In preparation for the upcoming school year the Google Classroom team has announced a new Classwork and People page for the students and educators on your G Suite for Education account, as well as updates to the Classroom Stream. This notice alerts you to those changes.

The new Classwork page lets educators better organize assignments and questions and improves planning. Teachers can group work into units or modules, and reorder work to match their class sequence. This helps simplify the class stream so it can be used as a conversational hub between educators and students. Teachers will be able to sign up for early access to the new features.

Actions to take:

• Teachers who are using Google Classroom, you can now sign up for early access to the Classroom features like Classwork, People and Settings beta.
• General Access to the new Classwork page will be available from August 2018.

Once available, the class owner will be able to opt-out of using the new Classwork page; this opt-out setting will be available for a limited period of time.

In addition to the Classwork page, the Classroom team has announced the following features also to come this Fall:

• People Page: We’re consolidating information to help educators and students get to what they need quickly. All information about class members - students, co-teachers, guardians - now appear in the new People page.
• Settings Page: On this page, educators can control all the settings for their classes, from updating basic class information, to controlling how students post in the stream, to resetting the class code.
• Stream Updates: With the addition of the Classwork page, the Stream’s purpose can shift to that of a conversational hub where educators can notify their students about upcoming deadlines, post announcements and more.
• Quiz integration: We’re making it easier to create formative assessments directly from Classroom. Teachers will be able to create a Google Forms Quiz from Classroom, and even lock the quiz for more secure and distraction-free testing on Chromebooks.

How it works:

If you ever have a Google Doc that’s tens or hundreds of pages long, it can be difficult to find a specific section of text that someone has asked you to reference. To save time, it can be valuable to provide a direct link to a specific paragraph in your document. Here’s how.

• Put your cursor at the start of the paragraph that you want to link to.
• Head to the Insert menu at the top of the page, and choose Bookmark.
• You will see that a ribbon gets inserted into the document where your cursor was previously.
• Click the ribbon icon.
• You’ll see that you have the option to get a link, or to remove the bookmark. Right-click on the word Link, and choose Copy Link Address. (If you ever decide you no longer want the bookmark to be there, you would just remove it by clicking Remove.)
• Now, when you send that link to anyone, the Doc will be opened right at the paragraph that you bookmarked earlier.

A few weeks ago, Google released a new update for Google Forms. With this new feature, you can now insert images into survey questions or add images as multiple choices options.

Adding images to a question

• For example, let’s say you have a question like, “Give me five adjectives you think of when looking at this picture.”
• In the past, if you were using images in Forms, you would have used this button on the right-hand toolbar.

• But now, if you want to insert images directly into questions or answers, you need to access your images from a different place. When you type out your question, click the image icon on the right side.

• You can upload an image, take a snapshot, direct the form to a URL, browse your Albums or your Drive, or do an online search for an image.
• Once you upload or select your image, it will be incorporated right into the question.

Adding images as multiple choice answers

• For example, let’s say you have a question like, “Which of the following images do you think best represents our brand?” and you want your answers to all be images.
• Click into the first answer space, and then click the image icon on the right-hand side. Upload or select your image.

• Repeat for the other answers. By doing this, you’re inserting the various image options as the answers in your multiple choice question, so that each answer is a different image.

These buttons will appear when you are in Shared with me, Recent, Starred, or looking at Search results in Drive. When you select a document in one of these views, the below bar will appear at the top of your Drive page.

For example, if you are in the Shared with me page, the documents in this folder may not all be stored on your Drive. To fix this, Google has introduced the Add to Drive button
. Click this button to add the document to your Drive and move around to a folder where you can easily find it.

Speaking of moving a document, a second button that has been added to the top bar of Drive is Move to. If you have selected a file and it is already stored in your Drive, then this button will appear. Additionally, if you’ve recently clicked the Add to Drive button, the Add to Drive button then converts to the Move to button.

These two buttons will be available in the top bar of Google Drive in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for the Add to Drive button in top bar of the Drive homepage, as well as in the top bar of the preview window.

You can find the Move to button in the bar at the top of Drive homepage, or it may also be located under the “…” button, as highlighted below.