Category Archives: Google for Work Blog

Work is going Google

Royal Technologies keeps the most up-to-date data on factory floors with digital signage powered by Chrome and help from Promevo

Posted by French Williams, IT Director, Royal Technologies

Editor's note: Today we hear from French Williams, IT director of the Michigan-based Royal Technologies, a 25-year-old engineering and manufacturing company specializing in plastic solutions for the automotive, furniture and consumer product industries. Read how Royal Technologies replaced its digital signage system with an affordable, easy-to-manage Chrome for Work solution with help from their partner Promevo, a premier Google Apps and Chromebook reseller.

When you think of advanced engineering and manufacturing, you probably don’t think of signage. But at Royal Technologies, digital signs powered by Chrome allowed us to communicate with our team of 1,200 employees in new ways, improved uptime by five to 10 percent on our factory floors and saved us $20,000 in the first year alone.
The digital sign in the photograph runs on Chromebit and displays a 1080p video about the different products Royal Technologies makes.
Our partner Promevo recommended the affordable Chromebit signage solution that’s working so well for us today. It’s a small ChromeOS computing stick you can plug into any screen with a HDMI port. We were already using 142 Chromebooks, Chromebox desktops and Chromebox for meetings for everything from IT computing to giving shop-floor operators access to manufacturing job paperwork, documenting work orders for our maintenance department, company meetings and performing transactions in our material requirements planning system. Some employees have even started using Chromebooks as their primary work computers. So we didn’t hesitate to give Chromebit a try.

Since we were already using Chrome, we were able to quickly and easily deploy each Chromebit for digital signage in just 15 minutes. Promevo’s customer support also showed us how to use the Google Admin Console to manage our digital signage. We learned that we could manage our signage and our Chromebooks from the same interface.

In just a few weeks, we updated a variety of digital signs across the company using Chromebits.
Digital signs on the factory floor in five of our six locations now display the latest production data. This data automatically updates every 15 seconds and shows our employees weekly goals for machine uptime. Displaying this goal-driven information has improved uptime from five to 10 percent on our factory floors.

With the $20,000 we saved in one year by switching all the old signage solutions to Chrome, we’re now in a position to expand our use of digital signage throughout the company. We’re now using 11 Chromebits and counting — we bought ten more to use across our locations very soon after trying out the first one. We’re also planning to add Chromebits to the reception areas of our facilities, too.

Chrome device management helps us manage all of our devices more easily, and streamlines software and OS updates. The Chromebit was a better hardware solution for our manufacturing environment because its lack of moving components makes it less susceptible to problems caused by heat and dust on the shop floor.

The combination of Chrome Digital Signage and Promevo's expert guidance and support helps us deliver plastic solutions efficiently without straining our resources.

Building sustainable supply chains with Google and Smartsheet: Q&A with Shaw Industries


Editor's note: Today we speak with Melissa Pateritsas of Shaw Industries Group, which uses Google Apps along with Smartsheet. Read on to find out how these integrated solutions foster collaboration and add greater efficiency to the Shaw Industries supply chain. Register here to join our Hangout on Air on July 20 at 10 a.m. PT to learn more about how Smartsheet, a Google recommended app, can improve your business.
Can you tell us about Shaw Industries and why you chose Google Apps and Smartsheet?

Shaw Industries Group is committed to creating an efficient and sustainable supply chain for its flooring enterprise. Being the world’s largest carpet manufacturer and a leading floorcovering provider means sustainability isn’t just a moral or ethical imperative, it’s smart for business. More efficient supply chains produce better, lasting products with fewer costs.

With offices and sales representatives across the United States and world, Shaw’s sales reach nearly $5 billion every year. Our growing business needed an even more efficient (and sustainable) way to bring daily operations into the digital age. So we turned to two powerful collaboration tools: Google Apps and Smartsheet.


In Smartsheet, we could make good use of the collaborative work management (CWM) platform that marries the power of a project and process management solutions suite to the familiar interface of a spreadsheet. And we saw Google Apps as an opportunity to improve efficiency and collaboration across teams. With a strong working history, the two work in tandem very well and together were exactly what we needed to achieve our digital transformation.

You mentioned the importance of supply chains for Shaw Industries. How did considerations around the supply chain impact your decision to switch to Google Apps and Smartsheet?

Part of creating an efficient and sustainable supply chain is lowering overhead costs. The processes used to produce carpet and flooring at our various manufacturing facilities differed slightly from location to location. The many manufacturing divisions had common needs, but also their own unique challenges. Any solution would have to address these differences, while commonalities would cause overlap. It didn’t make sense to have different support teams for each process, especially if half of what the teams did was identical.

Sharing plans and projects was also challenging. The systems we had in place were costly and time-consuming. We needed a way to increase visibility and update project statuses, not only for our team, but also for external parties like clients and vendors.

What results are you seeing now that you’re using Apps and Smartsheet?

Turning to Google Apps’ collaborative tools was a positive first step. Google Drive allowed us to easily share documents and files both internally and externally. Documents could be instantly shared and jointly edited by employees around the world in real time. Plus, going paperless made our operations more ecologically friendly.

Smartsheet’s suite of project and process management solutions, which feature Google Apps integration, further enhanced what Google already had to offer. Smartsheet offers great flexibility. With them, we can easily create templates that we can edit and customize to meet diverse needs.

We also simplified project roll-ups — which were previously done by hand. Using cell linking, engineering managers could automate the process, saving time and effort, and automatic updates solved the problem of visibility that we struggled with. We could now easily share individual projects with stakeholders, both internal and external, ensuring that everyone was on the same page.

Also, today our separate business units are able to build custom and individualized solutions on a strong foundation that addresses both common and distinct needs. Managers and engineers can automate processes that had previously been done by hand, spending more time and energy on devising ways to make our products better and longer-lasting. These new solutions are built using familiar interfaces and services that employees already know how to use.

Can you tell us about the process of adopting Smartsheet?

Adopting Smartsheet was a simple transition because of its familiar spreadsheet-like GUI. We didn’t need additional software. Everything we needed could be done within the frameworks that Google and Smartsheet already offered.

So where does the company stand now in terms of its digital transformation?

We’re definitely in the midst of transformation. With Smartsheet and Google solutions, and their simplicity and the scalability that a worldwide enterprise like Shaw needs, we’ve reduced overhead and complexity and cut time spent on processes. We now have more time and focus on building for the future. We can also proudly say that we’ve met our goal to create easy-to-adopt digital practices and a more efficient, sustainable supply chain.


Top UK CIO explains how to create a 5-star digital hotel experience

Posted by Chris Hewertson, CTO of glh

Editor's note: Today’s post is from Chris Hewertson, CTO of glh, the largest owner-operator hotel company in London with over 5,000 rooms throughout London as well as two locations in Malaysia. Chris was recently named “disruptive player in the crowded hotels market” in the CIO top 100 list. Here, he shares his secrets to success.

In 2013, we launched the world’s fastest hotel wi-fi and put our focus on digital. We had big ideas to transform our business, and we knew we couldn’t do it alone.

We’re always looking for new and innovative technology solutions that can help us deliver the best guest-centred experience in hospitality. Hosted services and real-time responses are becoming more and more of a basic customer expectation in other industries so we thought, why not hotels? We worked with implementation partner Cloudreach to adopt Google Apps as our fully integrated, enterprise-wide cloud collaboration and storage solution.

Let product enthusiasts within your teams help usher a smooth adoption

With over 33 hotels, more than 1000 users and nearly 4 million files, how were we going to move everything and everyone onto Google Apps for Work? The answer was obvious – Jedis.

Well, not Jedis exactly, but pretty close. Our nominated Google Guides were a group of 65 champions across all our locations and departments – from night managers to head housekeepers – who helped kick-start our Google Apps for Work adoption. Their support and enthusiasm for the tools meant we could truly bring Google Apps for Work into every part of our business.

Not only did they help us cut down old and unused data as part of the migration process (we have now almost halved our original 3 million files), they encouraged everyone to use the tools for creative solutions. This is a great example of how a user led change approach can lead to high levels of engagement and adoption while minimising the need for a traditional data migration.

Find creative ways to use new tools to improve customer experience

At glh, we take guest complaints seriously and try to accommodate each request as much as we can. At our biggest hotel, room moves and changes happen daily. Guests move rooms to be closer to their travelling party, away from their boss (yes, really) or even to avoid odd numbers.

Before Google, this would cause major disruption across a number of teams from Housekeeping to Concierge. Now, all teams can see and edit real-time room changes in Sheets, and housekeepers can even use it on their mobiles. As a result, we’ve significantly minimized delays, confusion and complaints.

From internal invites to office polls, Forms has been a welcome addition to the working lives of all of us at glh. Now we have a form that allows staff to check out a guest from anywhere in the hotel in seconds. No more printed paper that was popped into a box at reception.


Invest big savings from new technology tools into workplace improvements

Trans-atlantic Hangout conversations have led to a 42% reduction in conference call charges. Hourly printouts of various logs and reports of over 1,000 pages are now shareable digital Docs that are securely stored on Drive. The logs are updated in real time and available on any device.

It’s just over a year since we introduced Google Apps for Work, and in that time we’ve made so many apps-based ideas a reality – like our Manager of the Month initiative, where everyone votes using a Form.

Our Google Guides, who were so central to our training and awareness a year ago, are still coming up with new suggestions all the time – it’s amazing how creative people can be.

Viget keeps its creative workforce connected with Chromebox for meetings

Posted by Andy Rankin, Co-Founder and President, Viget

Editor's note: Today we hear from Andy Rankin, co-founder and president of Washington, D.C.-based tech software design agency Viget. Read about how Viget, an early Google for Work adopter, uses Chromebox for meetings to create a single team across time zones, increase employee retention and save $40,000 a year.

My brother Brian and I founded Viget in 1999. The internet was just taking off and we wanted to be a part of it. Since then, our talented designers and software engineers have tackled projects like overhauling a wildlife nonprofit’s online presence and optimizing a news organization’s 2016 Presidential Election media coverage. We’ve grown to more than 60 employees, and Chromebox for meetings allows our remote employees and three offices to work together seamlessly. It’s part of creating a unified company culture that thrives on sharing creative ideas.

We were early adopters of Google technology. When we started migrating to the cloud in 2008, we switched to Gmail. Using Google Apps was a natural next step as we grew the agency, and now we use Apps daily — to write contracts in Google Docs, allocate people’s time using Google Sheets and create client presentations in Google Slides.

We started using Chromebox for meetings the day the product launched in 2014. We built our first videoconferencing tool in-house in 2011, but it was too expensive to maintain. By switching to Chromebox, we save $40,000 each year. We also save time: we spent 300 hours building and maintaining our in-house tool over the course of a few months; now with Chromeboxes, I spend 15 minutes each week. Unlike other solutions, Chromebox turns on in seconds. It syncs with everyone’s Gmail accounts and calendars. There’s no dial-in to look up or minutes wasted logging on. And as both Viget’s president and sole IT person, this ease is incredibly valuable for me. So much so, that today, we have 11 Chromeboxes and plan to buy more as we continue to grow.

Our designers and developers work in tight-knit teams, so getting facetime with one another is important. Chromebox and Google Hangouts allow our teams to meet for scheduled check-ins and impromptu brainstorms. Most teams have a mix of employees from different offices, so they rely on these tools for all their communication. They also help us build relationships with our remote colleagues. Trevor from Charleston joins video Hangouts with his dog Newman. Sometimes, Kansas City-based Kelly’s two-year-old daughter sits on her lap during meetings so we can say hello.

Chromebox has one unexpected but important benefit: employee retention. As any creative agency knows, the competition for talent is fierce, and keeping great people is our top priority. So when a trusted employee tells us she plans to move to a new city or start working from home several days a week, we give her the flexibility to work remotely rather than find a new job.

Teamwork is at the center of our agency’s growth. Chromebox for meetings and Google Apps make it easy to work closely together on creative projects and develop strong relationships from anywhere. Seeing people’s faces every day makes us feel closer as a company, and the ease of communication helps teams to do their best work.

How tech-based learning spaces are helping spark creativity

Posted by Melissa Horwitz, Marketing Manager, Google for Education


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

Editor's note: Teachers are uniquely inspiring people. It takes a teacher to innovate in the classroom and inspire a love for learning. We had a great time celebrating these everyday heroes at ISTE this week, and we wanted to highlight a few of them below. Check out the #GoogleEdu and #ISTE2016 hashtags to get a recap of what went on in Denver this week.

The teachers at Laguna Beach Unified School District in California and Sun Prairie Area School District in Wisconsin wanted to give their traditional classroom a reboot. By upending the typical classroom layout that confines students to desks and teachers to the front of the room, they increased student engagement, introducing technology, hands-on learning and group activities.

Laguna Beach designs learning spaces to enhance engagement through movement 


“The classroom is the most neglected element in education right now,” says Mike Morrison, chief technology officer at Laguna Beach Unified School District. “You’ll find rooms with dark projectors, the lights out and the blinds drawn. How could these dark spaces inspire learning?” At Laguna Beach, Morrison and 15 teachers plunged into research on the impact that environment has on the senses — and tested technologies, furniture and even colored lighting. The core elements, says Morrison, boiled down to flexible furniture, multiple monitors and audio amplification.

To replace bulky desks that were designed decades ago to be placed in rows, Morrison and his team chose desks and chairs with wheels that can revolve in any direction. This frees up teachers and students to quickly group desks together and direct attention at any part of the classroom — or at each other. There are standing desks as well, giving students the option to have their legs engaged — a boon for students dealing with attention-deficit disorders, Morrison says.

More monitors and whiteboards provide more space for students to work as teams, instead of just watching the teacher up front. “The walls can then become anything we want them to be,” says Morrison — a place for a test review, a team project or solving a math problem as a class.

Morrison and his team also changed the audio and lighting to help set the mood for different types of learning and make it easier for teachers to be heard. Teachers wear lanyard microphones connected to each classroom’s speaker system. “A teacher who spends the day shouting to be heard is stressed, and so is the class,” Morrison says. Teachers use lighting to change wall colors depending on the activity — yellow to encourage quiet reading time, blue for creativity and brainstorming.

About 40 classrooms have been reconfigured to date, with 20 more to come this summer — and the change is palpable, Morrison says. “Teachers are walking around more, and they’re in touch with what students are doing,” Morrison says. “The atmosphere in classrooms is also much calmer.”

Laguna Beach Unified School district put together this fun video — a takeoff on TV’s “The Office” — showing off the classroom improvements.

Classrooms become technology incubators for Sun Prairie Area students 

At Sun Prairie Area School District, teachers are inspiring students to be entrepreneurial and engage with technology. They found that by creating dedicated spaces without any of the usual trappings of a classroom, they could motivate students to break out of their comfort zones and think more outside the box.

One of these learning spaces, “Fab Lab,” was created by Stephanie Breunig, a media specialist for the district’s Cardinal Heights Upper Middle School. Students can use the Fab Lab for school or personal projects. The lab has Legos, digital and GoPro cameras, art supplies, circuit boards and software such as GarageBand, recording software for music and Final Cut Pro, a video editing software. In the Fab Lab, students work with teachers to create their own videos or music mashups and internet memes. They've even started learning 3D printing and robotics.
Student working on a project in the Fab Lab
At Sun Prairie Area, teachers are also evolving learning spaces inside the classroom. With Google Maps, students take virtual tours of the world in their geography lessons, learning details about other cultures that they couldn’t find on a regular map. “Students use Google Maps to explore and take interactive tours of other countries,” says Tim Mortensen, 6th and 7th grade social studies teacher at Patrick Marsh Middle School. “When we learned about the pyramids, they could actually see them on the map and they started asking questions about what they’re made of. Some students even explored the surrounding area, wanting to know more about the hotels and restaurants in Egypt and asking questions like why the McDonalds there has different items on the menu.”

“Literacy no longer means just reading and writing words on a page. Technology has created a new definition of literacy that includes digital,” says Curt Mould, director of innovation, assessment and continuous improvement at Sun Prairie Area School District. To teach with technology, teachers are creating learning spaces defined by interactive learning and experimentation.

Laguna Beach and Sun Prairie Area School Districts have discovered just a few of the ways that disrupting the traditional classroom environment can help engage students. From exploring the world with online activities, to simply taking the classroom outside for a lesson, there are an infinite number of ways that teachers all over are creating new learning spaces to inspire students. Is your school district trying to reinvent the rooms where learning happens? Tell us about your plans to inspire curiosity in the classroom environment.



Give feedback faster with Quizzes in Google Forms

Posted by Tynia Yang, Software Engineer, Google Forms

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

Editor's note: On Monday, we announced four new ways to help teachers engage their classes using Google tools. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into one of these tools: Quizzes in Google Forms . If you are at ISTE in Denver, visit us at booth #2511 in the expo hall to learn more and demo our new tools.

Educators have told us that collecting feedback earlier in the learning process results in better outcomes for both teachers and students. But they’ve also shared that creating assessments and providing feedback can lead to hours of repetitive grading.

Dr. Ismael Piedra, a professor at the Instituto Technologico de Monterrey, for example, used “exit tickets” after his lectures to check student comprehension. But his attempts at gathering quick feedback would often result in 300 quizzes to grade and hours of work.

After months of pilots with educators like Dr. Piedra, we launched Quizzes in Google Forms on Monday to help teachers quickly create, deliver and grade assignments or assessments. With Quizzes, teachers can select correct answers for multiple choice and checkbox questions to reduce repetitive grading. They can also enter explanations and review materials to help students learn. And to make sure students understand the lesson material, teachers can prevent students from sending themselves a copy of their responses.

Nick Marchese, a music and programming teacher at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, uses Quizzes in Google Forms to adapt his teaching throughout the learning process. “Quizzes help me optimize my teaching,” he explains. “After students take a quiz, I can check the summary of responses to see frequently missed questions and a visual representation of student scores. If I see there’s a question that a lot of students got wrong, then we start the next class by reviewing it.” Nick says that students love the immediate feedback they get while he loves how Quizzes can “automatically check multiple-choice questions and reduce time devoted to grading.”
Effie Kleinberg of Bnei Akiva Schools in Toronto, likes that Quizzes reduce the overhead of giving formative assessments. “Quizzes make it quick and easy to create and grade a student assessment,” he says. Effie posts his Quizzes as assignments in Google Classroom, where he is easily able to keep track of student responses and view results. Students receive quick, actionable feedback though explanations and review materials, without requiring Effie to manually grade each quiz.

We made Quizzes available to all Google Forms users so we can continue improving based on your feedback. Tasks like automating repetitive grading are just the beginning, so we look forward to hearing what you think. Get started by creating your first Quiz today!

How 3 teachers use Expeditions to enhance their students’ natural curiosity

Posted by Alex Lockwood, Software Engineer, Google Expeditions

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


Editor's note: Teachers are uniquely inspiring people. It takes a teacher to engage students, bring the classroom alive and turn classroom concepts into lifelong passions. This week at ISTE, we announced four new ways for these everyday heroes to engage their classes using Google tools. One of these announcements was that Expeditions — virtual reality field trips using Cardboard — is now available to everyone. To get started, all teachers need to do is download the Expeditions app onto a set of devices and choose where in the world they want to take their class. The app is available today for Android and will be available for iPhones and iPads soon.

Field trips and school outings create opportunities for students to share new experiences and get them excited about learning, but teachers often lack the resources for these out-of-the-classroom adventures.. Teachers at Community Consolidated School District 62 wouldn’t let a lack of resources stop them from igniting students’ sense of wonder by exploring the world together. Sarah Murphy, a science teacher at Algonquin Middle School; Elizabeth Moravec, an art teacher at Terrace Elementary School and Orchard Place Elementary School; and Matt Peebles, a fourth-grade teacher at Plainfield Elementary School introduced Google Expeditions. Expeditions are collections of virtual reality panoramas — 360° photo spheres and 3D images — annotated with details, points of interest and questions that make them easy to integrate into curriculum already used in schools.

Many students at CCSD 62 come from low-income families and may have never traveled outside of their community. But with Expeditions, teachers can take these students on trips of a lifetime and make lesson plans more interactive and meaningful. Teachers at CCSD 62 can apply to use the district’s “traveling suitcase” with all the tools and technology to take students on an Expedition. Read how Sarah, Elizabeth and Matt are encouraging students to become curious learners and establish deeper connections with their surroundings.

Encouraging students to ask more questions and take charge of their learning 

Since Sarah got an Expeditions kit for her classroom, her students have developed a new love of learning about science. In the past it was difficult for students to visualize the concepts they learned, such as how big a geographical landmark is. Now that Expeditions is an integral part of every unit, or themed area of focus, students have been more engaged and are asking more in-depth questions that show a deeper understanding of the topics.

For example, Sarah first took her students to the Grand Canyon to show them the processes that formed one of the seven wonders of the world when they were studying Earth History. When they put on Google Cardboard, students started becoming curious about new aspects of the landmark and asked questions like “How did it form?” and “What do the stripes mean?”.

“Students’ faces lit up when they saw the size of the Grand Canyon,” Sarah says. “By virtually traveling there, they better understood that the stripes are different layers of rock. Expeditions encourage students to observe, explore and be curious. For them to be successful in life, they need to be curious and be able to explore on their own.”
Students in Sarah's class look through Google Cardboard, engaging with the "Into the stratosphere" Expedition
Sarah also encourages students to discover their passion for learning and science by letting them lead Expeditions. When students lead instead of the teacher, they ask each other different types of questions, sparking meaningful conversations. They’re also sharing their knowledge after exploring diverse ecosystems in small groups. For example, a group of students studying the desert shared what they learned during Expeditions with students focusing on the rainforest, and vice versa. This personalized learning and peer-to-peer sharing encourages students to be active learners and take ownership of their education.

Inspiring students to approach art with a new lens

In her art classes, Elizabeth often shows students photos of art, sculptures and monuments to inspire their own creations, but when she had the opportunity to use Google Expeditions, she knew she could provide them with a “larger than life” source of inspiration. Elizabeth chose the Colosseum Expedition, which fit nicely into the current unit about monuments.

“Expeditions aid in creativity,” Elizabeth says. “Students are thinking about their surroundings and the impact they have on their environment.”

Since Elizabeth doesn’t have an Expeditions kit permanently in her classroom like Sarah, she’s found creative ways to recreate the virtual reality experience using Google Street View and YouTube 360 videos. With Elizabeth’s DIY virtual reality, students experienced driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in an Indie 500 car. Others went to the top of the Space Needle and said it felt like they were free birds soaring above the world. After these experiences, which many students couldn’t imagine doing in real life, students added more detail to their drawings, analyzed their work more and made deeper connections when thinking about how objects relate to the world. By using virtual reality-like experiences, Elizabeth is giving students a new source of inspiration for their art and more insights and tools to express their thoughts and reflections.
Artwork students created after "visiting" various locations using Google Street View and YouTube 360 videos

Applying classroom concepts to real-world situations 

Math concepts can be abstract, and while students may see its application to calculating a tip at a restaurant or measuring ingredients in the kitchen, they might not always see the more fun uses. Matt uses Expeditions to explore landmarks and show fourth grade students how math concepts, specifically geometry, can be useful beyond the classrooms. When his students embarked on the Great Wall of China Expedition, he taught them how right angles contribute to the stability and construction of structures. After that visit, the entire unit was more impactful because students connected the math concepts to their Expeditions experience.
Matt's students look through the viewmaster to experience what it's like visiting The Great Wall of China
When they saw how math can help a monumental structure last so long, students began to wonder about the architectural design and math concepts behind other buildings and monuments. Just as Elizabeth does, Matt takes his students on additional virtual reality trips by using Google Street View. His students “walked around” 16th Street Baptist Church and talked about the location’s significance and its role in U.S. history.

“Incorporating technology and Google Expeditions in the lesson plan creates intrinsic motivation, and students feed off each others’ enthusiasm,” Matt says. “When learning becomes fun, students make new connections and can’t wait to explore the next thing.”

Sarah, Elizabeth and Matt are creating field trip-like experiences for their students to inspire them to think more creatively, “travel” around the world and find greater meaning for classroom lessons as they pertain to real life. Earlier this week, we announced that Expeditions is available to everyone. To get started, all teachers need to do is download the Expeditions app onto a set of devices and choose where in the world they want to take their class. The app is available today for Android and will be available for iPhones and iPads soon.

Teach and learn from everywhere in the classroom with Google Cast for Education

Posted by Max Kirsch, Product Manager, Cast for Education

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

Editor's note: This week we announced four new ways to help teachers engage their classes using Google educational tools. This post dives deeper into one of the those announcements: Cast for Education. 


In his 11 years of teaching at Hillcrest Elementary in the Lake Stevens School district in Washington State, Bob Coleman has witnessed how educational technology can help advance collaboration and engagement in the classroom. So when the 4th grade teacher found his students stuck on a common math problem, he gathered the class in front of the classroom projector. Sitting behind his desk — now in front of his students and not among them — Mr. Coleman realized that the biggest screen in the room was only available to the teacher.

In Mr. Coleman’s classroom — and for millions of students around the world — both education and technology are expected to be collaborative. But today, the classroom projector is most often out of reach for students. Educators are eager to overcome this barrier, so much so that wireless screen sharing for schools was one of the top features requested by teachers in 2015.

Teachers, we heard you loud and clear. Yesterday we announced Google Cast for Education, a free Chrome app that allows students and teachers to share their screens wirelessly from anywhere in the classroom. Cast for Education carries video and audio across complex school networks, has built-in controls for teachers, and works seamlessly with Google Classroom. And because the app runs on the teacher’s computer that’s connected to the projector, it doesn’t require new hardware. Teachers run the Cast for Education app, and students share their screens through the Cast feature in Chrome.
Teacher view (click image to see larger)
Student view (click image to see larger)
To gather feedback on the product, we had teachers like Mr. Coleman and his colleague Tony Koumaros pilot Cast for Education in their classrooms. Mr. Koumaros knew his students would be excited to share their work with the rest of the class, but he was surprised to discover that they were eager to share even when they didn’t know all of the answers. “Casting makes it fun to ask for help,” he said. “My students enjoyed working through challenges together.”

Erin Turnbach, a 2nd grade teacher who piloted Cast for Education at Tom’s River Regional School District in New Jersey, found herself “co-teaching with a 2nd grader” during a lesson on animals. When the class got stuck during research time, Ms. Turnbach was able to work one-on-one with a student while another casted to the rest of the class. “We’re always trying to encourage teamwork,” Ms Turnbach says. “The end product is stronger when you collaborate and build off each other’s ideas. With Cast for Education, everyone engages and the students take ownership of their learning.”

“It’s hard to imagine not using it now that we have it”, Mr. Coleman says. “Sharing student screens was a big need for us, and now Cast for Education is our daily classroom tool.”

*Note: Visit g.co/CastForEDU to try Cast for Education today in beta, with full availability for Back to School 2016. Chrome management admins can install the new Cast for Education app for all teachers, and the Google Cast extension for their entire domain.

Azavea’s socially-minded employees work collaboratively together using Chrome devices

Posted by Robert Cheetham, Founder and CEO, Azavea


Editor's note: Today we hear from Robert Cheetham, founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based geospatial web software and analysis firm Azavea. Read about how Azavea has relied on Google for Work tools for more than eight years and recently started using Chromebox for meetings and Chromebooks so employees can work together from anywhere.

When I founded Azavea in 2000, I dreamed of creating a great work environment focused on driving social impact by applying geospatial technology. We're a certified B Corporation, and our mission-driven work includes climate change, elections, public safety, transit, water infrastructure and natural resources. Inspired by my first job working for a local government agency in Japan, where cubicles don’t exist, I designed our workspace to have an open layout, long before it became popular in contemporary offices. Today, we rely on Google Apps, Chromebooks and Chromebox for meetings to support this collaborative environment and help us work closely together on our software and data analytics projects.

In the early years, when Azavea only had a handful of employees, we installed basic workplace software from a CD-ROM and had limited server space. When we outgrew our email system in 2008, we chose Gmail. Our employees quickly started using Google Calendar, Docs, Hangouts and Sheets because they integrate so closely with Gmail. These tools helped us work effectively together on projects, so it was a natural next step.

In 2012, our software developers started asking for supplementary computers to let them work from home, when traveling for client meetings or even in the office kitchen. We looked into tablets, but they were expensive and didn’t have fully functional keyboards. As longtime Google users, our Operations team investigated options from Google.

Chromebooks are fast, affordable, secure and remarkably powerful, so we started offering them as supplementary devices for people who wanted more mobility. Our colleagues can easily switch between their main workstations and portable Chromebooks, and the long-lasting battery makes them the perfect companion for frequent travelers, office roamers and remote employees. I typically travel for a week each month myself, so I use my Chromebook on long flights as well as meetings and conferences where there may not be convenient power. It typically lasts more than nine hours, while a laptop only lasts two or three.

The company now has more than fifty people, and when we moved to a new office a few months ago, we needed a videoconferencing solution for a dozen new meeting rooms, we once again turned to Google and picked Chromebox for meetings. Like the other Google products we use, Chromebox is affordable, easy to install and integrates with our existing workplace software, like Hangouts and Calendar. Anyone can quickly set up and join a meeting. As a small firm, this ease of use is critical for us — we don’t have a team of dedicated IT staff, so we don’t have capacity to constantly deal with technical difficulties or high-maintenance updates.

I wanted to start a company that felt like a community and made an impact. Over the past several years, Google has significantly enhanced our company’s operations because their products simply work and easily scale as the company has grown. Our teams are able to work effectively together, no matter where we are.

In the cloud: Have trust, will profit

Posted by Julien Blanchez, security and privacy, Google for Work

For any forward-thinking business, embracing the cloud is no longer a question of why but how. How do I get there and how will it improve my bottom line?

The answer could be as simple as trust.

According to new research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by Google, companies with high levels of trust in the cloud report a 9% rise in profitability year on year, compared to 1% for their more skeptical peers.

The survey of 452 senior executives across 10 countries examined their use of the cloud and their attitudes towards its security, reliability, accessibility and scale. The results show a clear link between an organization’s profitability and their trust in the cloud, suggesting cloud adoption alone is not enough to guarantee a positive business impact.

The benefits of trust go beyond profits


Companies that actively foster trust in cloud technology report more than just a boost to their bottom line — they believe their trust in cloud technology drives workplace transformation.

“As organizations expand their use of the cloud, those with higher levels of trust are able to transform their organizations more quickly, and the resulting business benefits can be substantial,” explains EIU Senior Editor Carolyn Whelan.

Guilherme Cruz, CIO at Brazilian shipping company Wilson Sons, credits trust in the cloud with powerful improvements to business communication, easier access to data on mobile and faster collaboration. “It is a company transformation,” he explains. “It is about the way you are working, about changing behavior and processes.”

Although cloud adoption has grown rapidly, trust in this technology hasn’t increased at the same pace. The survey found that about 99% of organizations have already shifted some of their information technology (IT) to the cloud yet only 35% have a “very high” level of trust in the new environment. With regard to the degree of trust, 16% say their trust level is “somewhat high,” 29% say they have only a “moderate” level of trust, and 19% say their trust level is “low.”

How to foster a culture of trust


Building trust in any organization is an ongoing process that needs to be championed by a company’s leadership team. By encouraging education and experimentation, leaders can help to change how their teams embrace working in the cloud.

The survey results support the idea that leaders shape a culture of trust. Nearly half (47%) of respondents whose senior executives prioritize cloud trust note an increase in trust levels over the last three years, versus 6% whose leaders don’t. Of the respondents whose companies have low levels of trust in the cloud, nearly half (45%) said that general management is the most common impediment to cloud adoption.

The greatest benefit of a cloud-enabled world is the potential to fundamentally change the way businesses work, and building trust in the cloud requires everyone, starting with leadership.

To learn more about how moving to the cloud can make businesses more secure and successful, read the EIU report and tune in to Atmosphere Digital: Rethinking Security in the Cloud on June 28, 2016 at 10 a.m. PT.