Getting started

Last year, we introduced Read Along in Google Classroom, a new feature that helps students build their independent reading skills by enabling teachers to assign differentiated reading content, based on Lexile® measure, grade level, or phonics skills. 

Read Along in Classroom includes access to a growing library of decodable books from Heggerty that educators can assign to practice specific decoding skills. To improve upon the current analytics dashboard experience and provide teachers with phonics-based performance insights for decodable books, we’re adding a new analysis section. 

With this update, teachers will see details about how a student or class is performing on the individual phonics skills listed in a decodable book and words that need practice. 

• Admins: 
• Existing Workspace Customers (those who signed up for Workspace for Education before July 7, 2024): Read Along in Classroom will be available to all Google Workspace for Education customers as a service that will be covered under the Workspace for Education Terms of Service. You can enable Read Along in the Admin Console for users in your domain to access this service. Visit the Help Center to learn more about turning Read Along on or off for users. 
• For new Workspace Customers (those who sign up for Workspace for Education on or after July 7, 2024): Read Along will be automatically enabled in the console, and all eligible users will have direct access to it. Visit the Help Center to learn how to turn Google Read Along on or off for users. 
• End users: The phonics analysis dashboard will only appear for newly created decodable book assignments. This can be accessed by clicking on the assignment name in the “Grades” section of Google Classroom. Existing assignments will keep on showing the data as earlier. Visit the Help Center to learn more about Read Along in Google Classroom. 

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Available now.

Available for Google Workspace: 

• Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning add-on 

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Turn Google Read Along on or off for users 
• Google Help: Read Along in Google Classroom

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

Resources

Google offers a wide variety of APIs that Google Apps Script developers can use to build features for Google users. The data access that these APIs can reference is governed by the OAuth scopes of each Workspace application, which users are required to authorize before a script can run. Historically, the OAuth consent screen has asked the user to authorize all of the necessary OAuth scopes to run a given script. 

Starting today, the OAuth consent screen will now let users specify which individual OAuth scopes they would like to authorize. For example, if a script requests access to a user’s Sheets and Forms files, and the users only intends to use the script with Sheets files, they can decide to only allow access to their spreadsheets and not their forms. This affords users the benefit of more granular control over what data their 3P applications are allowed to access.

To complement the release of this new consent flow, we’re also adding methods to the ScriptApp and AuthorizationInfo classes that let Apps Script developers programmatically interact with the scopes granted for a script. Refer to the developer documentation for more information.

After a user grants permission to a script, Apps Script might request OAuth consent again in the following cases: 

• The user, who has granted consent to a subset of the requested OAuth scopes, tries to run a part of the script that was not previously authorized. 
• The script is updated in such a way that it requires permission for additional scopes. 
• The user revoked access to the script from their Google Account settings.

All past execution failures will be logged in the execution history. Each OAuth failure will contain a hyperlink that users can use to provide the permissions that were missing. 

• Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. 
• Developers and end users: 
• Granular OAuth consent is only available for scripts that have finished migrating to the V8 runtime. If you would like to utilize granular consent on one of the few remaining Rhino scripts, you can manually migrate to V8 by following these instructions.
• This new consent screen will only be used for new OAuth scope grants. Pre-existing scope grants will not be affected, so no action is required by users on scripts they’ve already authorized. 
• The new consent screen will be launched first to the Apps Script IDE (i.e. executing a script directly from Apps Script). The consent screen will launch to the remaining surfaces in the future: 
• Google Ads Script
• Macro executions 
• Trigger executions 
• Web app executions 
• API Executions 
• Chat apps
• Add-ons 

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on January 8, 2025, with expected completion by January 24, 2025 

• Available to all Google Workspace customers and Workspace Individual Subscribers

Resources

Earlier this year, we introduced the ability to use Gemini in Google Drive to interact with PDFs. To improve your viewing experience when reviewing PDFs from Drive, we’re excited to announce that Gemini in the side panel of Drive is now integrated into Drive’s overlay file previewer. 

As a result, you can seamlessly switch between multiple files while leveraging AI capabilities using Gemini in Drive to do things like: 

• Get a quick overview of long, complicated PDFs 
• Use PDF contents to make something new, like a study guide or an email draft 
• Summarize files in @-folder

Getting started 

• Admins: To access Gemini in the side panel of Workspace apps, users need to have smart features and personalization turned on. Admins can turn on default personalization setting for their users in the Admin console. 
• End users:
• To access this feature, double-click on a PDF from the Google Drive file list and click on “Ask Gemini” (star button) in the top right corner. 
• Note: When Gemini initially launched in Workspace, PDFs viewed in Drive opened in a new browser tab to allow interaction with the Gemini side panel. With this update, the default behavior will open a file in the overlay file previewer. If you prefer for PDFs to open in a new tab by default, you can update your PDF opening default behavior in your Drive settings. If you previously set a preferred PDF opening default behavior in your Drive setting, your default open behavior will remain the same. 
• Visit the Help Center to learn more about using Gemini in Drive to work with PDFs. 

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on January 9, 2025 

Available for Google Workspace customers with these add-ons: 

• Gemini Business 
• Gemini Enterprise 
• Gemini Education 
• Gemini Education Premium 
• Google One AI Premium 

• Google Help: Use Gemini in Drive to work with PDFs