New controls to keep students and educators safer online

Editor’s note: This week we’re joining thousands of educators and students at BETT in London, Europe’s biggest educational technology exhibition. Visit us at Booth SJ20, where you can check out new Chromebooks and features in Google Workspace for Education. Follow along on X and Facebook for the latest updates.

Keeping students and educators safe online is no small task, and often the responsibility falls on just a few IT administrators with limited time and resources. While no technology can completely eliminate your risk, significant new controls across Google Workspace for Education and Chromebooks can help create even safer learning environments.

More granular controls in Google Workspace for Education

It’s now easier to protect your school's digital environment with new controls over data access and sharing. These new features provide administrators with more precise ways to manage third-party apps, Google Forms sharing and response permissions while strengthening security and maintaining data integrity. Here’s what’s new:

• Get more control over third-party app approvals: Admins can now control their third-party app policies using organizational units, derive user-level insights using Admin console reporting and enable educators to request app access on behalf of students.
• Enforce sharing and responding policies in Google Forms: Reduce the risk of data theft by enforcing additional Drive sharing policies on Google Forms. With this launch, admins will now have additional controls over whether users in their domain can respond to or share forms that belong to external domains. Form creators can limit response access to specific users, groups or target audiences.
• Request eSignature for PDFs: Electronically request secure eSignatures right from within Google Docs and PDFs stored in Drive. eSignature is compliant with many industry regulations, including HIPAA, GDPR and more, making it a great replacement for other costly eSignature point solutions.

Enhanced management capabilities for Chromebooks

We’re always looking to improve the Google Admin console to be easier to use, so admins can manage their hundreds — or hundreds of thousands — of devices. All of these features are available with Chrome Education Upgrade:

• Let students take their achievements with them with Content transfer: Students create years of essays, presentations and projects throughout their academic careers. Content transfer is a simple new way for students to take their work with them when they graduate or move schools. Admins can easily start the process by notifying students to select which accounts, files and other data they want to migrate from their institution-provided account to any consumer account they choose. Learn more about content transfer in our Help Center and make sure it’s set up for the end of the school year.
• Manage time spent on Chromebooks outside of school: As more schools send devices home after school hours, admins have asked for additional ways to manage how much time is spent on devices. While admins can allow students to use their personal accounts on school-managed devices with the Off Hours policy, they’ve asked to have the ability to limit any use of the device during certain time periods. Device Restriction Schedule, a new ChromeOS device policy, will soon be available in the Admin console to control when school Chromebooks can be logged into at home.
• Get insights about your devices: IT admins can get all the info they need about their fleet in the central Device Hub in Google Admin console. The Hub also provides proactive alerts based on potential problems to make fleet management easier.
• Easily find policies and devices in the Google Admin console: WIth over 1,000 policies in Google Admin console to manage your Chromebook fleet, finding the right one can be time-consuming. Our new simplified filtering for policies helps you quickly get up-to-date on new feature releases and the most popular settings. And coming soon, you'll be able to use natural language to find the exact policy you need by providing machine learning-ranked results based on your intent. We're also using these ranked-results to display related settings when configuring most policies, helping you ensure comprehensive policy coverage with AI-powered recommendations. Natural language search will also be available for the device list, automatically applying relevant filters to streamline querying within your fleet.
• New enhancements to ChromeOS Flex: Deploying ChromeOS Flex is now easier with the addition of Auto Enrollment, a feature that automatically enrolls the device to your school domain after ChromeOS Flex installation. ChromeOS Flex can also receive direct firmware updates to ensure devices stay current with the latest security patches and functionality enhancements. We’re continuing to invest in ChromeOS Flex as a secure, easy-to-manage, and sustainable solution for educators.

To learn more about these updates, and all of the Google for Education announcements made at BETT, check out our launch guide.