Earlier this year, we announced a Google Classroom beta that simplifies lesson planning with shareable class templates and classwork. We’re excited to announce that this is now globally available for Google Workspace for Education Plus customers in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. 

Curriculum leads and verified teachers can now share links to high-quality classes and class templates so other educators in their organization can preview and import classwork to an existing class or to a new class. This will provide educators with ideas for instructional design and enable them stay up-to-date with the best materials. 

End users 

This feature enables curriculum leads and teachers to easily distribute standardized curricula or classroom content to others in their organization. As a result, fellow educators can easily preview, select, and import high-quality classwork into their classes. 

Student information, such as assignment submissions, comments, and grades, will not be visible when previewing a shared class. Imported class materials will be saved in draft mode for the selected class. 

Admins: There is no admin control for this feature, however, Admins should make sure the following is set up for end users: In order to share classes, educators must have a Google Workspace for Education Plus license assigned to them. To preview and import classwork from shared classes, educators must be verified teachers. End users: To share a class, click the “Share classwork” button on the Classwork page. After receiving a class link, open it in your browser. When previewing the shared class, select the classwork items you want to export to a class. Visit the Help Center to learn more about sharing class templates and classwork. 

Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on January 31, 2024 

Available to Education Plus 

You can now pin messages to the top of the meeting chat. Pinned messages will appear for all users, even if they join the meeting after the message was initially sent. This makes it easy to ensure that important messages – like links to presentations – are displayed prominently and easily accessible by meeting participants.

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

Resources

Last year, we introduced new appointment scheduling features to help you set more relevant meeting durations and tailor your calendar view to match your preferences. In our effort to further improve upon the current appointment scheduling experience, we’re adding the options to: 

Add up to 20 co-hosts to your appointment schedule during the setup process so you can host appointments with others. 

Create appointment schedules on secondary calendars. Prior to this update, you could only create appointment schedules on your own primary calendar. Now, you can create the schedule and receive booked events on secondary calendars as well. This can be particularly useful when multiple users, such as a team, need access to the same set of office hours. Everyone with permission to use the secondary calendar can make changes to the schedule and view incoming bookings. The appointment schedule can check the secondary calendar for availability, but cannot check the availability of all users with access to the secondary calendar. 

Expand the delegate access functionality to appointment scheduling. Currently, delegate access enables you to let someone else, such as an administrative assistant, access your Google Workspace account to send mail or manage calendar invitations and events on your behalf. Now, the person with delegate access can edit or delete your appointment schedules on your primary calendar. Select “Check calendars for availability”, which enables you to decide whether or not you want to check the availability of calendars added to the appointment schedule. Unchecking this setting means even if there is a conflict on one of the calendars, users will still be able to book that time. This may be useful if you want to prioritize incoming bookings over existing meetings. 

Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. End users: You cannot add groups or users outside of your domain as a co-host.Co-hosts are not able to see appointment schedule details or make changes. However, if the schedule was created on a shared calendar, the co-host will have access to see details or make changes.Bookings will be visible on the host and any additional co-hosts’ primary calendars.The “Check calendars for availability” feature will be ON by default and can be disabled by unselecting the “Check calendars for availability” box in the appointment schedule editor. Co-hosts calendars are not automatically checked for availability. You can select your co-host’s calendar in the “Check calendars for availability” section to have their availability considered (as long as you are subscribed to that calendar).Visit the Help Center to learn more about creating an appointment schedule and customizing your appointment availability.

Rollout pace 

Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on January 30, 2024 Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on February 12, 2024 

Availability

Co-hosts, secondary calendars and delegate access: 

Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Education Plus, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and Nonprofits Check Calendars for availability: 

Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Education Plus, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Nonprofits, Google Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts 

Resources 

Unsubscribe from emails on Gmail more easily 

We know managing unwanted emails is a source of frustration for many users. That’s why we announced new guidelines for bulk senders a few months ago to ensure users stay safe. Now, we’re introducing new ways to make it even easier to unsubscribe from unwanted emails in Gmail on web and mobile by:

Adding the unsubscribe button to the hover actions in the threadlist on web. When the unsubscribe button is clicked, Gmail sends a http request or an email to the sender to remove your email address from their mailing list. 

Moving the unsubscribe button from the three dot menu to appear more prominently in your email on your Android and iOS devices.

Today, we’re introducing Google Workspace’s new feature, local data storage. This feature allows admins to export their organization’s Workspace data into the geographic location or locations of their choice. These are the available options for this feature: 

User data: Specify users, groups, organizational units or your entire organization Export frequency: Opt for continuous or one-time exports Storage settings: Specify the geographic location of the Google Cloud storage bucket that the data is exported to, who can access the data, and more settings within the Google Cloud storage bucket.