Good Morning!
Google Groups - What are they and how do they work?
If you go to the apps launcher (the nine box grid on the top right of your google page) you will find Groups.
At this time, no one is able to create a group except a Google Administrator. Here is why this is the case!
- In our district, each Google group has a purpose. There are groups set up for the administration of the website and also groups that correspond with mail groups that are set up in Outlook.
- If you were to set up a group, no one would receive a notification from that group because those groups are first routed through Outlook.
- Anyone with a Google account (school) or a student with a Google account but no Outlook account would not get notifications from the group. This would include interns and other miscellaneous staff.
You can check your group affiliations by clicking on MY GROUPS. In the next 2 weeks, I will be cross checking the Google groups with the Outlook groups to make sure they both align. That way, if someone shares a file with a group, you will be getting notifications. Until then, if you check your group affiliations and see that you are a part of a group you shouldn't be, or are not in a group you should be, you may not be getting notifications if people are sharing items with you. Please shoot me an email and I'll take care of it as soon as possible!
So how do I share items with a group that isn't set up in Google Groups?
- First of all, no groups will be set up in Google Groups by an administrator that aren't in Outlook.
- To set up your own personal groups, you'll need to create these groups in Gmail. Here, you can create student groups, colleague groups, or whatever groups you'd like. The nice thing is once these are created, you'll be able to share files to these groups - with or without Gmail. Remember, these groups are in your Google account, but they don't transfer to Outlook. Likewise, any group you've created in Outlook does not transfer to Google.
- To create these groups, please see this VIDEO on creating contact groups. This video is silly, but you'll learn how to create the groups. Also, if you want student groups, you really need to just use Classroom. With Classroom, you'll have the option to communicate in various ways with your students once they log in to Classroom with their Google account. Remember, at this time students in grades K-5 do not have any type of gmail so Classroom may be the best way to send notifications.
Our main email system is Outlook. Please don't rely solely on Gmail. You may miss some emails if you aren't a member of a specific group! I am working hard to coordinate these two, but people may be missed - especially with the flurry of new staff members!!