Google Workspace for Education and Canvas - Integrations, Updates, and What’s Next

My name's Drew Siedel. I'm the head of North America on the Workspace for Education team. What that means is I lead a group that has this really phenomenal opportunity to both partner with and learn from k twelve and higher education institutions across the US and Canada. I'm joined by Vivek. Hello. My name is Vivek.

I am a product manager on the Workspace for Education team. Which means I get the privilege of bringing all the collaborative and communicative power for workspace to education. Wonderful. Thanks, Rebecca. As far as what we're getting into together today.

First, we're gonna be talking about Google assignments and something that's very exciting. We are bringing assignments to LTI one dot three, then we'll be doing a little bit of a deep dive into Google Meet and what we're doing together in LTI with Canvas. Then we'll be talking about some of the new and exciting collaborative features in Workspace for Education. We'll then discuss a couple help resources that y'all can take back to your organizations, share amongst yourselves. And then what we're most excited about is we have some customer stories.

So We are very, very fortunate to need to do something. Yes. Are we muted in the meat? No. You are you didn't ex admit him. Oh, we have to admit somebody.

I'm not seeing that. Is there more playing on the fly here today? Okay. Stay on the meat and I'll pick up. Okay. Keep selling them.

Fun. But we are really, really, grateful that we have some wonderful speakers joining as well. So we have Stephanie the chief Technology Officer, a Capistraro Unified School District in California. Welcome Stephanie. We also have Jeff Faust, the chief Technology Innovation Officer at Chesapeake Public Schools in Virginia.

Hi, Jeff. We have a group from Midell Schools in Oklahoma, including Caitlyn Hall and Tiffany Wood instructional technology facilitators, and Aaron Renick White, an executive director of technology. Welcome We also have Patrick Tarte, senior administrator of digital resources at Wake County Public School System in North Carolina. And as well, Oorora Velasco, the associate director of instructional technology services at San Diego State University. So welcome all of them.

And now we're admitting our guests. Hello, everyone. Smooth. So from here, I'm gonna pass things over to Vivek to dig into assignments and some of the new things we're bringing LTI one dot three. Thanks, Drew.

And since we started so early and on time, I'm gonna take my sweet time with all the updates. Jokes aside, I am actually really excited to be here today. Even at the booth, we've had a lot of conversations, and I see some familiar is here, talking about assignments and all the fun stuff and the cool new things that we're building on top of it. And so, hopefully, I'll kinda skip through some of the, maybe, CLZ, boring stuff, and we'll get right to the new updates and what you're most excited about. Well, before we do that.

We should talk about what Google and Education do together. Just to kind of context that where assignments came from and the kind of the history of it So so far, we have about a hundred and seventy million users for Workspace for Education and Google, and we are actually really committed to education as one of our key core values. So our commitment to education is that we'll enable impactful teaching and learning for everyone from anywhere. And really the key words there are just the last four. Right? It's for everyone and it's from anywhere.

And what this translates to is we we means that we provide equitable access to learning Again, kinda going back to everywhere and anyone. How does this actually translate into the product? This means that our products are accessible online, offline, and with limited connectivity. So regardless of what kind of setup your student has at home, we wanna make sure they can still use all of our products and be engaged with all the learning that we're providing. We also try to make sure that we invest in cost effective solutions to make sure that the tools that we built are available to everyone. Lastly, we try and boost academic impact with their top teaching resources.

Wanna really look to the future and there's three main things that we wanna focus on with education and Google. Personalized learning, I know this is top of a mind for everyone here. Collaborative and accessible classrooms, again, really focusing on this fact that we wanna have everyone and from everywhere. Be available to user tools. And the last piece is safer digital learning environments.

We are committed to safety privacy, and security, and everything that we build and ship has the same standards as the rest of Google. So where does Google assignments actually fit into that picture? Assignments is meant to be an integrated application that just makes the whole assignment submission and grading workflow easier. So it's a faster, simpler way, and the whole point is that we bring the rest of the Calabrio power of Google to make that part easier for you. So to be clear what we're actually talking about, if you use Canvas and you use an external tool, this is the little piece that we're talking about where it says Google assignments, l t I one point three. I see some nods.

I see this is, familiar for some of you. And for those who haven't used it, I'm hoping when you leave, you'll go and enable this. So what does it actually do? We collaborate very, well with Instructure. We spend a lot of time making sure that, both of our products and tools work well together. So it brings all the things that you use already in workspace.

And so docs, sheets, slides, all the collaborative power of that and brings it into its structure. And the whole point is that we wanna try and save some time. Right? All that time that you're sending those docs to your students, all the time that it comes back, then you have to assign then you get grades, then you have to send the grades back, all the feedback that you're trying to provide as they work on those assignments. All of those time consuming workflows. We're trying to really optimize and help you do that in a faster, more efficient way.

Lastly, we also provide guide Right? We wanna help you analyze the work and provide clear feedback. So whether that means in real time as they're working on an assignment, you wanna provide them some comments and some guidance, or whether it means after submission, you're looking at the originality reports and assessing, hey, did you maybe miss a citation here? One of the key features here is around streamlining the assignment distribution itself. Right? So as soon as you assign a single assignment, whether that's multiple files, maybe it's a single doc, whatever that is. Once you actually do the action of assignment, What we do is we create a personalized copy for every single student in your course. So they get their own copy.

It has their name on it. They can go ahead and start working on it. It doesn't impact anyone else. So this works very well with the Canvas, blueprint courses, as well as the course copies, and we support assigning multiple files. So if you have a portfolio that you're trying to build, Maybe you're assigning, a Google sheet, maybe you're also assigning, slides.

Maybe you're also assigning a doc. Maybe it's all together, and it's a single package that you're sending and you want them to work on that and you wanna provide them feedback in real time as they do that. The second piece here is around collaborations, which exist in Canvas today, which we are trying to superpower with the productivity tools of Google Workspace. Show fans who's used Canvas collaborations before. Nice.

Love to see it, and hopefully this will be exciting news for all of you. We are now introducing a lot more drive items available within Canvas collaborations. So previously, maybe you've used it for docs maybe use it for your sheets or slides. Well, going forward, you can also use it for forms, sites, jamboards, drawings, whatever you want. And the whole point is now you can have your students collaborate together in all of these different types of formats right within Canvas.

You also, of course, get to select who in your class actually gets to collaborate together and make sure that all the security and the privacy aspects are still there. As some of you may know, we also integrate canvas SpeedGrader, so you have your choice. At the end of the day, it's really up to you and what you feel comfortable with. If you like SpeedGrader, great. Use that.

If you're familiar with Google assignments and the grading rubrics and the workflow that we have there, great. Use that. Both of them allow you to provide personalized copies to all of your students. Both of them have general can generate originality reports and both of them work really well both in structure and the canvas flows. The last piece and this is the piece that I really wanna focus on is this concept of visibility on progress and the ability to provide clear guidance.

Right? You don't wanna have these assignments that go out, then you don't see it for two weeks, then you get back, and you're like, Okay. This is not what I asked for. Right? So the ability to actually see that, to see the progress that students are making to provide checks and balances to say, Hey, have you considered this, right? Or actually, this is not what this question was referring to, right? Providing those micro guidance points along the way can really help your students get to the final goal that you want them to. So obviously, with all the Calabrio power of Workspace, that helps you do that. Right? You get the real time feedback.

You can watch as they're typing even. You can play alongside with Right? And you can write comments, you can provide edits directly and suggestions to say, hey, maybe let's not let's omit this part of your paragraph. That I think will make it more concise and will get your point across better. You can also save frequently used feedback. So maybe sometimes you're like, Hey, I, you know, I often have to tell my students there's a missing citation here, for example.

And so maybe you have a little blurb that you're writing and consistently copy pasting, Well, you can just save that to a bank. So now on future assignments, when you're looking at the student submissions, you can just say, Hey, I have this frequently saved comment that I often have to give. Great. I just click on that and that applies to this assignment. Lastly, we have critical thinking and originality reports.

Right? So the idea here is you have an assignment. Maybe you're not sure if they forgot citations. Maybe you're not sure if it's been plagiarized, and you just wanna make sure there's some assessment of that. Orig reports helped you do that. Of course, we check everything against the So there's billions of web pages, forty million books in a repository, and we check against all of that.

But if you wanna go a step further, or education plus and T and O upgrades can also allow you to build your own repository. Right? So maybe you have all this class work that your students have submitted over the last four or five years. Right? You can upload it all. And now you can check against that. And you can say, oh, actually, this is the same assignment that somebody submitted two years ago.

Oh, it turns out it's your older brother. So that kind of customization is what we offer with the plus and T and L upgrades. And I'll go wanna go back to this message of everything falls still within the Google. Right? So all the same security compliance, safety, privacy standards that we have for the rest of Google also apply to all of our education products. And so everything is built and officially supported by Google.

You have Workspace support from a live team of education specialists. We're using the latest and greatest. So LTI one three is the newest standard. And if you're not on it, we highly recommend you move to that, over the next year or two. And on that front, let me just spend a minute here talking about the difference because we've had a number of Google assignments tools available, and I really wanna drive home this message of getting on to assignments, LTI one point three.

The main difference here is that it's more cure. Right? There's a reason that one point one is deprecated. We've moved folks over to one point three, and you really wanna make sure your domain and your users are safe. So let's move over to one point three All the new features that I talked about are being developed only on that tool. And so anything new that's coming out really will be on there.

With that, comes a great announcement. So starting in August of this year, we have partnered with Instructure to really make sure this transition goes smoothly. And so starting in August twenty twenty three, users will not be able to install this old LTI tool, and no further development will happen on All of our focus is on making sure that this new tool that we've built really works and can serve the community that we're trying serve. The current users, the current assignments, current courses that you have, none of that will be impacted. So don't worry.

Nothing nothing is changing immediately. The idea is over this next year, we want you to slowly start using the new tool, get accustomed to it, start doing some development teach your instructors how to use it. And then starting in end of life in twenty twenty four, meaning no no users will be able to use the Google apps l t I tool. Is that also the No. This is specifically for the Google App sells you at one point one.

Thank you for the clarification. And actually switching lanes a little bit. I'm very excited to announce the Google Meet LTI tool with Canvas. That's all like ten phones come out. Everyone's like, photo.

Yeah. So Google Meet LTI, building on our awesome partnership with instructor so far on assignments. We're now taking that to build our next LTI tool, which is the Google Meet LTI. Similar concept. Right? It's an integrated application.

It plays very nicely with structure builds right into the existing UI. So you don't have to ever leave instructor. Everything stays there. And the idea is that we help you connect. Right? It's whether it's through classes, whether it's parent teacher conferences, it's one on one learning, whatever that may be.

We're gonna launch this by back to school twenty twenty four, and it's gonna bring all fun stuff from me back into instructor. So what does that actually look like? Of course, keep saying this and I wanna really make sure you get this when you leave this room. It's secure, it's reliable, it's easy to use, and it's engaging in going back to that mission that we talked about, it's for everyone from everywhere. Of course, it'll be tightly integrated with Canvas. So within the Canvas UI itself, you can start a meeting directly, you can schedule calls, and it's automatically locked to members of that course.

So you don't have to worry about students coming from other classes and just joining and dropping in. Everything is locked down to that specific course and who's actually attending. So as I was kinda referring to, it re prevents unwanted guests and also controls who can access your meetings across your entire domain. You can also, of course, we have a service level agreement that says meet is always available. Ninety nine point nine nine, but really that's, you know, got a round up because of the penny.

It's easy to use. So you have multiple, cohosts, You can have multiple speakers. So if you have a guest speaker coming in, they can be a host as well. Recordings are easily saved, automatically show So every time you have a online learning, you get that recording saved and sent to your drive, attendance reports. So if you wanna see, hey, I've been doing these classes, but I feel like not everyone is showing up, you can now look back and say, Hey, these were the twenty that showed up, these were the five that didn't.

And you have that for every class that you do through me. And of course, we have the AI powered noise cancellation for all the distractions that we have in the background. We also allow you to break out into smaller groups for breakout rooms and group projects. So you can pre determine that. You can maybe you have a few set groups for a long term project that you're doing over a full semester.

And so you can create that ahead of time. You can also interact Right? It's not just about a one way learning. You really wanna have your students engaged in participating in the conversation. So you can do that with polls. You can just say, hey, who's awake and see how many people actually say yes.

You can start having q and a and this can be in parallel while you're performing a lecture where you're saying you're teaching a specific aspect, you can also have them answer questions so that they're making sure that they understand what's being head. And if you wanna go bigger and if you wanna engage your entire district, if you're to engage your entire school community, we also have live streaming. Right? So if you have thousands of attendees, that's okay. We can support them all. Lastly, we have the automatic transcripts.

So you can review and share what was discussed. Right? So if you have a long conversation, maybe it's a a parent teacher conference or maybe it's a a teacher's meeting and don't remember everything that was said. Well, you can now go back and look at that transcript. One of the really cool and, inclusive features that we have is live translated captions. Right? So if you have students with coming from multiple backgrounds, multiple languages, now as they are watching and not participating in the meet conversation, they can have captions translated into whatever language that they want.

And so that helps them make sure that they're being included in the conversation even if English is in their first language. Right? Going back to this mission of making sure it's available to everyone from everywhere. And now I'm gonna actually pass it back to Drew for some awesome announcements on the rest of Workspace. Alright. Thanks for back.

I will make this very fast. We can get to our guest speakers. A couple of exciting things. We are very, very excited about what are called smart chips. It's a way to bring third party applications and some exciting first party applications into the Google Doc sheets and slides that you love.

So one that we just launched is custom building blocks. We recognize that educators oftentimes create templates for content that they make frequently, thinking about things like lesson plans, curriculum guides. We wanna really make sure that we're saving time for things that they may have to reuse or recreate often. So with just a few clicks, you can type at within a Google doc, for example, it's gonna pop up in a venue, and then you can find those saved templates instead of having to start from scratch. And this feature enables you to save custom blocks of text, tables, and chips to build these reusable components.

So for example, You might create a project kickoff template to track milestones and tasks, a course launch checklist or even a block of code or text that it's commonly used within the organization. So rather than reworking from out of the box or building, from scratch, these blocks can help to meet the specific needs of your organization by finding those templates, letting you search easily, and ultimately just saving time for that for that work. So really, really exciting. I'd say if you use docs sheets or slides today, type at and you can see some of these exciting things in action. The next one is we're facilitating time class activities and docs with timers and with some stopwatches.

So educators can use these for class activities, keeping track of how much time is left or how long a certain exercise took. You can use this today. If you're inside of a dock, just type at timer or at stopwatch, these things will pop up automatically for you just like magic. As well, we have opportunities to quickly gather feedback we recognize in education, whether you're an educator or a student, feedback is pivotal. So now educators and students can use what are called voting chips to quickly gather feedback directly in a doc.

So voting chips, which you can access by just typing in at voting within a Google doc will launch in the interface similar to what you see here and folks can vote on what's working well, give some candid feedback, a really, really beautiful tool. And a couple of things to make slides and meet work even better together since we recognize similar to what we're doing today with the virtual audience. These are two tools that really need to work seamlessly. So the first one is being able to see your speaker notes while presenting in Google Meet. So today, presenters can now see their speaker notes while presenting, helping them build presentation skills with confidence.

We also can now manage slides with a co presenter which was one of the longest requested items we had from educators. So with co presenting in Google slides, two or more people can now manage the slides together. Include including things like advancing slides, playing videos. So ultimately, we wanna provide educators or maybe students if they're practicing their presentations, with a smoother presentation experience and co presenting is now available within Google Meet. And the other pieces Vivec had mentioned, and something that's really an example Google's world leading AI and ML in action is closed captions in meet recordings.

So if you do have asynchronous learning requirements, If you wanna allow students to revisit courses that were already shared or if you had a student that was sick or unable to visit a course live, you can of course record those in Google Meet Now, you can add closed captions to those meet recordings. And you can add those captions in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, and even more languages coming soon. So very, very exciting things happening within Google Meet and slides together. And of course, we wanna make it easy. We recognize special, especially with virtual and distance learning.

Distraction can happen. So we're enabling this tool to make it easier to focus on key participants. So with co presenting slides and meet together, a co teacher or a co host, can work together to help students stay focused. So with this, if let's say you have, someone that's doing sign language for students, You can pin both those half folks presenting together and it should make it easy for students to stay focused on what they need to stay focused on even if they're doing so virtually. So to wrap things up and that was warp speed, if you are interested in learning more about Google Meet, please do go to the short link here.

G o o dot g l slash meet dash e d u. And of course, if you would like to learn more about assignments one dot three, We have a couple resources that should be very, very helpful for you. If you're an administrator, how to set this up. Pretty easy, generating authentication code through Canvas, sharing that with your workspace administrator. They can get that set up in a matter of minutes speaking to each other.

Some resources as well for educator, so helping them to get started understanding how to use that tool, especially with the new assignments one point three. And then, as well, the upgraded replacement for Google Drive and cloud assignment language about what that means, how you can message that out to your community. So some exciting things happening. The short link is right down there. And from here, I'm excited that I will be passing things over to some of our guest speakers.

So, first, let's give a warm welcome to Stephanie joining us from Capistrano Unified. Thank you. I can't wait to get back to my room and try those Google things. As Drew said, I'm Stephanie Avron, the, chief technology officer. I was director of EdTech.

For a long time, and I took over a CTO six months ago. And basically, I'm here to just explain our transition from, into Canvas using Google as kind of the glue that made it possible. And so what I did is I just showed you a timeline. This was a very quick transition. If any of you transitioned into an LMS during the pandemic, you probably have as many gray hairs as I do.

But it was not easy, but I often say it was the best of times. It was the worst of times because we had been trying to transition into canvas for years, but we never got buy in from our teachers. And so now was the time that we got buy in because they had no choice. So we had to go to something. Our elementary had no LMS.

They were using Google classroom, but as you know, Google classroom does not have a central dashboard, and we had no idea what they were doing. And our secondary, they were using an LMS, but again, there was no central dashboard for that as well. So in the spring of twenty twenty, our district made online, learning work with our current tools in the spring. And that's when we discovered we needed something cohesive, something bigger, like a an instructor canvas. And so the decision was made to move to Canvas in the summer of twenty twenty, the worst six weeks of my life, I like to say.

And we created lessons for all teachers and all subjects and all grade levels in canvas because we were really worried that they would not use it if we did not supply all the lessons for them, especially our youngest, our our our teachers in elementary because they'd never used an LMS before. So we felt the need to create those lessons for them. So I had an army I called the my Capistrano canvas army of elementary teachers that worked all summer long, creating lessons for every single day of the year. For every subject, and they were already by September of, actually August of twenty twenty. It was a director from the superintendent, and I was given a deadline.

And I was given an amount to pay the teachers. And she said if you reach the deadline. I'm not paying the teachers. So it was very tough. It was very tough, but, she couldn't do that, really.

She was just threatening. She she's not she's not with us anymore. Anyways, anyways, so they created these Google lesson these lessons, and I say Google because they all had the foundation of Google, because that's what them feel comfortable. When they saw the Google, LTI or the Google Cloud assignment at the time, they felt comfortable and they could see how could use it the same as Google classroom. And so that's what helped us transition our teachers.

If we had not used Google, I I don't think we would have had full implementation at all. To this, today, we have full hundred percent participation from our secondary teachers. Our elementary teachers are still You know, coming along, but they don't need it as much as the secondary teachers do. And let's just be honest. And so they use it when they want to but we're trying to get it, moving forward.

So like I said, in the fall of twenty twenty, we had full implementation pre k through twelfth. Yes. We had pre create pay pre k lessons as well. I do not know how those teachers did it to tell you the truth. And we were virtual.

We But then we had a hybrid version, which I'm sure most of you did as well in the fall of twenty twenty. Some students stayed at home, some were in class. And so the teachers had to do the hybrid teaching, which was extremely difficult. And then after that first year, we got through it. And then in twenty twenty one, we could all take a breath and we came up with best practices for that define our canvas and Google, working together.

And so elementary has the best practices for canvas and Google. And then our secondary do as well. And so we just continue to refine that and perfect it as we continue to go along. So that's, Capistraro's story. Just real quick, we're in Southern California.

We have about forty five thousand students fifty seven schools. Alright. And another warm welcome for Jeff from Chesapeake. And thank you so much, Stephanie. Thank you, Drew.

So, since we're a little short on time, I'm gonna skip my resume and biography and just tell you that I think, pickleball is the devastating culmination of decades of bad decisions in this country. Okay. Let's move on. So so where are we in our journey? Chesapeake Public Schools is just starting to use Canvas. But we bring a perspective that we have several people in the division who are very familiar with and have years and years of experience in Canvas, I came to Chesapeake in June of twenty twenty, and everybody knows what was going on at that time.

And they had three months prior just adopted a different LMS. Well, changing LMS is hard, right, division of forty thousand students. It's a big deal. We're doing it again. Why? Because it we believe strongly that what we had wasn't serving our needs.

It wasn't serving our teachers and our students' needs. And for all of those reasons, we started some really, really tough conversations about a year and a half ago about, you know, what are the things we should be emphasizing and prioritizing in adopting a new LMS. And so the the interface between an LMS platform and the products you're going to use with it is critical. Right? LTI API integration. There's a there's a thousand different words for it out there.

But at the end of the day, what we mean is does it make it easy for the users to use? And the new, Google assignments l t I plays directly into this experience for us. So we are a Google division. Chromebook's division wide, not to students, but staff as well. I've, about six thousand staff members in my division, and we have I think we're down to about six hundred windows machines in the whole division. So that's that's where we are.

And we are absolutely focused on How do we take a lot of these things that we've done over the past five, ten years and streamline them, make them easier, make them better for the users, you know, and that means all users, not just students, not just teachers, not just parents, not just staff. So why Canvas and Google assignments? Well, one, standards matter. Right? One ed tech we had we've heard from numerous representatives of that. You know, it's something that I am pretty passionate about when we look at technologies, we look at standards. What, you know, what are the standards you meet, what are the standards you meet? I'll tell you that our previous LMS was is kinda known for telling people they were meeting or were about to meet or were about to get certified for this particular, one in tech standard, but that never came to fruition.

So you know, being that the, LTI, one point three, you know, Google assignments API is already LTI certified. It's beautiful. And what we looked at was when students take a file and they turn it in, if that file changes format, we've just done to our students what we all hate when it gets done to us. When I send somebody a document and they change it and they send it back to me, and now there's two versions of the document and the third person gets We all that is something that creates a ton of waste for us. So why do we do that to our students and even to our teachers is a question? With the Google assignment l t I, you don't have to do that.

They can have that one version. They can submit it multiple times, but they're still working off that original version. I think in today's day and age, that's becoming the norm And there's tons of statistics out there about attachments and other things that we can send them on email that people don't even open them anyway. So I think that I think that promoting Google Solutions, making them easy, having that single version of the file that perpetuates in multiple systems, whether the students working at Google Drive or working in Canvas, I think that's a big deal. And I think our teaching students deserve better.

I think again, making this as approachable for them as easy to use for them as possible providing them the flexibility and our ability to be on their phone. You know, one of the in in my previous division, we were a chemist, division. And one of my favorite stories was a teacher who was on the sideline of of her child soccer game. And she said, Jeff, you'll never believe what I did. I graded all of the outstanding outstanding assignments from my phone, from the side of the soccer field.

She's like, I could never have done this before. And that was like something that caught on like wildfire in our division. It was a big deal. And I just think that those are the kind of things we're looking for. At the end of the day, and I know these words are thrown out a lot, but anytime, anywhere, any device is what's driving our decision making.

So thank you guys and I will, turn it over start. They said we could really have a room as long as we want. So I'll just dive completely up. We'll probably about ten minutes down. So user error.

Oh, there we go. Okay. Alright. So we see a couple familiar familiar faces from our last session. So thanks for, following us, little fan club.

We've got I'm Aaron Renick White, I'm the executive director of technology. Caitlin Tiffany, are my instructional facilitators. I'll just give you a little bit of background on Midell and our interaction with Google and, Canvas We are a Google district going on our eighth year. Then, you know, again, I think familiar theme twenty twenty happened and everything blew up and came as came in. And so we went Canvas in twenty twenty and we cut off Google classroom.

We serve, just under thirteen thousand students about eight hundred teachers and we have a mixture of iPads and Chromebooks. And I think that's important to mention because Google does work on the iPads just the same as a Chromebook. So you don't have to live, solely in that space. Order to make all this work. So as Aaron kinda mentioned, we just actually finished up a session, the previous session with Canvas and Google and how they play nicely together.

There's a lot of familiar faces. So I won't dive too much into it. We kind of emphasize the three things in our presentation, because these are the things that we encourage our teachers to use and we love about Google and Canvas. One of those being embedding content. So we absolutely love that we can use the rich content editor, whether it be in pages or assignments or even now in new quizzes.

And I can take anything that I've made in my drive, slide, a docker sheet, and I can put it into a Canvas page. And we have Canvas pre k through twelfth. And so it's really helpful that they can stay in Canvas, and they can see the resources they need, whether they're in class or they're not in class. Okay. Another thing we love is the you can assign content using the submission type external tool.

One of I lied to you and said drawings could not work unless you put it in a slide. You? Yes. Sorry. I lied. Listen to Vive.

He knows more than me. Okay. So So sorry. It did not work when I did it, but clearly I did it wrong. Before I was using the old, I stopped doing that.

Okay. So you can set up the assignment as submission type external tool, or you can do submission type online and then file upload. And then your students can upload anything from their Google Drive or multiple items from their Google Drive that way. So if you wanna do more student choice, you can do, the submission type file online file upload. So we love it whenever we give students choice.

A lot of our teachers, if we stick to the basics, then we have a lot more success. And the beautiful thing about Google is it's incredibly easy to use. And when you mix it with Canvas, it takes the best of both worlds. And then that file upload piece actually, this our last little bit on collaboration. The you can allow your students to create their own thing first So the LTI assignments is a template.

So if you need them to be very specific to what they're creating or they just need guidance, Caitlyn, last session I mentioned she's had eleven creators. Lord knows they need a template. Right? Like, I don't know. It's blank. Okay.

So you can give them that space to work. Okay. And then so that's your assignment piece, but then you've got the students are they're working a group and elaborate and then one student can file upload to get that turned in. So on the collaboration piece, and then just with the project based learning, similar to what, Tiffany was saying just in terms of they can upload a slide, a drawing. Okay.

We're gonna keep hitting on that. We're gonna figure out how to do that in Midell. And, you know, and and work through that and I I think something and Tiffany will tell this story. Stephanie brought it up like pre k they can do this. You just have to set the expectation.

Whether it's Google And Canvas, just Google or just Canvas. What's your kindergarten story? And then we'll keep us off. Okay. So when we weren't remote, we had a kindergarten team at Parkview Elementary fabulous people. If you meet McKinsey Field, she's here somewhere.

So she had an entire classroom of kindergartners at home submit their Google slides as their assignment where they got credit for their remote day. Like, Kinder gardeners, can open Google slides from Canvas, move the little words, the OT words from the left to the right, Okay? And then click the blue button and then the submit button until they get their confetti. And she taught that starting in August. And by January, when we shut down because we lost electricity in our school district, her kids, her little kindergarten, little sticky people, were submitting Google slides from home, and we were just so completely impressed. So I didn't know little sticky people could do that.

They can. Thank you. All experiencing the same thing too? Is are we just repeating the same story? Like everybody this is, so my name is Patrick. I'm Wake County Public School System and the East Coast. Relling North Carolina.

We are in the middle of a Canvas expansion project where, twenty seven days ago, we turned off Google classroom. And we vowed we would never turn it back on, not even for teachers, and it worked. So, that happened. And a lot of it happened not because we don't like Google classroom, but it came out of the pandemic. We needed consistency for teachers, for students, Where's my work? Well, I don't know.

Where what classes? Oh, well, they're using seesaw. Or are they using this? So we needed consistency. And that's where, Google Almit's really helped bridge a lot of the gap for us. So part of the improvements, with Google LTI was to improve security. Vive talked about that.

We actually do not install anything one point one anymore in our district. And I'm I'm getting a lot of flack for it, but I just we can't do it. So we work with vendors saying, look, you we'll install it when we do that. So LTI one point three, we're Google was the first one we had installed that do that. So that was good.

The improvements over the time, Google assignments used to have only native Google grading but, they came out. So they got a SpeedGrader. Even though we were very heavy in Google classroom, we still had teachers that loved Canvas, and they loved SpeedGrader, And so they looked at this integration. They're like, well, cool, but I can't use it. So when they came out with that, that really got the ball rolling toward, let's turn off Google Classuring.

Let's go all in Canvas, and so we'll expand. We've done a lot of training A lot of our training includes how to do a Google assignment and do it well and the different flavors of why you had one for the other. So the features really helped us out it was really funny that, we got so many people or we're turning off Google cloud. You're turning off Google and I would give the straightest face. I can't do it very often.

I do this straight face on. She's like, yeah, we are. We're going back to ask Jeeves. So, So it was, it was always funny. And then you, you laugh and they're like, was he serious? So, The best part of the whole Google assignments for our district was the teacher buy in, and I think it's been mentioned several times.

Since we had so many people heavy into Google, during those trainings, when you're showing a teacher who's just resisting, like, they live Google classroom, Google Meet online for, you know, we were there for a long time. And then you're like, well, we're gonna take that away and you gotta use something else. And it's just kinda like I know that. So then you show them a Google assignment and they're like, Oh, that's Google classroom inside of Canvas. I can do originality ports.

I can do that. Those aha moments It was funny. The keynote said, I was like, dang it. She stole my line. But, those a moments gave us the teacher buy in.

And it's not perfect, you know, people still hesitant. But, what it did for us is it really did an inward change. Like, I get I can do it now. Like, I can't. I see it.

They just need us to help bridge that gap. And so as technology, for Way County Schools, a part of my joy. I was in the classroom for nine years, but my joy now is to help bridge the gap, for teachers. Move in the right direction. So that's Way County Schools.

Do you want to microphones. Hi, y'all. Thanks for sticking it out, everyone. So hi, everyone. My name is Aurora Velasco, and I'm the associate director for instructional technology services at STSU.

And at ITS, we help faculty use technology for teaching. So I wanna talk a little bit about our back story using Google tools. So our students officially got switched over to using Google Workspace suite at the time, of course, in twenty eighteen. Then, of course, in twenty twenty, as we all know, what happened. A lot of stuff went along with it though.

So of course, as we know, COVID accelerated at the adoption of a lot of our academic technologies. So at a very quick pace, people had to move to virtual instruction in some cases, hybrid. But at the same time, much like Stephanie's, school district, we were also transitioning to Canvas. So lots of change. And then that same summer, At SDSU, they standardized students using only their Gmail, their SDSU Gmail accounts for all official campus communication.

So even students who were not quite switched over, to Google Workspace were now needing to log in on on a daily basis. So, oh my goodness, so much change. How do we help our faculty? How do we help them, get up to speed with all of these changes, canvas, Google, etcetera? So we, were fortunate enough to get a one point seven million dollar investment, to create the flexible course design institute. And I'm gonna go into more detail about that, course in the next slide, but that was money that we received, for a federal funding for COVID, from the CARES Act. And to present day, looking now at in twenty twenty three and beyond, we're hoping to build on that solid foundation that we've given our students, our faculty, our staff, all this knowledge, and build, and innovate.

And we look forward to integrating new technologies such as the Google assignments, TI, that I'll also talk about, what we're doing with that in a second. One second. Okay. So I wanna talk a little bit about our flexible course design institute or flex CDI. As I mentioned, this was a huge investment, for faculty development on campus.

We had sixty percent of our faculty in get involved in this faculty development. They receive stipends to undergo a summer long course. And, I wanna mention that this course, was in Canvas, of course, and it contained many modules with pedagogical strategies on how these faculty can teach virtually or in hybrid modalities. One of those modules was dedicated solely to how to use Google Workspace tools in their, in this virtual environment. Via collaborations, you know, how to do, assignments, assessments, how to work smarter with Google using the built in tools such as docs slides, jamboard, etcetera.

I also wanna mention it was actually peer driven. It was faculty teaching faculty. We tapped many faculty members who had previous success teaching virtually or in hybrid modalities. So for example, our Google, module within this course was created by one of our learning design and technology faculty members, which is our ed tech area. As I mentioned, sixty percent of faculty did undergo this course, between twenty twenty and twenty twenty one.

And I did include a link on the slide. I'm not sure if these are being shared to subpence, but I believe if you search in the Canvas commons, you can find our SDSU, flexible course design institute. And I encourage you all to go to the commons and we wanted to make sure that these resources were freely available to our colleagues, and higher in education overall. And aside from the module we had on how to use Google Workspace tools for instruction, there's a lot of other resources such as, accessibility, universal designed for learning, inclusivity, how to engage your students in these, different modalities. And currently, this summer, we are, piloting Google assignments.

And I wanna give a huge thank you to Drew and Vivek, who met with our Canvas admins, and you went ahead and answered all their questions they before they hit the enable button, made sure we were good to go. And we currently have our instructional designers and some faculty, testing it out. They're running it in some test courses, and we're hoping to do some outreach with faculty this fall. So yeah, I kinda had to breathe through that, but thank you all for taking the time to hear my story. Alright.

Well, that was a great exercise and flexibility and gratitude and breathing. So thank you so much for joining. Appreciate you sticking with us. A big thank you to all of the presenters. They put a lot of time and energy preparing. Vivek and I will be outside. If there are any questions, please come say hello, and thank you again for joining us.