Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Pavel Simakov, Technical Lead, Course Builder Team

Over the past couple of years, Google’s Course Builder has been used to create and deliver hundreds of online courses on a variety of subjects (from sustainable energy to comic books), making learning more scalable and accessible through open source technology. With the help of Course Builder, over a million students of all ages have learned something new.

Today, we’re increasing our commitment to Course Builder by bringing rich, new functionality to the platform with a new release. Of course, we will also continue to work with edX and others to contribute to the entire ecosystem.

This new version enables instructors and students to understand prerequisites and skills explicitly, introduces several improvements to the instructor experience, and even allows you to export data to Google BigQuery for in depth analysis.

• Drag and drop, simplified tabs, and student feedback

We’ve made major enhancements to the instructor interface, such as simplifying the tabs and clarifying which part of the page you’re editing, so you can spend more time teaching and less time configuring. You can also structure your course on the fly by dragging and dropping elements directly in the outline.

Additionally, we’ve added the option to include a feedback box at the bottom of each lesson, making it easy for your students to tell you their thoughts (though we can't promise you'll always enjoy reading them).

• Skill Mapping

You can now define prerequisites and skills learned for each lesson. For instance, in a course about arithmetic, addition might be a prerequisite for the lesson on multiplying numbers, while multiplication is a skill learned. Once an instructor has defined the skill relationships, they will have a consolidated view of all their skills and the lessons they appear in, such as this list for Power Searching with Google:

Instructors can then enable a skills widget that shows at the top of each lesson and which lets students see exactly what they should know before and after completing a lesson. Below are the prerequisites and goals for the Thinking More Deeply About Your Search lesson. A student can easily see what they should know beforehand and which lessons to explore next to learn more.

Skill maps help a student better understand which content is right for them. And, they lay the groundwork for our future forays into adaptive and personalized learning. Learn more about Course Builder skill maps in this video.

• Analytics through BigQuery

One of the core tenets of Course Builder is that quality online learning requires a feedback loop between instructor and student, which is why we’ve always had a focus on providing rich analytical information about a course. But no matter how complete, sometimes the built-in reports just aren’t enough. So Course Builder now includes a pipeline to Google BigQuery, allowing course owners to issue super-fast queries in a SQL-like syntax using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. This allows you to slice and dice the data in an infinite number of ways, giving you just the information you need to help your students and optimize your course. Watch these videos on configuring and sending data.

To get started with your own course, follow these simple instructions. Please let us know how you use these new features and what you’d like to see in Course Builder next. Need some inspiration? Check out our list of courses (and tell us when you launch yours).

Keep on learning!

Posted by Geeta Ajetrao, Head Teacher Digital Learning 

Editor's Note: Today’s guest author is Geeta Ajetrao, the Head Teacher of Digital Learning at Arthur Phillip High School (APHS). Geeta helped guide the successful adoption of technology at APHS and is currently responsible for implementing the school’s digital policies and overseeing digital curriculum.

At Arthur Phillip High School a public secondary school in Parramatta, Australia, we educate 1,500 students in grades 7-12. They come from 65 different countries, and over 90 percent of them speak a language other than English at home. Recognised for our long-standing commitment to digital education, administrators and teachers at Arthur Phillip wanted to make teaching and learning more fluid by improving and enhancing our ever – expanding digital education structure.

Our school first embraced digital education five years ago when the Australian Government's Digital Education Revolution (DER) provided all high school students in grades 9-12 with laptops. To build on this, our teachers designed interactive wikis hosted on school servers so students could communicate with them and other students. When our wiki environment exceeded the capacity of the school servers and DER was discontinued, we needed to find a cost-effective solution that would let our students continue to benefit from digital learning.

One hundred Chromebooks were purchased for a pilot group of students and teachers to test out Google Apps for Education, and both students and teachers alike were enthusiastic about them. Our teachers said Google Drive “made it easy for them to plan interactive lessons,” which would keep the students engaged for an entire period. In Ancient Egypt history class, students start up their Chromebooks in no time - unlike their old laptops. Students can navigate to the site their teacher created to watch and discuss a YouTube video or annotate a map in Google Maps. Chromebooks have created student-centred lessons, allowing students to move at their own pace as teachers provide them with immediate feedback.

Today over 600 of our students in grades 7-9 currently have Chromebooks, and in three years they will be available to every student. Our students now feel more empowered and confident in their abilities. This is especially true for our NSEB (Non English Speaking Background) students whose language literacy skills have improved since we started using Chromebooks in the classroom. Students get customised lessons based on their strengths, and allow teachers to provide them with resources, so they can improve.

Since we introduced a digital learning environment, suspensions have decreased by 50 percent, and attendance has risen significantly. What I’ve noticed most is that the school has a calmer vibe--more students are engaged and excited about their lessons, rather than being bored or distracted. Chromebooks have changed the way our students think about learning. Most importantly, they know it doesn’t have to stop once they leave the classroom.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Lead Product Manager, Chromebooks for Education 

When you’re focused on bringing students the best education possible, you count every penny and every second. Schools are often asked to work wonders with a limited budget and a small staff, and that’s especially true when it comes to technology. With Chromebooks and Android tablets, we want to help schools do more with less.

We’ve worked to make Chromebooks the perfect laptop for schools – sharable, secure, fast and easy to manage – and as a result they were the #1 selling device in US K-12 education last year. Today we're introducing a new line of devices that give students and teachers more choices at even more affordable prices. These new Chromebooks are fast and lightweight, with prices that start at $149. That means schools can get Chromebooks into the hands of 33 percent more students than ever before on the same budget.

The Haier Chromebook 11 (available at Amazon) and the Hisense Chromebook (available at Walmart) are available for pre-order starting today. Coming later this spring, the Haier 11E is a ruggedized model built just for education and tested with teachers and students in real classrooms. Schools can contact their technology partners for more details on pricing and availability.

Chromebooks get the latest updates every six weeks, and we continue to add the features that educators want most, like a lost/stolen device mode, faster updates that use less bandwidth and easier ways to manage apps and extensions.

The new Chromebooks come in a variety of forms, from laptop to desktop to all-in-one to a convertible. For more on what’s new, take a look at the Chrome blog. When a tablet is the right choice, schools are also embracing Android. Android tablets are intuitive for younger grades, and flexible enough to be used for creative projects, science experiments and project-based learning.

So today we’re also adding to the set of Android tablets available through Google for Education, with four new devices from ASUS, Dell and HP available to schools in the US and UK. Running Android 5.0 – Lollipop, and supporting up to five student accounts per device, these four new tablets make it easy for teachers to personalize each student’s experience.

The latest Android tablets for education

Just like Chromebooks, we’re focused on making Android affordable and easy for schools to manage at scale.

• The new 7” ASUS MeMO Pad is available for just $149 
• Three of the new tablets are 10” and meet PARCC requirements for state testing, supporting plug-in keyboards for easier typing 
• Schools have told us that they love the Nexus 7, so we’re keeping it available for educational purchase at $199 

Whether you go with Chrome or Android, it’s easy for your IT department to manage devices through the online Google Admin Console, and easy for teachers to discover and distribute educational content to students with Google Play for Education. You get access to both through a one-time $30 management license for each device.

Now schools have even more choice for devices students can use to learn, at even more affordable prices.

Posted by George Reis, Software Engineer

As more and more schools have started using Drive and Classroom, you’ve given us a ton of ideas about ways these tools can help you get more done, especially when it comes to who can share what within your school. So we’ve been working on some new settings for our Google Apps for Education and Drive for Work customers that we hope will take you to your collaborative happy place.

Coming Soon: Trusted Domains 

In the next few months, we’ll be adding a “trusted domains” feature that will allow schools to extend Drive sharing and Classroom participation to domains they choose. Schools that have already set up separate domains –  for example, one domain for faculty and another for students – will be able to use Classroom. It will be possible for students to join classes in other domains, like high school students taking college classes for advanced credit. You’ll also be able to configure your trusted domains for Drive, so you can better control sharing outside of your organization.

More changes are rolling out over the next several weeks:

Reset passwords quickly and securely 

When students and teachers get locked out of their account, we’ve heard that waiting for an IT admin – who often wears many hats within the school – to reset their account can take hours or days away from a busy study schedule. Admins will now be able to allow students and teachers to securely reset their passwords so they don’t lose any valuable time waiting.

Disable download and printing for Google Docs and everything else in Drive 

When what you’re sharing is only meant for a few select people, you can keep it for their eyes only by disabling downloading, printing and copying. This option to disable exporting from Drive will be available in the advanced sharing settings for each file, and it works for Docs, Sheets, Slides and any other files in Drive.

Set sharing settings by organizational units 

If your organization’s users are all in the same domain and you want teachers to be able to share outside the school with parents but only want students to share within the school, you can customize Drive sharing controls based on organizational units. 

Share outside your organization more easily 

When it comes to sharing – whether it’s group projects between students or information about Back to School night shared with parents – you want to make sure that recipients can see it whether they use Drive or not. Now, whoever is receiving that PDF, Google Doc, or video can see it without having to sign-in to their Google account. Admins can turn this on or choose to require recipients to sign-in before they see shared information.

Set up custom admin alerts to know when things change 

All Google Apps admins can now set up custom alerts for the things they care about, like a suspicious login from an account, and get an alert in the Admin console and through the Admin app on Android and iOS. Admins can set up alerts for all activity in Drive, and see when files are created, edited, printed, downloaded and previewed in Drive.

Here's a short video outlining all of the new sharing features coming to Drive for Work and Apps for Education:

Posted by Susan Herder, Instructional Technology Coordinator, and Gretchen Zahn, Curriculum Coordinator at Mounds View Public Schools

Editor's note: Today’s guest authors are Susan Herder, Instructional Technology Coordinator, and Gretchen Zahn, Curriculum Coordinator at Mounds View Public Schools. Susan is a Google Certified Teacher and Google Education Trainer. Gretchen Zahn coordinates the district’s hybrid program and helped develop the district’s teacher appraisal process.

Students aren’t the only ones learning at Mounds View Public Schools — teachers and administrators are also learning from one another with the help of Google Apps and Google Classroom. In 2013, we introduced the Teacher Development and Appraisal Program to support teachers’ professional development. Every teacher is part of a collaborative team, a group for feedback and knowledge-sharing. Because each team manages information in different documents, it’s a priority to keep them organized and easily accessible.

Google Apps and Google Classroom help our teams keep track of all documents related to goal setting, learning targets and other inputs. Teachers write agendas, take meeting notes and complete TDAP self-assessments in Google Docs, and use Google Sheets to analyze student data from the assessments we give every month. Teachers input assessment information in the same sheet, so they can see a student’s progress across multiple subjects. Collaborative teams also use Hangouts to have conversations about professional development and student progress without scheduling meetings. During these Hangouts, teachers can reference resources and student information stored in their team’s Google Site. Teacher development is now a team effort since everyone is learning from each other and discussing their progress.

Principals use Google Classroom to organize, send and receive teacher feedback, much like teachers do with students. Our teachers’ favorite feature is the ability to post questions based on the principal’s feedback. It’s a channel for two-way communication that previously would have happened much slower via email or in-person meetings. Classroom has also encouraged principals to provide feedback more frequently, since it’s so easy and widely used. Approximately 90% of our certified staff use Google Classroom as part of the Teacher Development and Appraisal Program.

Image courtesy of Dr. Jeffrey Ridlehoover, Principal, Mounds View High School

Google Apps for Education has streamlined what initially appeared to be a difficult process of sharing information, data and resources. Teachers and administrators are leaning on each other to improve their teaching skills and ultimately become better educators districtwide.

Posted by Kevin Brookhouser, Director of Technology, York School

(Cross-posted on the Google for Work Blog.)

Editor's note: Leading up to Education on Air, we asked you what topics you’d like to discuss at the conference. The clear winner was “innovation in schools,” so we asked Kevin Brookhouser, a Google Certified Teacher and director of technology at York School, to share his innovative practice of giving students freedom in what and how they learn. Kevin is the author of the new book The 20Time Project and will share his methods during an Education on Air session on May 9. Register here for the free online conference today.

The 20Time Project stemmed from the collision of several fortunate events: I met a number of inspirational teachers through the Google Teacher Academy, spent time at the Google campus, and read a book by Daniel Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us about how to encourage innovative thinking. Inspired by Pink and Google’s “20 percent time”— a practice that allows employees to take time out of their “day job” to work on a side passion project— I created my own version and applied it to the classroom.

Guest blogger Kevin Brookhouser speaks around the world about empowering students with time and choice. He'll lead a conference session at Education on Air on May 9th

20Time is a simple concept that anyone can execute, as long as you give students the choice to design their own learning experience and support them throughout. Give students one day a week to work on a project of their choosing — one that serves a real audience and solves a real-world problem. Help students discover great ideas, write a thoughtful proposal, blog about their progress, craft an elevator pitch, and demonstrate their work through a final presentation.

20Time affords students the opportunity to follow the three critical ingredients essential to innovation as described in Drive:

1. Autonomy: freedom in what they learn and how they learn it 
2. Mastery: the ability to track their learning growth 
3. Purpose: meeting the needs of an audience outside the walls of the classroom

When given the freedom to control their own learning, it turns out that students can come up with incredible ideas. The experiences they created are bigger than any I could’ve imagined — like Maria’s YouTube channel, which inspires young people to love books, or Maddie’s Recycling Closets project, which spreads awareness about sustainable consumerism. I’m fortunate to work at a future-oriented school that supported the experimental project from day one. But wherever they teach, I recommend that teachers who want to try 20Time give it a go — dive in and present the reasoning behind it. Transparent communication to parents, students and administrators can go a long way toward getting buy-in. For example, I send this letter to students and parents at the beginning of the year, and welcome other teachers to modify it to fit their needs.

I’ll be sharing more about what I’ve learned about innovating in schools during my session at Education on Air on May 9. Register here to get updates about the conference. You can find 20Time resources, including five steps to get started, at 20Time.org. The 20Time Project is now available on Amazon, and if you’re looking to purchase multiple copies for your school or would like me to speak about 20Time or Google for Education, I welcome you to contact me directly. See you on May 9!

Posted by Chris Meaney, Director of ICT, Academies Enterprise Trust

Editor's note: This post is written by Chris Meaney, Director of ICT for Academies Enterprise Trust, the largest sponsor of academies in the United Kingdom.

With 42,000 students at 76 schools spread across the United Kingdom, we at Academies Enterprise Trust work hard to broaden access to information. However, some of our legacy technology made it cumbersome for students to share classwork and for teachers to share ideas for improving learning. Google Apps for Education and Chromebooks helps us come together as one large team— and they’re projected to save us £7.7 million in hardware and maintenance costs.

We began using Google Apps for Education in 2012, and soon after, brought 1,200 Chromebooks to many of our academy classrooms. We saw immediately that Google Apps and Chromebooks made learning more interactive and showed students the potential of learning with technology.

At the beginning of the school term in Maltings Academy in Essex, every student writes a 500-word story on subjects they’ll study for the rest of the year. They now write their stories in Google Docs, and use Google Drawings, Forms and Sites to add material like illustrations and surveys. Since they can share their stories with other students, they can edit each other’s work and offer suggestions.

We see similar collaboration across our academies and even between different schools. We’re using Google Sites and Google+ to create a storehouse of lesson plans and learning materials — a virtual support community that’s available anytime. One Google Site shows pictures of corridor displays to inspire teachers to use common spaces more creatively. The academies’ eLearning specialists regularly post ideas to a Google Group about digital learning and encourage other teachers and administrators to share their knowledge.

The easy setup of Google Apps and Chromebooks spared time and headaches for our ICT professionals. We moved nearly all of our academy websites over to Google Sites without hiring web developers or paying hosting fees — an easy move that’s already saved us £33,000.

In fact, we’re spotting significant cost savings in many areas, including maintenance, data storage and hardware. For example, by replacing traditional laptops with Chromebooks, we saved about £100,000. We expect to save millions over the next five years, which we’ll put into improving how students learn and how we teach them.

To learn more, read their case study here.