How to forward emails in FUHSD Gmail accounts

Teachers who are using Google Classroom know that all Classroom notifications and announcements go to students' FUHSD Gmail accounts. This year, student's School Loop contact email is also their FUHSD Gmail account. Unfortunately, not all students check their FUHSD Gmail regularly and may miss important teacher communications. There are a few ways around this. Students can either forward all their FUHSD email to a personal email account, or set up a filter to forward just certain emails.

Here's how to do both. First, add a forwarding address in Gmail. Go to settings by clicking the gear icon and choosing Settings.

 Click the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" and choose "Add a forwarding address".

Once you've added the email address, a verification message will be sent to the email address you've added. Click the link in the email to verify the new address.

To FORWARD ALL EMAILS, go back to Settings --> Forwarding and select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to". You can choose how to deal with the original emails (best choice is to either keep in the Inbox or to mark copy as read). Click "save changes" and you're done!

If you want to just forward certain emails, you can set up a filter. Click on "create a filter" from the Forwarding tab, or go directly to the Filters tab to do the same. You can filter emails based on criteria like sender, content or subject line. 

Once you've chosen your filter criteria, you can specify what to do with emails that meet those criteria. For this purpose, choose "forward it to" and then select the email address you've added. You can also use this same feature for other actions (like starring emails from specific people or automatically archiving emails on a certain topic). 

Voting using Google Classroom

Google Classroom recently added a small but useful function to its Question feature. In the past, students have been able to give short answers to teacher-posed questions, which could be private responses, or which other students could either see or see and respond. Classroom now gives your the ability to have multiple choice questions --again, where students can either see a summary of responses or where only the teacher can collect answers. This could be a great means for quick classwide formative assessments, but it's likely that many teachers will also deploy this feature as a fast means for taking a class vote.

The Explore tool in G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Education)

At the end of September, Google Apps for Education underwent a change of name to become G Suite for Education. This was mostly a marketing change but there's one notable addition and subtraction in Google Docs, Slides and Sheets. In the lower right corner of any Doc, Slides or Sheet document you'll see the Explore icon (you can also get to there in Docs and Slides through the Tools menu).

Explore opens a sidebar with Google search capability, which allows you to search the web, find and add images, and search your own Drive without leaving the document. In Slides and Sheets, the Explore tool will also make recommendations on design or formatting based on content. In Sheets, you can even use the tool to create formulas and charts or other data visualization.

Unfortunately, the addition of Explore is tempered by the loss of the Research Tool, which had similar functionality in Google Docs but also included the ability to add citations and footnotes directly into a doc. Since it's early days yet, the citation tool may be revived in the future.