help teachers inspire learning for students, regardless of place or time.

Parents and guardians stay informed with Google Classroom email summaries


Parent participation has a major impact on student learning. Today, we’re launching a new feature in Google Classroom that will automatically share summaries of student work with parents. Once invited by a teacher, parents and guardians can receive automated daily or weekly email summaries of student work and class announcements, making it easier to stay up-to-date on what’s happening in the classroom.
“I enjoy helping my children prepare for assignments that they have coming up – and the earlier I know about them, the better,” says Michelle Barrette, a mother of five Medfield, Massachusetts students and pilot user of the new Classroom feature. “This way I can prevent them from missing deadlines and see if they need help brainstorming topics or solutions.”

Annotations help students color outside the lines — and the classroom


When teachers want to help students understand complex math or science concepts, visuals — like drawings on a whiteboard — can help. But how does this work when students and teachers aren’t in the classroom together? Today, we’re announcing the ability to annotate documents in the Google Classroom mobile app.

Using annotations, students can complete assignments, sketch out math problems or even create visuals of creative ideas directly on their devices. This gives students a portable classroom whiteboard on which they can easily draw and sketch. Now, thinking through complex homework challenges from home, school or on the bus is even easier. 

Teachers can use annotations to quickly grade assignments by writing directly on the student’s work, or highlighting the most important passages in a text or novel. Anne Farrahar, an English teacher in the Medfield Public Schools district, explains how her lessons benefitted from her high school students annotating a critique of Shakespeare’s "The Merchant of Venice." “They highlighted all the ideas they thought were convincing arguments in one color, and all the ideas they disagreed with in another color,” says Farrahar. “This gave me the chance to assess students' individual understanding and, based on their responses, gather ideas for future lessons.” 


More Expeditions thousands of miles away or inside the human body


Have you ever wondered what it would be like to visit the White House Kitchen Garden or what it would be like to travel inside the human body? Today we’re announcing new Expeditions that bring students far beyond the usual places they can travel. With these adventures, like a visit to Bhutan or an exploration of the human vascular systems, teachers are able to deeply immerse students in lessons, creating vivid and memorable learning experiences.
In addition, the Expeditions app is coming soon to iOS. More teachers, including those who use iPads, will be able to share Expeditions with their students by using full-screen mode on the devices in place of a VR viewer. With over 200 Expeditions available, we’re excited for them to experience these virtual field trips on more devices. 

More Google for Education features for busy teachers and curious minds


 In celebration of the new school year, we’re excited to share more new tools for teachers and students to break down traditional barriers within the classroom: 
  • A more organized Classroom. To make Classroom even easier to use, teachers can organize the class stream by adding topics to posts, and teachers and students can filter the stream for specific topics. Plus, users can now preview documents, PDFs, images and videos, all without leaving Classroom. 
  • Share your screens wirelessly at school. With the latest Chrome update, Cast for Education is now available to all teachers and students. This free Chrome app carries video and audio across complex school networks and has built-in controls for teachers — no new hardware required. Look out for updates including support for secondary domains coming soon. 
  • Google Forms get an upgrade with images. In Forms, teachers can now add images to questions or as multiple choice answers. This is perfect for subjects like math when students need to show their understanding of diagrams and graphs. 
  • Inbox by Gmail for the classroom. Inbox by Gmail is rolling out to Google for Education users. Coming soon, email notifications from Classroom will be intelligently grouped in Inbox, making it easy for teachers and students to find important updates and highlights. 
Whether students are at home or in the classroom, teachers can continue to inspire and support their curiosity with Expeditions, Classroom, Apps and Chromebooks. Stay tuned this week on Google+ and Twitter for more details on these exciting new tools. 

Updates from ISTE: 4 new tools to help teachers do what they do best

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management, Google for Education and
Cyrus Mistry, Lead Product Manager, Devices and Content, Google for Education

Editor's note: This week our Google for Education team will be joining thousands of educators at the annual ISTE conference. Follow along here and on Twitter for the latest news and updates.

Teachers are great communicators, collaborators, creators and critical thinkers. It takes a teacher to empower students with these skills and create the leaders of our future. As technology becomes an increasingly integral component of our classrooms, the role of teachers becomes even more important.

Today at ISTE, we’re announcing four more ways for these everyday heroes to engage their classes and empower their students using Google tools. Look out for a deeper dive on each of these launches on the blog throughout this week.

Bring curriculum to life: introducing the Expeditions app
Since we launched the beta Expeditions Pioneer Program in September of 2015, more than one million students across 11 countries have taken one of our virtual reality trips. Today, we’re making Expeditions available to everyone. To get started, all teachers need to do is download the Expeditions app onto a set of devices. With more than 200 Expeditions to choose from, students can journey far and wide, learning from immersive new experiences. Our content offering has also grown and now includes Expeditions made by established educational content providers including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Pearson is beginning work on Expeditions content as well. The app is available today for Android and will be available for iPhones and iPads soon.

While Expeditions can be used with many of the devices schools or students already have — either smartphones with Google Cardboard or tablets in 2D full screen mode — Best Buy Education will also be making Expeditions kits available for schools to purchase. These kits will contain everything teachers need to bring their classes on amazing Expeditions: a tablet, virtual reality viewers and a router to connect them all. Kits are available for pre-order and will ship in time for back-to-school. We’ll also publish clear specs for partners interested in working with us to create their own kits.
Empower student-driven classrooms: Google Cast for Education
Collaboration is key to student success, but in most classrooms today the biggest screen in the room is out of reach for students. If students want to share their screens with the class, they have to physically connect their devices to the classroom projector. When teachers present, they’re tied to the projector at the front of the room. Educators are eager to overcome this barrier, so much so that wireless screen sharing for schools was one of the top features requested by teachers in 2015.

Today we’re announcing Google Cast for Education, a free Chrome app that allows students and teachers to share their screens wirelessly from everywhere in the classroom. Cast for Education carries video and audio across complex school networks, has built-in controls for teachers and works with Google Classroom so it’s easy to invite your students. And because the app runs on the teacher’s existing computer, it doesn’t require new hardware. Teachers run the Cast for Education app, and students can share their screens with the existing Cast feature in Chrome. Check out the Cast for Education video.
Teacher view (click to see larger) 
Student view (click to see larger)

Accelerate the feedback loop: Quizzes in Google Forms
Getting feedback early helps students learn and teachers teach. Starting today, Quizzes in Google Forms will allow teachers to auto-grade multiple choice and checkbox questions — so teachers can spend less time grading and more time teaching.

Teachers can also add review materials in the form of explanations, supplemental websites or review videos — so students can get quick, actionable feedback. Plus, teachers can get instant feedback on student progress, so they know which lessons need more explanation and what to teach next. We’ve also added a common request from educators to disallow students from sending themselves a copy of their responses.
Ignite student creativity: creative apps on Chromebooks
We’re on a mission to discover Chromebook tools that foster skills of the future, including problem-solving, digital literacy, leadership and creativity. We listened to teachers in Chromebook classrooms and collaborated with EdTechTeacher, and we’re excited to announce a collection of creative apps on Chromebooks that schools can purchase as a bundle.

Explain Everything, Soundtrap and WeVideo are creative apps that help students demonstrate their understanding of curriculum through their own unique voice. We’ve worked closely with our partners to offer these apps to schools at a special price when all three apps are purchased together. They may be purchased alongside Chromebooks or on their own, and they’re available as an annual subscription per license from Chromebook resellers in the US. Contact your school’s reseller to learn more.

Students use creative apps at Muller Road Middle School in South Carolina (watch video here)

Look out for a deeper dive on each of these product updates on the blog throughout this week. If you’re at ISTE in Denver, visit us at booth #2511 in the expo hall to demo these tools. And check out our sessions — taking place in room #103 — where educators and Googlers will be giving short presentations throughout the conference.

Technology to help teachers do what they do best

This week our Google for Education team will be joining thousands of educators at the annual ISTE conference. Follow along on their blog and Twitter for the latest news and updates. -Ed.


Great teachers inspire us, listen to us and learn from us; they bring the most mundane subjects to life. Technology can help great teachers do what they do best—stimulating minds and fostering skills in the next generation—and make learning even more rewarding for students. So we’re excited by the updates and improvements to our tools for the classroom we’re announcing this week at the ISTE conference, one of the largest education technology gatherings in the world.

Expeditions for all

Since we launched the Expeditions Pioneer Program last September, more than a million students from 11 countries have taken one of our 200+ virtual reality trips—from the Great Barrier Reef, to the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu. Today, we’re making Expeditions available to everyone. To get started, all teachers need to do is download the Expeditions app onto a set of devices and choose where in the world they want to take their class. The app is available today for Android and will be available for iPhones and iPads soon.

While Expeditions can be used with many of the devices schools or students already have, Best Buy Education will also be making Expeditions kits available for schools to purchase. These kits will contain everything teachers need to bring their classes on amazing Expeditions: a tablet, virtual reality viewers and a router to connect them all.

06_27 - Tech for teachers.gif

Google Cast for Education

Sharing information on the classroom’s big screen helps students learn from one another. But today, students have to physically connect their computers to the projector to share their screens with the class. To open classroom collaboration and bring projecting into the 21st century, we’re announcing Google Cast for Education, a free Chrome app that lets students and teachers share their screens wirelessly from everywhere in the classroom, no new hardware required. Cast for Education carries video and audio across complex school networks, has built-in controls for teachers, and is integrated with Google Classroom.
Cast for Education: Teach & Learn from everywhere in the classroom

Quizzes in Google Forms

Getting feedback helps students learn and teachers teach. But grading tests and quizzes is time-consuming; teachers often have to take time away from other tasks to do it, and if it’s not done promptly, everyone misses out on the opportunity to learn from the things students got wrong. Starting today, Quizzes in Google Forms will grade multiple choice and checkbox questions automatically—so teachers can spend less time grading work and more time teaching. 

Teachers can set correct answers in Forms and even add review materials in the form of explanations, supplemental websites, or review videos—so students can get quick, informative feedback on how to improve. Plus, teachers can get an instant snapshot on what their students understand, so they know which lessons need more explanation or what to teach next.

06_27 - Tech for teachers2.gif

Creative apps on Chromebooks

Teachers tell us educational apps on Chromebooks help them improve skills like problem-solving, teamwork, communication and creativity. In collaboration with teachers at EdTechTeacher, we’re announcing a collection of creative apps on Chromebooks that schools can now purchase at a discount: Explain Everything, Soundtrap, and WeVideo. These apps let students demonstrate their understanding of curriculum in their own way by creating unique animations, music, and videos.
Creative apps on Chromebooks

As technology becomes an integral component of our classrooms, we also want it to be so easy to use that it fades into background, allowing teachers to spend their time doing what they love: engaging and inspiring students. 

Source: Google Chrome


2014 cheers for Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms

Cross-posted from the Google for Work Blog

90,000 hours. That’s the amount of time the average person spends working during their lifetime. To put that in perspective, if you spend 90,000 hours watching movies and did nothing else — no sleep, no breaks — you would be watching for 10 years non-stop.

Since you spend so much time at work, we want you to have the latest Google Apps updates when they're available to make working easier. That means your apps are constantly being updated with new and helpful features almost every week to ensure you have the latest tools, security updates and speed improvements — as soon as they’re ready. And that applies across the Docs editors as well. So as a busy 2014 comes to a close, we want to highlight a few of the new ways get things done with Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms.

Work with any kind of file
You come across all types of files all day. The last thing you want to worry about is what software you need in order to view or edit these files. For this reason, we made it so you can open and edit Office files directly in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, on your desktop, phone or tablet.

Make suggestions
Editing files in real-time with others is a great way to work together across the Docs editors, and many of you asked for the ability to suggest changes in other peoples’ documents, rather than making edits directly. Now you can do just that with Suggest Edits in Docs. Make suggestions that can be accepted or rejected with a single click. And when you convert a Word file to Docs or vice versa, your tracked changes will convert as well.
Work on any of your devices.We created new mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides across Android and iOS, where you can edit your documents, presentations and spreadsheets on the go. While working in the cloud means you have access to your documents on any of these devices, you can still access or create documents even if you don’t have a data or WiFi connection.

Edit your images directlySometimes the best way to convey a thought is visually and you need your images to look just right, which is why we made it easier to edit and adjust images. You can now crop your images, even masking the crop to specific shapes, and add borders in Docs, Slides and Drawings. Plus, you can connect objects and images in Slides and Drawings, recolor and change opacity of images in Slides, and even add effects.

Get things done fasterWe want to help you take care of your common tasks. And you know what lots of people make in documents? Bullet lists. So now, just type an asterisk (*) and it will automatically become bullets in Docs and Slides. Nobody likes having to do the same thing twice (unless you’re Santa) so just copy and paste your charts between different spreadsheets in Sheets. For all the regression lovers out there, you can also add trendlines, and to further visualize trends, you can add miniature charts, or sparklines, into individual cells.

Get answers to your surveysForms is a great way to gather information, and across 2014, we added lots of new ways to ask questions and get answers. You can customize themes in Forms to add your own flare and create short URLs that are easier to share. There are also lots of new question options, like limiting one response per person and shuffling the answer order.

Add tons of functionality from 3rd partiesAdd-ons for Docs, Sheets and Forms are tools created by developers that help you do those extra things you need help with, whether it’s printing mailing labels or adding MLA-approved citations, right from your document.

Let there be tablesYou can add borders and backgrounds to your tables, and merge cells together to get your tables to look just how you want. And when you convert your legacy files to Docs, the table cells and borders will still be there so you can keep working.And let everyone, including blind and low-vision users, get work doneAcross Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms, it’s much easier to use a screen reader, with better text-to-voice verbalization and improvements to keyboard navigation. You can now use braille support to read and enter text in Docs, Slides and Drawings. And you can collaborate easier with others in Docs, Sheets, Slides or Drawings because screen readers announce when people enter or leave the document, and you’ll hear when others are editing alongside you. We’ll continue to make a ton of updates behind the scenes to ensure everything keeps running faster and smoother next year. Four cheers (Docs! Sheets! Slides! Forms!) for a happy work life in 2015.

Posted by Ryan Tabone, Director of Product Management, Docs editors

Now, Docs! Now, Sheets! Now, Slides and Add-ons! Simplify your holidays with Google Docs

The Docs editors don’t just make things easier at work—they’re handy for helping you get stuff done at home too, especially around the holidays. We’ve rounded up five ideas to help you focus on the cheer—we’ll take care of the rest.

1. Sending holiday cards? Refresh your address book first. 
Use Forms to make it easy for friends and family to send you their most recent mailing addresses. Just create a quick form and email it out or post the link on social media. Everyone’s addresses will be neatly added to a private spreadsheet.
2. Now that you’ve got your addresses up to date—print out mailing labels. 
Use the handy Avery Label Merge add-on to pull your holiday card addresses from Sheets into an Avery label template in Docs. Pop your labels into the printer, hit print and start sticking!
3. Send a digital, collaborative holiday letter with Docs. 
 If you’d rather send holiday letters instead of cards, Docs can let everyone in the family contribute, no matter where they are in the country or the world. Just create a doc, give everyone edit access and write your card together (and leave your thoughts and opinions with suggested edits & comments). When it’s ready to go, you can publish it and share a link, or go old school and print and mail it out.
4. Give your documents and presentations a holiday touch with royalty-free images. 
Choose from a bunch of free holiday-themed images in Docs and Slides to make your holiday projects a little more festive. Just click Insert > Image > Search > Stock images to browse.
5. Create visual wishlists to share. 
Have a bit of fun with your family's holiday wish lists by making Slides for Santa. Share these visual wish lists with anyone who’s looking to pick up something for your family.

Add-ons for Forms bring a little something extra to your surveys

Google Forms is a free and simple way to collect information--from quickly polling your friends about who'll be attending your trip to the haunted hayride, to getting thousands of responses to an awareness survey for work.

Over the last few months, Forms has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like new theme choices and the ability to create your own personalized themes.

To give you even more flexibility and options, we’re introducing add-ons for Forms—new tools, created by developer partners, that deliver even more features to your surveys (just like add-ons for Docs and Sheets).

Add-ons bring handy extras to your survey building experience, like setting a survey end date, sending custom emails based on responses, storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions, and more.

You can access add-ons from the “Add-ons” menu in Forms, or by directly visiting the Forms add-on store.
Here are just a few of the growing list of add-ons that you can use today with Google Forms:
  • formLimiter: Close your survey automatically, after a maximum number of responses is reached, or at a date and time of your choosing. 
  • Ultradox Trigger: Create custom emails, reports, invoices, newsletters, etc., based on information that people enter into your form. 
  • Form Values: Store and pull from lists that you use regularly in Forms, like a list of staff, students, rooms, resources or anything you want. 
We hope these new tools make your Forms creation process even easier and more useful--and stay tuned for more--our developer partners will be launching even more add-ons in the coming weeks. 

PS: If you’re a developer with ideas for creating your own add-on for Forms, here’s some documentation to get you started.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager

A few more ways to make Forms your own

Earlier this month, Google Forms got snazzed up with new customizable and pre-designed themes that let you easily create beautiful surveys—and today’s updates give you even more ways to build and share those surveys.

Find what you’re looking for 
Similar to Docs and Slides, you can use the “Search the menus” shortcut to get quick access to nearly all the features in Forms, without having to dig through the different menus at the top of the page. To find a feature, simply press Alt+/ or look under the Help menu.
New ways to manage your questions 
You’ll also be getting new tools to control how your survey questions appear to others. For example, you can now:
  • mix things up by randomizing the order of questions on quizzes or surveys with the new “shuffle questions” option. 
  • make sure you only get one answer per person by turning on the “only allow one response per user” feature in settings. 
  • limit people to one response per column for grid-style questions using the new option under “advanced settings.” 

Get the word out with shorter URLs 
And of course, what’s the point of creating a survey is you can’t share it with others? To make this easier, now when you click the “Send form” button, you’ll see a checkbox for creating a tidy URL to share. 
Learn more about all the ways you can use Google Forms at google.com/forms/about and stay tuned to our +page and Twitter account to follow along with the latest updates for all the Docs editors.

Posted by Elynn Lee, Software Engineering Intern

Google Drive and the Docs editors: designed with everyone in mind

Cross posted on the Official Google Blog

Imagine trying to keep track of another person’s real-time edits in a document—using only your ears. Or trying to create a table from spreadsheet data—without being able to clearly see the cells. Whether you’re backing up a file in Drive or crunching some numbers in Sheets, it should be easy to bring your ideas to life using Google’s tools. But if you’re blind or have low vision, you may need to rely on assistive technologies such as screen readers and Braille displays—and that can make working in the cloud challenging. While screen readers can parse static webpages (like this blog) relatively easily, it’s much harder for them to know what to say in interactive applications like Google Docs because the actions they need to describe are much more complex.

With these reasons in mind, today we’re announcing some improvements to Drive and all our editors—Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, and Forms—specifically designed with blind and low-vision users in mind.
Improved screen reader support in Drive and Docs 
In June, we introduced a new version of Drive that’s sleeker, easier to navigate and much faster. But just as importantly, the new Drive also includes better keyboard accessibility, support for zoom and high-contrast mode and improved usability with screen readers.

Across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms, you’ll find that it’s now much easier to use a screen reader, with nicer text-to-voice verbalization and improvements to keyboard navigation. You’ll also notice other updates, including:

  • Support for alt text on images in Docs, so you can tell a screen reader what they should say to describe an image 
  • Better support for using a keyboard to edit charts and pivot tables in Sheets 
  • Additional screen reader improvements specifically for Docs, Sheets and Slides, including support for spelling suggestions, comments and revision history 
  • The ability to quickly search the menus and perform actions in Docs, Slides and Drawings (and soon Sheets and Forms)—even if you don’t know the action’s key sequence 
Collaborating with others is easier too: in Docs, Sheets, Slides or Drawings, screen readers announce when people enter or leave the document, and you’ll now also hear when others are editing alongside you.

Refreshable Braille display support 
If you use a Braille display, you can now use it to read and enter text in Docs, Slides and Drawings. Even if you don't use a Braille display, with Braille support, your screen reader’s settings for character echoing are automatically followed. Enabling Braille also dramatically reduces the lag between when you press a key and when it’s announced by your screen reader, and improves the announcements of punctuation and whitespace. Learn how to enable Braille support in our Help Center.

Get up and going faster
The first time you use a screen reader or a Braille display, getting up to speed can be a daunting task. But it’s simpler with new step-by-step guides for Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms and Drawings.
You can also access the in-product “Help” menu at any time without interrupting your work, or use the updated shortcut help dialog to easily search through keyboard shortcuts if you don’t remember them.

Finally, we’re offering phone support for Google Drive accessibility questions. If you get stuck, visit support.google.com/drive to request a phone call and someone from our team will reach out to you.

What’s next
Referring to recent updates to Google Drive, Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said at this year’s National Convention: “The progress...during the last few months has just been positively extraordinary.” We’re pleased the community has welcomed these improvements, and will continue to work with organizations like the NFB to make even more progress.

Everyone, regardless of ability, should be able to experience all that the web has to offer. To find out more about our commitment to a fully accessible web, visit the new Google Accessibility site at www.google.com/accessibility.

Posted by: Alan Warren, Vice President, Engineering