Google Meet Features Expanding!

This week Google is rolling out several new features for their Enterprise for Education customers. These much awaited features include Breakout rooms and Google Meet Attendance. To learn more about the updated features coming to Google Meet, check out this 30 minute webinar.

If you want to jump into Breakout rooms, check out this guide from Google. It outlines how to create Breakout rooms, join/edit rooms, leave rooms, and end the rooms.

Google Meet attendance is also slowly rolling out to our staff. Google launched this resource last week, then paused the rollout to address some bugs. Over the past week, our staff have been noticing this feature becoming active in their meets. If you don't have it yet, don't worry! It is on its way. Attendance will work automatically for any Meet with more than five participants. To learn more about how Attendance works in Google Meet, check out this post from Google. Please be aware, if you have an extension that does attendance in your Meet, you may want to disable the extension. We find that once Google rolls out a feature to their program it breaks extensions that do the same task.

Finally, Google is adding Polling and Q & A features to your Meets. This will allow you to make your Meets more interactive without having to send your students off to a separate platform. Check out this post on "5 tips for more interactive meetings with Q&A and Polls, rolling out to Google Meet" to learn more.

Google Docs: Fonts for Early Elementary

Sample of search results from fonts.google.com A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in a training with a bunch of my favorite lower elementary teacher friends, and several of them were lamenting the fact that it is hard to find "good" Google fonts for the little people they work with on a daily basis. Specifically, it is a challenge to find the single story lower case a and the open 4 . This conversation, of course, sent me out on a mission to remedy this for these fantastic people. So, the next day I put on my headphones, turned up the tunes on Spotify, and dived into the website fonts.google.com . This website lists all the Google fonts available. It also allows you to type in your own letters and numbers and see them in all the various fonts. For my purpose, I typed in "abckgy 1234 This is the font." From here I could see all 877 fonts, and look specifically for the a and the 4. It was quite an adventure, and I came across a lot of really awesome font

It's time to change your password!

There are several times a year when it is important to change your password. Your password will expire every 90 days. When your windows computer informs you that your password will be expiring soon, CHANGE IT THEN! It is also always a good idea to change your password before going on break so that you do not get locked out of your computer, email or gradebook. Here is how you change your password from the school windows computers. On your Windows desktop/TEC computer , press the Alt, Ctrl and Delete buttons at the same time. Click on "Change a Password" on the menu below: Enter your username, if needed, and follow the directions on screen. If you are off site or working solely on a Chromebook , you can use the VDI (Virtual Desktop) to change your password. Simply go to vdi.portageps.org. Click "VMware Horizon HTML Access." Click "Accept." Login with your portage username (leave off the @portageps.org) and password. Click "Login." Cli

Skyward Tech Tip: Unlocking a Closed Grade Period

Have you recently attempted to change a grade from last quarter only to be met with the statement “ This Grade Period is closed for Grade Entry “? This occurs because the date for the end of a marking period or quarter has past and that grading period has been locked in the Skyward Gradebook. Below you will find the process for changing term grades, assignment scores, and other information from past grading periods. Google Docs Version Go to your gradebook Let’s start with the gradebook for the class where you need to make a change. In this example, we will be adding a score to a missing assignment and removing the incomplete grade from the quarter grade. (Note: The process to open or unlock the gradebook is the same regardless the change you need to make.) This change will be made for marking period three, Q3. In that marking period column, click on the “Options” dropdown button. From the Options dropdown, choose “Grade Posting Status for Term QX”, whe

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