It’s the end of the month and it feels like I was writing about Google Apps daily in April. I checked, I wasn’t, but there were a lot of useful updates to Google Apps products this month. Here are the updates that are of interest to teachers and students.

1. Google Play podcasts. You can now publish your podcast on Google Play. The process is actually rather straight-forward.

2. New filtering options for YouTube within Google Apps domains.

3. Google Calendar now suggests mutually convenient meeting times for your group.

4. You can now create and track goals in Google Calendar.

5. Google Calendar’s web app now includes task reminders.

6. Google Classroom now includes a polling function.

7. Outlook users will be pleased to know that the Google Drive plug-in for Microsoft Office now supports Outlook.

8. The Mac & PC Google Drive desktop apps now allow you to choose which folders you want to sync.

9. Google Drive now lets you choose which files you want to sync for offline access.

10. Google Keep for Chrome & Android now let you bookmark websites, add notes to your bookmarks, share bookmarks, and set reminders for sharing. Watch my latest video overview of the Google Keep for Chrome extension.

11. Desktop notifications are now a feature of Google Drive’s web app. The notifications will tell you when someone shares a file and or requests a file. Watch my video to learn how to enable this feature.


Learn how to put all of these features and more to good use in your classroom in my online course Getting Going With GAFE. You can earn three graduate credits in the course.