 Hi, I'm Helen Zhou, a Google Product Manager working to make Chromebooks the best devices for teachers, students, and admins. I'm here today to give you a glimpse into the world of education and to share how what you build matters. I want you to think back to when you were in high school. If you're anything like me, you'll probably remember having a bunch of textbooks, each of which weighed a couple pounds and made your backpack super heavy. Homework also was pretty boring. I used to remember putting candy at the end of each paragraph just to get myself to keep reading. And the curriculum was static. Sometimes the only way to learn something was to read that same content over and over again. Now, if you step into many classrooms, you'll notice that things have transformed. Those same textbooks are still there, but collecting dust in a corner. In the meantime, every student has a Chromebook and is using it to search, explore, collaborate, and learn. I've seen students sing to their laptops for music class or program robots to race each other. I've seen teachers explain topics with 3D models and students excitedly point to each other's screens as they work together. Learning is fun, dynamic, and engaging. This is all possible because developers like yourselves are out there building great tools and leading the change. This evolution in the way that we teach and learn, powered by the evolution in technology, is exactly what makes me so excited to be working at Google and excited to be here talking to all of you. Today, we'll cover the evolution of tech in the classroom, what we at Google are doing in this space, and tools that you can use for optimizing and integrating with Google for Education products. All this to make learning more fun and more accessible worldwide. So, let's dive in. The role that devices play in education is so different from what it was before. For anyone who was in school maybe two decades ago, you might remember computer labs, where you'd go for some typing practice or maybe a test, but otherwise rely on textbooks and static content. Or for those of you in school 10 years ago, you might remember metal carts that got wheeled around in different classrooms, and inside those carts were shared devices that you could borrow for a class period to do a research assignment or work on a paper. It wasn't a very personalized experience, and it definitely didn't feel like it was your device. Now we see that in many countries like the U.S., Japan, and Sweden, schools have moved to a one-to-one model. What this means is that in many schools in those countries, each student gets assigned a laptop, like a Chromebook, at the beginning of the year, and that laptop stays with them throughout all of their classes and with them when they go home. To get a more concrete example, let's hop over to Ben's school district in Illinois. Ben has worked in education for over 20 years, and he's seen how tech has evolved from merely replacing paper with digital into redefining how to teach and learn. His district moved to one-to-one devices about 10 years ago because they saw an opportunity to make education more personalized and more equitable. His district chose Chromebooks because those devices are flexible enough for kindergarteners to draw with and powerful enough for high schoolers to run science programs. Teachers are also trained to use tech to make learning more personal in the classroom. If you visit one of the classrooms in Ben's district, you'll see students split up into smaller groups based off of learning speeds and getting differentiated instruction. One group of students might be working on an immersive reading app to practice vocabulary, and another might be working to create a commercial of a book using Google Slides, screencasting, and cartoon tools. Finally, once the school day ends, these devices go home with the students, where they get to benefit from having access to a device with a keyboard at home. This trend towards using technology and education was already becoming mainstream, and the pandemic accelerated that. That's why in the last year or two, we've been able to reach over 50 million students on Chromebooks and 170 million using Google Workspace for Education, which includes Google Classroom. And what this means for you is that there is an opportunity to reach millions of users by building for education. If you're wondering where to start, I'm going to share a couple examples of products that we at Google are building and education. Hopefully, some of the themes that emerge might spark some ideas for you. In the adaptive learning space, we built Practice Sets, which leverages AI to help teachers create formative assessments for students to practice problems and access helpful tooltips to get themselves unstuck. To make education accessible for everyone, we just launched Reading Mode for Chrome Browser, which lets you read text out loud and lets readers adjust the font, color, and sizing of text to suit their own preferences and needs. We also recognize that folks are accessing content from a variety of contexts. So to help support those still learning in a remote or hybrid environment, we continue to make improvements to video conferencing with features like live captions and background noise cancellation. And to help with the return to classroom, we created Cast Moderator to enable teachers and students to wirelessly cast their screen to the front of the classroom. One that I'm really excited to share is Screencast. Screencast captures so many of the themes in edtech around the rise in video, the need for personalized learning, and the power of encouraging students to create. It works as a built-in screen recording tool that comes with every Chromebook starting with version M103. Teachers and students can annotate, get automatic transcriptions, and share screen recordings with other people at school. We also recently announced how to make Screencast useful for more people around the world. We use a mix of on-device and cloud-based transcription so that users can record in multiple languages. To me, Screencast captures the power of technology to make learning richer and more accessible. When I was chatting with a teacher recently about her use of Screencast, she shared how she has students record Screencast's for Parent, Guardian, Teacher Conference Day. Because of the power of automatic transcription and translation, Screencast enables her to reach parents who are non-native English speakers and give those parents a chance to understand what their kids are learning in the classroom. It's truly been a game changer for her. I hope that gave you some ideas on what you can do in the education space. Now you might be wondering, how does an app actually get chosen and shared with students? Unlike consumers, students aren't downloading their own apps off the Play Store. Instead, school leaders choose apps for the students. Teachers or curriculum leaders find applications that solve some need in the classroom. And then, the IT admin reviews them to make sure that they're safe to use. The IT admin can then deploy those apps to specific groups of students and teachers through Google Admin Console. That way, those apps get automatically installed. So by the time a student signs in, they can see all of the apps on their device. Plus, admins can specify which apps get pinned to the shelf so that common apps are easy for students to find. Another way that students access apps is through Google Classroom. Teachers and students use Google Classroom to share coursework and assignments. Often, you'll see students go into Google Classroom to figure out what assignments they might have due in a day and to communicate with their teachers or students. When a student signs into Google Classroom, they can see an overview of their classes. And within each class, see the relevant resources, whether a worksheet, a video, or a link to another resource in another app. Now that you've seen some examples of what Google has been building in the education space, let's move on to what it takes for you to be integrated and be used by teachers, admins, and students. I'm gonna pass to my colleague, James, who will go into more details about the tools that you can use. Hello, as Helen said, my name is James and I'm a Developer Relations Engineering Manager at Google. Today, I'd like to talk about the Google for Education ecosystem. Here are the tools we're building to make your lives easier. I'm going to cover three ways you can integrate. First, classroom add-ons. Then, licensing management. And finally, we'll discuss the classroom API. I'll show you how to use Apps Script to bring a teacher's course list into Google Sheets. Google Classroom add-ons is a new feature that allows educators to bring their favorite content, activities, and lessons from top ed tech tools right inside Classroom. As a developer, you can integrate your learning tool with Classroom using the add-ons API. Note, while individual add-on availability may vary by region or language, the add-ons feature will be available worldwide to Google Classroom users with the Google Workspace for Education Plus Edition or Teaching and Learning Upgrade. To make it easy for your add-on to be discovered and installed, we have a Works with Classroom filter in Google Workspace Marketplace. Once an admin sets up an add-on, a teacher can find it within Classroom and get logged in with just a few clicks. Teachers can seamlessly browse and assign Classroom add-ons directly within an assignment, meeting teachers where they are in their workflow. Add-ons use Sign-in with Google so teachers and students who have signed into Classroom can seamlessly sign in to your add-on with the same secure login, removing the need to remember multiple passwords. Add-ons may provide features to teachers such as the ability to review student work, see grades, see student performance insights, or even give student feedback, all within Classroom. There are two Classroom add-ons that I would like to share with you today. The first add-on I will highlight today is the Adobe Express add-on. This add-on empowers students to demonstrate their learning in more creative, visually appealing ways. Adobe Express is a fun, easy, and engaging tool that students can use to create posters, infographics, webpages, videos, and more. Ben Forta, Senior Director Education Initiatives at Adobe, shared how integrating with Google Workspace Ecosystem is crucial to reducing barriers to entry and unlocking creativity across grades and subjects. The second add-on is the Pear Deck for Classroom add-on. Educators can transform presentations into classroom conversations and create powerful learning moments for every student every day. For example, creating powerful formative assessments and active learning experiences with the Pear Deck add-on is as easy as one, two, three. Max Kirsch, General Manager, Learning and Engagement at GoGuardian, had shared their experience in partnering with Google to build product integrations is a smart way to drive growth. Interested in creating a classroom add-on? Express your interest via our form. Check out the link on the screen or video description below. Another tool we've built is the app licensing program. School admins are often purchasing app licenses in bulk, sometimes requiring tens of thousands of licenses, which can make it difficult to deploy the right students and teachers. This is also challenging for developers who then have to maintain some way to make sure the right students get access to the right licenses. The app licensing program solves these challenges by making it possible for schools to directly provision licenses in Google Admin Console. What this means is that if an IT admin wants to deploy a specific app only to their 11th grade class, they can do so using Google Admin Console. All they need to do is buy the licenses from the developers, redeem them in Google Admin Console, and flip a switch for their 11th graders. Then boom, every student in that grade has access. This has made developers' lives easier too. For example, Squid is a popular Android-based note-taking app that was already popular in schools and is optimized to run on Chrome OS. But they faced a variety of challenges when it came to helping admins get the app set up for the right set of students and teachers. Andrew, founder of the popular note-taking app, Squid, shared that the app licensing program solved the long-standing need. He said, in addition to making schools happy, the app licensing program helps us by not having to build a front end to support managing licenses and giving users the ability to automatically get a license using their school Google account. Or as another example, in 2022, Figma, a popular design tool made for the web, wasn't being used in K-12 education at all. Their team wasn't sure how to get their tools into schools. But thanks to the app licensing program, they were able to quickly build an end-to-end integration with just a few hours of development work and make themselves available for deployment by school administrators. Lauren, head of Figma for Education, shared, we couldn't recommend the experience enough. Without the app licensing program, Figma for EDU and our mission to make design accessible to every student in the world would have been stuck in an endless loop of maybe next quarter. The app licensing program has been in an early access period over the last year. We'll have more updates to share soon. So check out the link in the video description for the latest information. Next, I'll talk about the Google Classroom API. The Google Classroom API provides a rich feature set that can be used by developers to provide student, teacher, and administrator value. A student information system, CIS, is one of the key operational systems in schools that create value for users. CIS are used to manage enrollment, create student and teacher schedules, manage attendance, grades, behavior, and more. There are two primary types of value a CIS can offer with Google Classroom, roster import and grade export. Let's discuss a few ways CIS integrations can leverage the Classroom API to enable value for IT administrators and education leaders. Classes and class rosters may be imported directly into Classroom, which can help eliminate manual work for teachers while scaling operations. Automate access controls, including making sure only specific staff can access students they work with. Automate parent and guardian account management so parents and guardians can access your tools as needed. Assignment and grade export from Classroom to a third party CIS to reduce friction between systems. I'm going to take a moment to give you a quick overview of an example application using the Apps Script, Google Sheets and Google Classroom APIs together. In this example application, we'll fetch the course list of the signed in user and render it to the active spreadsheet. First, we add the Classroom API as a service to the Apps Script project. It's so simple to do, just a few clicks and you're done. Now we can begin to code. We'll start by establishing a reference to the spreadsheet we want to modify. Apps Script provides the spreadsheet app class, making it very easy to use Sheets API from within the Apps Script. Next, we'll set up error handling before making Classroom API requests. In practice, you'll configure error handling in a way that meets the needs of your application. Here, I'll just log to the console any error message we may receive. Finally, we'll use the Classroom API to retrieve the course list. The list returned will be dependent on the user executing the script. Once the list has returned, we'll use the Sheets API to append the list directly to the sheet, row by row. That's it, you're ready to run the script. Ta-da, your spreadsheet is now updated with your course list. And that's just the beginning. Imagine the possibilities you can achieve using Classroom and other workspace APIs in education. Now, I'll pass it back to Helen. Wow, that was so easy to use. Thanks for sharing, James. Now, let's move on to talk about another aspect of designing an app for education, considering which platform you want to build your app on. Progressive web apps are our recommended way to build for the modern classroom. PWAs allow you to reach a wide user base across any device with powerful capabilities like file system access and push notifications, all from a single code base. From video conferencing apps, audio, video and photo editing tools, fully featured IDEs and coding environments, you can build a diverse set of education software all on the web, and you can even have them work offline. PWAs are also versatile because they can be accessed through the browser or installed and opened in a standalone experience. Code Academy, for example, whipped up their PWA in under a month and they have seen that users accessing their coding content via the PWA are twice as engaged as those who enter on the browser. Across the industry, we've seen an increased investment in the web with developers who previously relied on Chrome apps or native apps migrating to a web app instead to improve their reach, reduce development costs, and still support a rich user experience. To find out more specifics, check out web.dev.pwa. Another option to build is an extension. Extensions are still the most popular type of application being used in education today. They work best when you're trying to add to or enhance the web experience. For example, TextHelp offers a popular extension called Read&Write. Read&Write is a literacy support and accessibility tool that offers help with everyday tasks like reading text out loud, understanding unfamiliar words, researching assignments, and proofing written work. If you're already building an extension, you'll be excited to learn that we have introduced some new changes to Manifest V3 to support longer service workers. To find out more about extensions, be sure to check out the IOTalk on Chrome extensions linked in this description below. Finally, Android apps continue to be a widespread way for developers to build for mobile and computer form factors. If you already have a mobile app, you'll be pleased to hear that Chrome OS supports Android applications, such as top video editor, LumaFusion. Developers using Unity to build rich immersive education tools will also be happy to know that there are easy build options for Chrome OS right in the editor that will help you get the best performance. There are some tweaks we recommend to make sure that your app runs smoothly on a Chromebook. You can take advantage of built-in libraries to improve stylus inputs, or test that your app works well with a keyboard and mouse. That being said, Android apps do tend to be more resource intensive and require enabling Google Play. So it's important to note that many schools don't install Android apps on school managed Chromebooks today. For other helpful tips on ways to optimize your app for the classroom, check out the link on the screen or the video description below. There, you'll find resources recommending ways to improve compatibility with content filtering products and how to use Google Drive effectively, as well as many more details on what we've discussed in this talk. To conclude, I ask Ben if there was one thing that he could share with developers, what would it be? His answer, build for students. Even though Ben is an IT admin and spends most of his time worrying about technical issues, what he cares most about at the end of the day is making that student experience more fulfilling and more equitable. That's the reason that I'm here too, and hopefully the reason you'll want to join us. So as you're considering what ideas you might want to bring to education, keep in mind that end user, the teachers that we're thankful for and the students we want to inspire. We at Google are committed to continuing to innovate in this space, and we're excited to work alongside you to transform teaching and learning for everyone. If you want to find out more, please check out the resources we have on ChromeOS.dev and developers.google.com in the video description below. You can also stay on the latest updates by joining the newsletters. Thanks for joining. That's all for today. Bye.