What's new with Google Workspace for Education
You can now position an image in front of or behind text in Google Docs. Additionally, this formatting will be preserved when importing or exporting documents from Microsoft Word.
You’ll see the new option for positioning an image above or below text within the image options sidebar and in the image toolbar when clicking directly on an image. New options for positioning images in front of and behind text in Google Docs.
You can now present content from Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides directly to an active Google Meet call. As a result, you can present with fewer clicks, and then once you’re presenting, you can see your audience and your content at the same time back in the Meet tab.
Google Meet meetings can be scheduled across Google Workspace products, such as Calendar, Gmail, Google Chat, and more. This means your unique meeting code and its expiration are based on the product that your meeting is created from.
Most meeting codes will expire 365 days after the last use, but there are instances where the meeting code will expire instantly once the meeting ends.
Google Calendar (Meeting codes expire when the following two conditions are met: 1) The meeting code has not been used for 365 days, and 2) The meeting code isn’t associated with any future calendar events.)
Gmail, Google Chat, and the Google Meet homepage (Meeting codes expire 365 days after last use.)
Google Classroom (Meeting code expires instantly once all users leave the meeting.)
Breakout Rooms (Breakout rooms expire instantly once the parent meeting ends.)
Video feeds
Hover over your video feed for options between a tile in the grid or a floating picture. You can also resize, reposition, and hide it to concentrate on the call.
Your self-view appears in the bottom right of the grid to put more video feeds at eye-level as you look into the camera.
Viewing and presenting experience
See what you are presenting while in Google Meet.
Unpin the content you or others share to see more and larger video feeds.
Participant names are always visible regardless of meeting size.
Bottom bar
Meeting dial-in codes, attachments, the participants list, chat, and other activities are at the bottom right to create more vertical space for seeing people and content.
Controls are consolidated in one place with descriptions available upon hover.
Leave call button is moved away from the microphone and camera buttons to prevent accidental call hang-ups.
Bottom bar is always visible, while not covering cover captions and bottom video feeds.
Other visual updates include
When someone speaks, their tile is outlined in blue.
Mute indicators are subdued to reduce visual distraction.
When there are more participants than can be shown on the grid, a tile is added so you always remember who’s on the call.
In addition to checking student work for matches across billions of web pages and books, originality reports can now check for matches against a repository of student work within your domain.
Once school matches are enabled by your admin, submitted assignments will automatically be added to your school-owned private repository after an originality report is run. If a match is detected amongst other documents in the repository, the match is included as a flagged passage for the educator to review.
Now you can add these four new citation source types in Google Docs:
Film
TV Series
TV Episode
Miscellaneous
This will make citing in papers easier, since you won’t have to copy citations from other tools. The four new citation source types come in addition to the types you already have available:
books
websites
journal articles
newspaper articles.
We’re updating the presenter toolbar in Google Slides to feature the controls you need while presenting, ensuring a better, less intrusive experience for presenters and presentation viewers.
When presenting, now you’ll see options for:
Selecting the previous or next slide,
Select any slide from the picker,
The three-dot overflow menu, which will open options for opening speaker notes, auto play, caption preferences, and more.
This is the same behavior you’re familiar with from other Google Workspace products, like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Version history makes it easy to see changes to a Jam and who made them. This is particularly useful in education settings, allowing teachers to view and track student changes to Jam files. Additionally, you can name different versions of your Jam files, so you can quickly revert to them when needed.
You can now set up Google Meet breakout rooms in advance on Google Calendar. This makes it easier for teachers and meeting facilitators to prepare for differentiated learning, be thoughtful about group dynamics and avoid losing valuable time setting up breakout rooms during the call.
When a host is done with a meeting and wants to leave, they now have two options:
Leave meeting: The host will leave the meeting, but the meeting will continue.
End meeting for all: Everyone, including people in breakout rooms, will be ejected from the meeting. Participants will be informed that the host has ended the meeting. Once the meeting has been ended, people will not be able to rejoin, unless the host rejoins first.
This option is not available if you close the tab that the meeting is in.
The meeting host is the only user in a meeting who can use the “mute all” feature. Once all participants are muted, the meeting host cannot unmute them. However, users will be able to unmute themselves as needed.
The mute all feature will only be available for hosts who are joining from a desktop browser, but will be launching on other platforms in the coming months.
We’ve added two new ways that make it easier to find comments that require your attention and action in Google Docs on the web.
New comment activity since the last time you viewed a document will be “badged” with a blue dot. Additionally, when you hover over the blue dot, you’ll see a “New” banner.
In the Comments history dialog, we added new filtering options. You can sort comments by: “For you”, “All comments”, or “Resolved”.
Previously, admins could choose to allow users to link-share files to either their entire domain or anyone with the link. Target audiences allow admins to define and recommend more granular link-sharing options for users. This can help to:
Improve your organization’s security posture by making it harder for information to be shared more broadly than is appropriate.
Guide students to share with more specific and appropriate audiences.
