Posted by Stephen Konig, Product Manager & Sunset Photographer

(Cross-posted on the Google Chrome Blog.)

Chromebooks are fast, easy to use and secure. They bring the best of the cloud right to your desktop, whether that’s Google Drive, Google+ Photos or Gmail. Today, in partnership with Adobe, we’re welcoming Creative Cloud onto Chromebooks, initially with a streaming version of Photoshop. Initially, this will be available for U.S.-based Adobe education customers with a paid Creative Cloud membership—so the Photoshop you know and love is now on Chrome OS. No muss, no fuss.

This streaming version of Photoshop is designed to run straight from the cloud to your Chromebook. It’s always up-to-date and fully integrated with Google Drive, so there’s no need to download and re-upload files—just save your art directly from Photoshop to the cloud. For IT administrators, it’s easy to manage, with no long client installation and one-click deployment to your team’s Chromebooks.

Head to Adobe.com to apply for access!

Posted by Devin Sandoz, Product Marketing Manager, Google for Education

Editor's note: Teachers and students from St. Albans City School will speak about their trail mapping project in a Tech & Learning webinar, to be held Wednesday September 24, 2014 at 10am PST / 1pm EST

St. Albans City School in Vermont knows how to take learning outside of the classroom. Last year 7th and 8th grade students participated in The Light Project, studying the relationship between streetlight coverage and crime rates and presenting a prioritized list of repairs to local decision makers. The school was eager to bring the same spirit of community to a new project, so this past Spring they decided to hit the trails.

The Friends of Lake Champlain, a local nonprofit, had noticed that trail erosion in the nearby Hard'ack and Aldis Hill recreation areas was causing runoff and pollution to find its way into the local lake. Teachers challenged 7th and 8th graders to walk the trails and map the conditions online. Laura Eichorn, a teacher at St. Albans City School, explains their approach: "We designed this project to solve a real problem in our community. Students interviewed engineers, surveyed the community, gathered data on trail erosion, and interacted with a variety of adults in hopes of improving the local trail system."

The school decided to use Nexus 7 tablets for trail documentation and related research, and Google Play for Education to distribute apps, books, and videos to students. Working in teams of five and armed with their tablets, students used the MyTracks app to capture location information and noted areas of erosion, trail widening and excessive mud.

Students from St. Albans City School map trails in the Hard'ack and Aldis Hill recreation areas

Even though they didn’t have access to Wi-Fi on the trails, students were still able to use the offline feature of Google Apps on the Nexus 7 devices to do their work. Some students used Gmail to communicate with one another about their trail findings, others used Drive to share documents. They used shared Docs to input data and comment on each other’s findings. “The students quickly picked up on how to use the Nexus 7 and enjoyed working together on the devices,” says Matt Allen, an Innovation Specialist at the school. “Plus, they became interested in learning more about technology.” The data students gathered was entered into Google Earth so that Sinousity Flowing Trails, a trail development company, could map out and identify the areas of concern.

Teams used the MyTracks app to chart their location and document problem areas

An overview of a trail segment. Each pin represents an area flagged by the students

The work had an immediate impact, resulting in the closure of one trail for repairs and helping to preserve the park and maintain safety. Students are eager to learn more about trail surveying and mapping technologies, and St. Albans City School is now looking to return to the park reserves to dig deeper into the field of trail engineering.

Hear from Laura, Matt, teacher Val Loucy, and students from St. Albans City School in tomorrow’s Tech & Learning webinar at 10am PST / 1pm EST.

Posted by Ego Obi, Global Lead of Access for Education in Emerging Markets

What if students and teachers from around the world could work on projects together in real-time without ever leaving their classrooms? Pope Francis recently joined students in Australia, Cameron, Israel, Turkey and South Africa for a Hangout on Air to celebrate the launch of Scholas―a new education initiative sponsored by the Vatican that aims to connect 500,000 schools across the world to enable e-learning and remote teaching using Google tools.


A social component of the platform uses Google Hangouts to connect students and teachers globally, so if students at a middle school in Ghana want to learn what it’s like to be a student their age in Peru, they can teach each other through an open and collaborative environment. Schools can also post shared projects on the platform, like the “40 Days of Hope” project by Seton Catholic High School, which aims to raise $3,000 to provide parasite medication and feed 40 people for a year in Nicaragua.

Later this year, Scholas will integrate more tools through Google Apps for Education and Classroom to create an even more personalized learning experience for each student. The Scholas platform aims to foster education through dialogue because when students can share and communicate openly, there’s no limit to what they can learn.

Posted by John Cox, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog)

Google is passionate about online education. In addition to our own Course Builder project, we’re also partners with edX, a not-for-profit that shares our desire for scalable, quality education for everyone. Their software, Open edX, lets people make educational content and deliver it online to anybody, anytime, anywhere. It powers their own site, edx.org, and is also used by companies and universities worldwide.

Today we’re very pleased to announce that you can now sign in to edx.org with your Google or Facebook account:

Until recently, users who wanted to take advantage of the high quality content on edx.org needed to create a new account first. This is a painful, error prone process―really, who wants to worry about yet another password? So we added the ability to use over 60 external authentication providers to Open edX, with support for everything from open standards like OpenID or OAuth 2.0, to custom university single sign-on systems. For their edx.org site, edX decided to let users pick between Google, Facebook, and a custom username and password.

If you run Open edX, you can also use this feature now. The authentication module is extensible so you can add any third-party provider you want if your favorite is not yet supported. And the feature is completely configurable, so you can pick whatever third-party authentication systems are best for your users, including none at all. It’s totally up to you.

By simultaneously increasing user choice, convenience, and security, we hope to make open online education even easier and safer to use, whether people pick Course Builder or Open edX for authoring and delivering courses. We’re very grateful to our partners at edX for working with us in this exciting field.

Posted by Lindsay Rumer, Chrome Marketing

(Cross-posted on the Google Students Blog.)

Chromebooks are college-bound this fall. Introducing the Chromebook Lending Library.

The Chromebook Lending Library is traveling to 12 college campuses across the U.S. loaded with the latest Chromebooks. The Lending Library is a bit like your traditional library, but instead of books, we're letting students borrow Chromebooks (no library card needed). Students can use a Chromebook during the week for life on campus— whether it’s in class, during an all-nighter, or browsing the internet in their dorm.

Chromebooks are a new type of computer that helps students get things done faster and easier. They have the battery life you need to study all night and are light enough to slip easily into a bag or backpack. With Google Maps, Drive, and Gmail, important information is stored in the cloud, so students no longer need to worry about losing documents, pics, music, and more. The days of losing a paper are over!

We hope you can swing by the Chromebook Lending Library for a little study break this fall. Check out chromebook.com/forcollege for all the details and spread the word with #ChromebookforCollege. And if the tour isn’t hitting your campus this fall, you can follow along on Twitter and Google+.

Posted by: Alan Warren, Vice President, Engineering

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog, Google Drive Blog and the Google for Work 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 alternative 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. With Braille support, your screen reader’s settings for character echoing are automatically followed. 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
As Laura Patterson, CIO, University of Michigan puts it, "The latest improvements in Google Drive and Docs for users of assistive technology are a major step forward and exemplify Google's commitment to making their products available to all members of our community.” We’re pleased the community has welcomed these improvements, and will continue to work with organizations 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 Carolyn Wendell, GEG Global Program Manager

Three months ago we announced the launch of our Google Educator Groups (GEG), a program aimed at supporting communities of educators who learn, share and inspire each other to meet the needs of their students through technology solutions, both in the classroom and beyond. With 124 groups already off and running, educators are expanding their social and professional networks and gaining skills to deliver the best possible education through open technology across 23 different countries.

GEG meet-ups in India, Philippines, and Australia

GEG provides a space for educators to meet, collaborate and learn both online and in-person. Google+ communities connect group members and serve as an online hub for communication, but leaders also coordinate in-person events and workshops for their group. Whether you’re a teacher, professor or principal, anyone is welcome to join a GEG. Each group is organized by a local volunteer (GEG leader) and is entirely independent from Google.

We recently launched the website in 11 more languages to help support growth of the program in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, Russia and many more. We couldn't be more excited about the growth of the program and the positive feedback we're hearing from those participating around the world.

If you’re interested in joining a GEG or starting a new one please visit www.google.com/landing/geg to learn more, spread the word and get involved. See you in GEG!