Author: Chris

Teacher. Blogger. Podcaster. Asks way too many questions.
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What do you get with Workspace Plus?

“What do you get with Google Workspace for Education Plus, and is it worth paying for?”

It’s a good question, especially since there is a totally free version of Workspace called Fundamentals which any school can use at no cost. So it’s not surprising that schools would want to know exactly what comes with the Plus edition in order to decide whether it’s worth paying for the upgrade. Google does provide a comparison page that lists out what you get in each of their Workspace for Education editions, but I find it leaves out many of the finer details. Details that I think makes a difference, so in this post I am going to run through all the additional stuff you get in Workspace Plus, so you can decide if it’s worth it for your school. (Spoiler alert, I think it probably is!)

This post is a follow-on from my previous one about the history of Google Workspace, and how we got here. I think it’s useful to set the stage for what you’re about it read.

Can I start by acknowledging that there is a lot of stuff in the Plus edition that is directly relevant to the network admin people. These are mostly security and administration features that the end user never sees, but which are super important for operating the service effectively at enterprise scale. While the free Fundamentals edition is certainly secure and manageable for smaller organisations, as a network grows to the sort of scale and size found in education systems and large enterprises, you need more of what Plus provides.

The Plus edition comes with much more robust tools for investigating network issues, managing spam and phishing, monitoring threats and network health, providing virtual security sandboxing for email attachments , greater automations for groups management, Drive Trust Rules, Target Audiences, Context Aware Access policies, and much more. Basically Plus provides a ton of great stuff that makes the network people happy, and keeps the end users safe. Even when the value proposition of Plus was not as strong for end users as it is now, most school systems in Australia and New Zealand upgraded to Plus simply on the strength of the back-end security stuff.

Then of course there is additional storage. While Workspace historically provided unlimited storage at no cost, a few people found ways to exploit and abuse that, and there were some pretty ridiculous examples of storage abuse. As usual, the few spoil it for the many, so in 2022 Google changed to a pooled storage model, with each domain getting 100TB of total storage to be shared across all users in the domain. This new approach to storage limits abuse and works well for smaller organisations, but larger schools and school systems would probably want more. So Workspace Plus gives an additional 20GB of storage for each user on top of the standard 100TB. For large school systems or universities with tens, or even hundreds of thousands of students, Plus licencing scales up the available storage so everyone has enough. Additional storage is another reason that so many school systems moved to Plus.

There are other nice benefits that come with the Plus edition, like domain-wide Cloud Search and priority support, but let’s get down to the stuff that matters to end users.

One easy way to see the end-user differences between editions is to open up an account running Workspace Plus in one window, and an account running Workspace Fundamentals in another, and do a side by side comparison of what you get in each. Of course, you may not be able to do this if you don’t already have access to a Plus account, so that’s exactly what I’ve done for you here.

Google Classroom

The biggest differences between the free and paid editions of Workspace are with Google Classroom. In my opinion, the Classroom benefits alone make the Plus upgrade worth the price, but of course that will depend on how much your school uses Google Classroom. If Classroom is your main system for distributing and managing student work, then I think the extra features are really worthwhile. So let’s start there.

Initially, the only real difference in the paid version of Classroom was that Plus users got unlimited use of Originality Reports, whereas Fundamentals users were restricted to only five, but for many teachers five was enough. Workspace Plus still provides unlimited Originality Reports, but with the rise of generative AI I’m not sure how valuable it still is. Most plagiarism checkers are horribly inaccurate with GenAI content, so I suspect it might not be as helpful as it once was. However, there is a whole lot of other stuff to tilt the scales in favour of Plus.

Practice Sets are smart, AI assisted quizzes that can support student understanding, and can also include built-in assistance such as notes, URLs or videos that students are directed to if they need help. Students can also show their work or make notes that are kept with their responses. YouTube Quizzes provide the ability for teachers to insert questions (Multiple choice, checkbox or short answer) into a YouTube video to check for understanding. Both these resource types provide a detailed overview of student progress to the teacher, along with AI assisted insights

Read Along in particular provides great insights into student reading levels, and provides each student with a friendly cartoon AI tutor that will patiently listen to them read, offering guidance when they get stuck, and then give lots of really useful data to the teacher afterwards that includes insights into accuracy, comprehension, completion, speed, as well as the level of AI assistance offered. It also provides the teacher with a list of words that each student is having trouble with. And just last week, Google announced it was introducing the option for teachers to create custom books for students, so it should get even more interesting.

Classroom in Plus also provides analytics for each class that looks at assignment completion percentage, average mark, missing assignments and active student percentage. This data can be viewed by class, student or an OU group and provides easy to use data directly to class teachers.

One of the real annoyances for school leaders is having to belong to every class in the school just to have visibility into each class. This really clutters the Classroom home page, and has been a source of frustration from many school leaders. With Class Visits, all school, curriculum and year leaders can be provided with an easy way to drop in on a class without needing to be a permanent member of it. They can look into a class, or even an individual student’s progress, without the need to belong to every class in the school. Obviously, not everyone in the school will need access to this feature, so note that it does require some configuration by the administrator to allow access to only the appropriate people.

Add-Ons provide for the integration of other 3rd party edtech tools directly into Classroom. Some examples include Adobe Express, EdPuzzle, WeVideo, Read&Write, Sora and many others. Add-Ons may require additional licencing and admin setup, but the advantage is that they bring these tools directly into the Google Classroom workflow and grading experience, making them simpler to use.

Speaking of the grading experience, Workspace Plus also provides options for marking periods and marking scales. Marking Periods enable the creation of specific marking periods (eg, terms, semesters) to assign work to. Classroom Gradebook then calculates averages, etc, based on these marking periods. Marking Scales can support different marking systems besides just numeric values, which was always a bugbear for Australian schools, who generally preferred proficiency grading. Classroom in Plus now supports Proficiency, Letter Marks, 4 point scales and even creating your own custom marking scale. Cutoff grades are fully customisable.

The free version of Google Classroom allows for Guardian Summaries, which can automatically send parents or guardians a weekly email summarising their child’s progress, but the Plus edition of Classroom also provides Guardian Access, where guardians can be given access to a private login page so they can visit the Class themselves and see their own child’s work in context.

Finally, one of the most requested features for Classroom is available in the Plus edition – Class Groups.  Teachers can differentiate work for students by putting them into predetermined groups for the assignment of work. Once created, work can be assigned to these groups of students instead of having to assign work to students one by one.

Overall, there is a LOT of stuff in Classroom that make the Plus edition a valuable option for any school that relies of Google Classroom.

Google Vids

Google Vids is a brand new tool in the Google Workspace suite of tools. It’s a web-based, collaborative video editing tool that integrates with Google Drive, feels like Google Slides, and makes group video projects simple. Workspace Fundamentals did not offer anything for video editing so Vids is a really welcome addition, especially if you do a lot of media creation in your classroom.

I can’t really make a comparison between Plus and Fundamentals here, because Vids is a Plus only exclusive feature. I’ll do another post focused solely on Vids in the future, but just know that it’s yet another feature that makes Plus a compelling option for schools.

Google Docs

There are a handful of Workspace Plus-only features in Google Docs that, while seemingly small updates, add some really useful functionality to Docs.

The first of these is Document Approvals. If you’ve ever had to create an approval flow for a document, perhaps needing a policy to be signed off by several people for example, Document Approvals really saves some time. You can set up an approval chain for documents, send to specified receivers for their approval, and then have the document automatically lock from further changes once everyone signs off on them. It makes a sometimes clumsy process feel very easy and smooth. 

Labels require some setup by your administrator, but once setup they provide an easy way to tag documents based on their content. For example, a document could be labelled as Internal Only, or Confidential, or any other label the school agrees on or wants to enforce. These labels then work with the Data Loss Prevention security feature to prevent data leakage or documents going to the wrong people.

eSignatures are another Plus only feature that can streamline some of the common workflows in a school or business. Being able to embed e-signable fields into a Doc and then have it sent to the intended signer(s) as a PDF, all while tracking the process in one place can save hours of work.

Smart Chips and Building Blocks are automations built into Docs to help streamline workflows and integrate Docs with other parts of the Suite. While Fundamentals does support both Smart Chips and Building Blocks, the Plus edition provides even more options. There are Smart Chips for voting directly in a Doc, adding a Stopwatch or a Timer, or adding Variables to make the document way smarter. Likewise, although the free version of Workspace does have Building Blocks, the Plus edition introduces additional options for Code Blocks, Calendar Events, and Task Tracking. But perhaps more importantly the Plus edition allows for Customised Building Blocks so you can make your own. Imagine being able to drop an entire chunk of a template into a Document anywhere you want with a single keystroke. Super powerful stuff.

Finally, Tasks can assign any item in a checklist or task tracker building block to a person, along with a due date. This task then integrates directing with Google Tasks and Google Calendar. Assign a task to a person in a Doc, have it appear in their Calendar. Or on their task list. Cross it off as done in one place, and it instantly shows as completed everywhere. It’s like magic, and this integration across tools is a real strength of Workspace..

As you can see, you get quite a lot of additional stuff in the Plus edition of Google Docs, and most of this is not really covered in the official Google list of Plus features.

Google Slides

Slides also get Document Approvals and Labels, similar to Docs. Exact same kind of functionality, but in Slides. Slides in the Plus edition of Workspace also gets Slides Recordings and Speaker Spotlight, two related but different tools.

Slides Recordings is exactly what it says, the ability to record yourself giving a presentation. You can include your webcam, and then just press record to get a video of yourself presenting your Slides. This is something that I’ve seen many teachers do with their students in the past, although often requiring a few different software tools to make it happen, so to have it available in such a, integrated, simple and easy-to-use way is really nice. You can also make as many versions of the recording as you like, and they all sit along with the Slides.

Speaker Spotlight lets you add a video placeholder frame into your Slides, so that your webcam appears in the placeholder while in presentation mode. I can think of a few applications for this, but the best one would be if you want to show a live feed of your webcam (or a document camera) in the middle of a presentation, say, to show an object to the audience for example. You don’t need to come out of presentation mode, so it’s much cleaner.

One other thing I discovered is that you can add Speaker Spotlight placeholders into your Slides and when you record your presentation with Slides Recorder, your video feed will follow the placeholders from one slide to the next. Neat.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is probably where you’ll find the smallest difference between the free and paid versions, as Sheets has mostly the same features in both editions. However, the Plus version of Sheets, like that of Docs and Slides, also supports Document Approvals, which is great if you have those same kinds of approval workflows on your spreadsheets, and Labels, which is helpful to prevent data loss, and maybe especially useful with Sheets data.

Aside from that, the main difference in Plus for Sheets is Conditional Notifications. You have regular notifications in the free version of Sheets, but it can only really tell you when a generic change has been made to a sheet. Conditional Notifications let you be far more specific about any changes. You can set up triggers on specific cells, to look for specific changes, and then notify specific people. Right now, the triggers only look for cell changes, and can only alert with email, but I can see this is something that Google is likely to develop with even more granular control in the future.

Google Meet

Finally, Google Meet is the other tool where there is a huge difference between the free and paid versions, although with fewer schools needing to use video conferencing these days, I feel like schools might not be as compelled by the additional features as they were in the middle of a remote teaching emergency.

That said, if you do use video conferencing on a regular basis, the additional features in Meet in the Plus edition are nice. You get everything you’d expect in a modern video conferencing tool, like Breakout Rooms, Polling and Q&A. The Plus version of Meet also includes the ability to Record the meeting, optionally adding captions to the recording and a full transcript of everything that is said in the call. You can Live Stream the call, either to YouTube, or keep it within your domain only and store it on Drive. At the end of each call, you get an email containing any call assets you’ve asked for, like attendees, transcripts, and any activity data from polls or Q&A.

Both free and paid versions of Meet allow you to change your background, but only the paid versions has tools to enhance your video and audio, and touch-up your appearance in the call.

If you tried Meet back in the pandemic days and found it lacking compared to Zoom, you would have been right. Meet was missing a lot of important stuff in the beginning, stuff that Zoom had and Meet did not (and neither did MS Teams for that matter). These missing features included tools to prevent students from being in calls unattended, tools to prevent “zoom-bombing” by uninvited users, tools to manage how users were contributing with their camera and microphones, and just generally tools that should have been there to help you manage the call, especially when there were a bunch of creative teens trying to see what they could get away with. Meet was designed for adults who did not need to be managed like this, so none of these control and management features were there at the start, and that was a big part of why so many schools turned to Zoom at the time.

However, a lot has changed since then, and Meet has definitely been raised up to the standard that you’d expect. If you have not tried it lately (and especially if you’re still paying for Zoom) it might be time to take another look at Meet in Workspace Plus. (I also love the fact that it’s 100% web based, so nothing to install.)

Wrapping up

As you can see there is quite a big difference between the free Fundamentals version of Google Workspace for Education and the paid Plus version. Personally I think Plus is worth it, and on the rare occasion when I have to go back to a free version of Workspace, I definitely notice what’s missing.

And here’s one other thing that’s worth considering… many of these additional paid features do a similar job to other tools you’re probably paying for. As I already mentioned, Meet in the Plus edition does pretty much everything that the paid versions of Zoom does, so a school thinking about moving to Plus could probably partially pay for the upgrade simply by cancelling their Zoom subscription. But it goes further than that. YouTube Quizzes does a similar thing to EdPuzzle. eSignatures in Docs does a similar thing to Docusign. Originality Reports does a similar job to TurnItIn. Even some of the back-end admin security features have paid equivalents, but are included right inside Plus, and fully integrated into a single platform. By the time you add up the cost of all these third party tools, replacing them with a single Workspace Plus licence probably more than compensates for the cost of Plus.

The fact that these Plus features all come bundled into a single licence cost, covered by a single terms of service agreement, and a single privacy assessment, with a single point of contact for support; that to me seems to me like a really valuable idea.

Wow, that was a lot, but I’ve been meaning to write all this down in one place for a while. Hopefully you find it helpful to understand exactly what you do get with a Workspace Plus subscription. Hit me up in the comments if you have any questions, and if you have managed to read this far, thanks!

I also created a Google Doc that summarises a lot of this if you’re interested.

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The Journey from Google Apps to G Suite to Workspace Plus

Lots of educators use Google Workspace at their school, but many are unaware that Workspace comes in three different editions, each with a slightly (or substantially) different set of features. The three editions are Fundamentals, Standard and Plus. In a future post I want to unpack the additional features in the Plus edition of Workspace and explain what you get for your money that’s additional to the other editions.

Before we go there though, let’s have a quick history lesson to put this all into perspective. Google began providing cloud based software to users way back in 2004 with the release of Gmail. Two years later in 2006, they added a calendar and a beta version of an online word processor based on the acquisition of Writely, and which came to be known as Google Docs. They also added Google Spreadsheets (which would become simply Sheets) and Google Docs Presentations (which would become Google Slides) in 2006, and gradually kept adding tools to the suite. These were all still just standalone apps, but the release of Google Drive in 2012 really unified everything together as a “suite” with cloud storage. The suite, which had expanded over the years with other tools like Sites, Drawings, Forms, etc, became collectively known as Google Apps, and even offered a version that could be customised for use within an organisation, called Google Apps for your Domain. Catchy.

In 2016 it was renamed as G Suite, and was still a completely free product. Then in 2020, they renamed it again, now calling it Google Workspace, and started to offer different editions, with additional features, at an additional price.

The evolution from Google Apps to G Suite to Workspace

I was working at Google during this re-brand to Google Workspace for Education and the introduction of the paid editions of Workspace. Like any big change (and the move from being a free product to a paid product was a really big change!) it had some challenging moments. Users wanted to know what the additional benefits were, and why they should start paying for a product that they had been getting for free for so long. And in the beginning, I’m not sure that Google did a particularly great job of explaining the differences.

There were originally four different editions – one free and three paid – and the added complexity of having different versions where there used be only one, made it hard to differentiate them clearly. The Fundamentals Edition was the continuation of the free edition, and Google committed to retaining this free version of Workspace for any school that wanted to use it. The Standard Edition was the same as Fundamentals from the perspective of end users, but came with a bunch of back-end technical security and admin management features to excite the network admin folk. The Teaching and Learning Edition had none of those additional admin features, but came with some additional features for educators, mainly in Google Classroom and Google Meet. Finally, the Plus Edition had all the features of both the Standard and the Teaching and Learning Editions rolled into one, with some additional Drive storage as well.

From a user perspective, most of the value of the Plus Edition of Workspace revolved around the growing list of paid features in Classroom and Meet. The additional features in Meet, like recording, breakout rooms, security controls, etc were really important in 2020, when we were all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and so many schools were suddenly dealing with remote learning, but it became a much harder sell as schools returned to face to face teaching. (The fact that Google was “building the plane while flying it”, urgently adding new features to Meet in order to keep up with market-leader Zoom, wasn’t helping). Likewise, loading additional paid features into Google Classroom, which was never really designed to be a remote teaching solution but clearly emerged as one during the pandemic, felt a lot less relevant as schools returned to normal. And really, the feature you were paying for in Classroom – unlimited use of Originality Reports was hard to justify while free users could still use them in a slightly more limited way. And so as the sales teams at Google kept ramping up the message about the value of paying for Workspace Plus, the actually value proposition was becoming harder to justify as the need for these paid features, particularly in Google Meet, started to wane.

Now, that said, Google did eventually start to greatly broaden the value proposition for the paid editions by adding more additional features, while also got a lot better at explaining what that value proposition was. Gradually, education systems started to understand the additional features and benefits of the paid editions, and now most education systems in Australia and New Zealand are on board. Departments of Education in NSW, VIC, ACT, SA, NZ, most of the Catholic dioceses around Australia, and many, many independent and private schools are all now experiencing the benefits of Workspace Plus.

That said, I think it’s fair to say that if you asked the average teacher which version of Google Workspace they are using, they would not be able to tell you. And almost nobody can tell you what the differences between editions are, if indeed they even know that there are differences at all.

When people ask “what extra features do I get in the Plus edition?”, they can always go to this page where Google outlines the extra features. It’s somewhat useful, but I’ve never found this page entirely satisfying because it leaves out a lot of the smaller differences. Smaller differences that add up to a significantly larger difference.

With this preamble of a history lesson, my next post is going to take you through what those differences are, and lay out all the little extras that you get with Workspace for Education Plus. Stay tuned.

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Gemini for teenage users: What you should know

Last November Google announced that it was making its Gemini chat app available to students aged 13+. This means that while it’s still not for use by primary age students, it is, generally speaking, available to most high school students.

It’s worth pointing out that what users aged between 13 and 18 will get when using Gemini is different to what 18+, or adult, users will see. Google refers to this as the Gemini Teen Experience. I had a few questions about how to configure this in the Google Admin Console, but after a bit of playing around, I finally worked it out so thought I’d share it here for anyone else who might be trying to configure it.

The question I had was “how does Gemini know who is over 18 and who is over 13, and how does it deliver a different experience to them?” I was assuming that admins would need to somehow identify the 13+ year olds and put them into a special group or something. Turns out it’s simpler than that.

Before the announcement of the 13+ teen experience in Gemini, the age limit to use Gemini was 18, and it was a pretty binary choice. You were either over 18 or under 18. If the school admin had marked you as under 18, you got no access to Gemini at all. Going to gemini.google.com would bring you to this page.

If you were 18 or over and went to gemini.google.com you would of course have full access to Gemini chat as expected.

It’s worth pointing out how Google designates users as either over or under 18. In the admin console there is a setting called Age Based Access Settings. In these settings the administrator must identify with Organisational Units (OUs) which contain Under 18 users. As you can see in the screenshot below, while most users in this domain have been marked as 18+, the Students OU has been overridden to indicate that Some or all users in this group or org unit are under 18.

What if an admin has not set this up? Google got pretty serious about this age based setting a while ago and warned all domain admins that if they had not gone into the console and completed these age based settings OUs by a certain date, then ALL users in the domain would be marked as under 18 by default. This would obviously annoy a lot of people, so I would think that most school admins dealt with this and applied these age based setting to the correct groups or OUs.

So, the system now knows who is over 18 and who isn’t. But how do you deal with the students that are over 13 but under 18?

If a school has their OU structure set up correctly, students are usually placed into OUs based on their year groups. As you can see in the screenshot above, there is an OU structure, such as My school > Students > Year 6. All student users in that OU are students in Year 6 (and would, for the most part be under 13). Likewise, the students in the Year 7 and 8 OUs would mostly contain students that are 13 and over. (There will no doubt be some students in a year group who are 12 and some who are 13, but the reality is that most schools will probably decide the cutoff based on a year level, so it’ll be Year 7 and up, or Year 8 and up)

When Google introduced the Gemini Teen Experience they enabled a version of Gemini for Under 18 users that has “guard rails” in place for teen users, and the model has been trained to respond carefully to sensitive topics. With the changes last November it seems that ALL under 18 users get access to this teen experience, including 13 and under.

So admins really need to go to the Gemini access setting and explicitly turn off Gemini for the users under 13.

By going to Generative AI > Gemini App > Service Status, the administrator is able to explicitly turn Gemini off for individual OUs. So, if you only want high school students to have access, you make sure that Service Status is On for the Year 7 (and above) OUs and Off for the Year 6 (and below) OUs.

This means that for Year 6 students and below, Gemini is completely off.

For Year 7 students and above, Gemini is on, but using the protected teen experience.

And for anyone over 18, they get the full unrestricted Gemini experience.

So what does this teen experience mean for those users marked as over 13 but under 18? Here’s a couple of examples that teen students might see when they ask some of those typically teen questions that need to be answered with care.

Responding to a question about how to buy alcohol, Gemini’s answers acknowledge that this person is under 18. It flags a warning at the top of the page that warns about the danger and illegality of this idea. It talks about the legal and health issues associated with alcohol. It suggests that the student talks to a trusted adult such as a parent, teacher or doctor. And it provides links to police, health and liquor law websites.

Interestingly, when I ask Gemini the same question as an adult, over 18 user, I get an even more restrictive answer and Gemini refuses to cooperate at all, citing the fact that it cannot verify my age, and therefore is not allowed to provide such information. When pushed, it goes on to explain why, but still insists that it is not able to help me further.

While I was initially surprised at the response to the 18+ user, I think the answer for the teen user was pretty appropriate, with some generally good advice, and some sound reasoning as to why they should not be buying alcohol in the first place.

In a second example, I asked Gemini whether I should get a neck tattoo. The response specifically noted that there were a lot of things to consider, especially since I was under 18. It warned that in most places you need to be over 18 to get a tattoo, and then listed a bunch of reasons why this may not be a good idea for someone of this age. Overall, I liked the way Gemini gave some sound reasoning of things to consider before getting a neck tattoo, but did it in a way that was not too preachy. Overall, it seemed like good advice to a teen, with a clear undertone of “I’m not telling you you can’t, but I’m definitely suggesting it’s a bad idea”.

If you have access to a teacher and student account (and they have been set up correctly) it’s interesting to set them up side by side and ask the same questions of both versions of Gemini to see what kinds of answers you get. Try some typically sensitive teen topics and see how Gemini generally responds to these teen prompts. You’ll see that it often suggests that they talk to a trusted adult, that they seek advice, that they avoid illegalities, that they don’t make decisions they will regret later, and so on.

As well as having these guard rails in place, you’ll also see that Gemini adds a red visual alert to the top of the page if posts contain dangerous, illegal or inappropriate topics.

Finally, image generation is completely disabled for teens. While there are lots of great uses for image generation in Gemini, the potential for student abuse is still a little risky, so the image generation feature is not available to teen users.

Overall, the Teen Experience in Gemini is a welcome way to allow schools to give their students access to a Generative AI model, while also keeping some important protections in place. You just need to ensure that it is set up correctly for your school situation in order to ensure that students are getting the right experiences for their age.

To learn more, you can check out the official Google support page, or this excellent resource from the team at Amplified Labs. Let me know what you think of the Gemini Teen Experience!