FAQs

Just a quick reminder about student access to Google services. None of this is new, but it's come up a few times today:

As a staff member, you have access to most of the Google applications. Students, though, have the following restrictions:

Google Hangouts and Hangouts Meet are only available to high school students. We used to have this enabled at the middle school level as well, but had to disable it in 2018 because the amount of inappropriate use was overwhelming. It was frequently used as a tool for harassment and bullying. We have never had this enabled at the elementary level.

Gmail is only available to students starting in third grade. At that level, it is introduced by our media specialists in the context of digital citizenship and cybersafety. Because we don't have a lot of control over email messages that we receive, we delay this until we can wrap it with some instruction.

All of our students have Google accounts. They can all use Drive and Classroom. You can share documents with them. They can collaborate and use most of the tools. But if you send an email to a first grader, he's not going to get it for two years. :-)

If you're setting up new Google Classroom classes with primary students, it's probably best to send the codes to the parents, and have them help the kids get enrolled.

Teachers in grades 9-12 now have the ability to record Meet sessions with students. This setting was changed on 4.2.20.

Note

* Students in grades K-8 don't have access to Hangouts. So you can record here, and meet with your colleagues, but you can't meet with students this way.

* The recording feature is an Enterprise feature. We don't have an Enterprise Google domain. They've enabled it for everyone for COVID-19. So eventually, this will go away.

Email notification from John Schinker: "You're receiving this because you've contacted me this week about email messages from teachers being categorized as Spam. It looks like, under some conditions, messages that teachers send through Progress Book were being marked as Spam.

The reason for this is that the messages were coming from Progress Book rather than Gmail. Some mail providers (including Google) know that we use Gmail, and so messages coming from other sources (like Progress Book) are suspicious. We made some adjustments to our mail configuration to certify that messages coming from our teachers in Progress Book are actually valid messages. This change was made on Wednesday (April 1).

Hopefully, messages that have been sent through Progress Book since then are not being marked as Spam. I have verified that this is working correctly with a few messages that were sent to students. If you're still having trouble with messages sent in the last couple days being marked as spam, please let me know.

Sorry for the confusion."