About G Suite in D102

G Suite is Google's special packaging of their free tools for use by schools. With G Suite, we can create and manage student (and staff) accounts, specify settings that apply to specific grade levels and groups, and otherwise customize the offerings for our District's needs.

All D102 students have G Suite accounts created for them. Whether and for what purposes they use them depends on the school. In grades 4–8, Google is a key element of the student's day-to-day work. Read on for more information about the Apps that make up G Suite.

Signing in to G Suite

Once your student is signed into one of the Google apps on his or her iPad, there is no need to sign into the others. The first time your child uses an app, it will ask for permission to use the account already present on the iPad.

The Apps

Gmail

All D102 students have a D102.org email account hosted by Google.

As with a personal Gmail account, a D102 Google Apps email account is accessed using a web browser or using an app on the iPad. It will look just like the personal Gmail you might be familiar with. A key difference between a Google Apps account and a personal Gmail account is that, as part of Google Apps for Education, Google does not serve ads nor does it track student email use. Another important difference is that we put restrictions on the ability of students to receive email from outside senders. They can receive email notifications from online services like Schoology and Zoom, but otherwise can only receive from other D102 students and staff.

Drive

Drive is both an app and a place. A person's Google Drive is on-line storage where they can store documents "in the cloud." A user's Drive holds all the documents created in other apps (Docs, Sheets, Presentations, Forms, etc.) as well as other computer files uploaded from a computer or iPad.

A student can use their Drive as a place to transfer files between their iPad and a desktop or laptop computer, either at school or at home. This can be a good way to share work from their iPads with you at home or with other important people.

One of the first things students will do at the beginning of the year is connect Notability on their iPad to their Google Drive. Notability will sync its data with a folder in the student's Google Drive, which serves as an important backup.

Because Google Drive is online storage, there is a limit to how much data can be stored. As of this year, the total data quota for a user's entire Google account is 30GB. This includes both email and attachments as well as uploaded documents. It is important to know that only uploaded Office document formats (Word, Excel, etc) can be converted into Google's native formats.

Docs

Google Docs is the word-processor portion of Google Apps. Google docs live in a user's Google Drive.

Sheets

Google Sheets is the spreadsheet tool. It's a great way to work with data, both when you need to do calculations but also if you just want an easy way to create and work with tables.

Slides

Google calls them "Slides" but the rest of us usually refer to them as presentations. The feature set is limited compared to PowerPoint or Keynote, but what sets Google Slides apart is the ability for more than one person to work on the same presentation. This can be at the same time or at different times, but it is a great way for a group of people to create a single presentation together.