Posted by Jack Fermon, Technical Program Manager, Google for Education

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

Educators across Latin America are changing what it means to “go to school” by introducing new learning models that prepare their students for real-world problems. Inspired by their ambitious goals and innovative approaches, we’re highlighting a few ways that schools in the region have made strides with the support of technology, including Google Apps for Education.

Building the groundwork for equal access
The Municipality of Vicente Lopez (MVL) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, created a program to give all students the same access to technology, regardless of socioeconomic background. All students and teachers use Google Drive to share worksheets and presentations, provide immediate feedback on shared documents, and work in teams while in class or at home. Teachers now learn from students, who have become experts in technology and taken ownership of their education.

Going digital without an IT staff
Colegio Banting in Mexico City has equipped its students with the best tools for success, even without resources to spend on staffing for IT. By introducing Google Apps for Education, they’ve interested students in educational technology, helped boost test scores, and improved communication between teachers, administrators, students and their families. Google Classroom makes it easier to assign homework, helping teachers and parents keep track of student work and progress.
Connecting face-to-face across many miles
Argentina’s San Andres University (UDESA) adopted Google Apps to encourage flexible learning through virtual classrooms while replacing their unstable email solution with Gmail. While Gmail was the initial reason for the switch, UDESA uses the full range of tools in the Apps suite to bring learning outside the classroom. Students use Hangouts to present their thesis projects remotely, and teachers invite outside experts, no matter where they’re located, to present about different topics.

Involving parents and teachers
In 2007, The American School Foundation (ASF) became the first school in Mexico to use Google Apps for Education, moving its 3,000 students to Apps while introducing weekly “technology office hours” for parents and teachers. As an early believer in the power of cloud-based technology, ASF wanted to equip its students with tools that would prepare them for the future. Beyond simplifying day-to-day processes and administrative workflows, ASF has created a supportive environment for all members of its community.

As schools across Latin America continue to develop and integrate technology into their curricula, they’re exploring ways to build learning spaces for curious minds both in the classroom and beyond. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for schools in the region.

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google for Work

We know you want to be assured that your digital information is safe and available when you need it. The series of incidents that riddled 2014 showed why it is important to stay ahead of those ill-intentioned people targeting online information. We have taken clear steps to make our products more difficult to attack, and to make it easier for you to protect your data. Innovative security technology is necessary today, and making it easy to use is equally important.

At Google, we take security very seriously and it's built into everything we do, from protecting our datacenters and your devices, to our partnership with the security community to stop bad actors on the web.

This year we raised the bar even higher. We created new security teams, our engineers discovered and helped fix vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and Poodle, and we took a series of concrete steps that will increase the security of our customers’ information:

• We offered encryption as a default for Gmail since 2010, but this year we made sure every single email you send or receive is also encrypted while moving internally between our data centers.
• We released End-to-End, a Chrome extension that encrypts information between your browser and the intended recipient and yesterday, we made it available to the community.
• We ensured that all files uploaded to Google Drive are encrypted at rest on Google servers — in addition to in transit, as they are shared on the web.
• We launched a physical security key that provides second-factor authentication through your computer’s USB port, and we are working on admin tools to let you deploy this at scale in your organization.
• We gave business users controls to share responsibility with IT, providing a wizard to secure your account and a new dashboard to monitor device activity.
• We made it easier to secure devices in the workplace with the new security features in Android 5.0 Lollipop.
• We rebuilt our device management solution to support iOS 7, 8 and the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

In addition to these announcements, we offer strong contractual commitments to protect our customers’ information. We do not show advertisements or scan customer information for advertising in Google Apps for Work, Education, Government or Non-Profit, and we do not use data for any other purpose than to manage and deliver our services. These commitments are regularly verified by independent auditors, and this summer we published their detailed findings in our SOC3 security audit report. We also help our customers comply with their regulatory obligations, and we renewed and extended our ISO 27001 certification and certified our Cloud Platform to the PCI standard. We were excited to participate in the development of the new ISO 27018 privacy standard for cloud computing, and look forward to opportunities to engage in similar efforts in the future.

Next year, the bad guys will keep all of us on our toes as we expect the number of threats and their sophistication to increase. We will keep raising the bar — for example we have been working to improve passwords with the new Smart Lock for Android feature, and developing identification technology that makes typing-in complex Captchas obsolete. As we enter 2015, you can expect our continued investment in security and a guarantee that we will continue to find ways to make it simple for people to use our services in a secure and transparent manner.

Posted by Lafeea Watson, Public Relations Manager, Krispy Kreme

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Lafeea Watson at Krispy Kreme, a global retailer of sweet treats with over 875 shops in more than 20 countries around the world. This holiday season, Krispy Kreme has chosen Chromebooks to power an in-store holiday campaign, connecting customers around the world to toast to the holidays with their coffee and doughnut, face to face. Learn more about how you can use built-in Google Apps with Chromebooks.

When Vernon Rudolph opened Krispy Kreme back in 1937 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it was a wholesale bakery that sold doughnuts to local grocery stores. The scent of its fresh-baked doughnuts, however, was too good for passers-by to ignore, and Rudolph was faced with request after request to let people buy them on the spot. He cut a hole in the wall, allowing him to serve eager his fans directly on the sidewalk, and Krispy Kreme as we know it was born.

We’re just as dedicated to delighting our customers and giving them even more reasons to come by beyond our tasty treats today. This year, working with our creative partners at VML, we created a “Joy Goes Around Holiday Hangout” interactive experience so customers can have conversations with people in 16 countries through Hangouts and Chromebooks in 17 of our retail stores.

The Joy Goes Around Holiday campaign is an interactive in-shop experience that allows our guests at participating locations around the world to toast to the holidays through customized Krispy Kreme Hangouts. We are also creating video of customers getting into the holiday spirit that they can then share with others over social media channels.

We’re thrilled that we’re helping people share a cup of coffee and an Original Glazed doughnut as if they were sitting across the table from each other. With Chromebooks and Google Hangouts, we’re bringing our global community closer together. We’re celebrating the things we have in common and the experiences that bring us joy.

Editor's note: We previously posted about an update to security in Gmail. As it turns out, the news isn't relevant for Google Apps for Work users because of a differing security policy—so we've removed this post. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. To learn more about Gmail security updates for consumer accounts follow the Official Gmail Blog. - updated December 18, 2014

Work on any of your devices.
We created new mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides across Android and iOS, where you can edit your documents, presentations and spreadsheets on the go. While working in the cloud means you have access to your documents on any of these devices, you can still access or create documents even if you don’t have a data or WiFi connection.

Edit your images directly
Sometimes the best way to convey a thought is visually and you need your images to look just right, which is why we made it easier to edit and adjust images. You can now crop your images, even masking the crop to specific shapes, and add borders in Docs, Slides and Drawings. Plus, you can connect objects and images in Slides and Drawings, recolor and change opacity of images in Slides, and even add effects.

Get things done faster
We want to help you take care of your common tasks. And you know what lots of people make in documents? Bullet lists. So now, just type an asterisk (*) and it will automatically become bullets in Docs and Slides. Nobody likes having to do the same thing twice (unless you’re Santa) so just copy and paste your charts between different spreadsheets in Sheets. For all the regression lovers out there, you can also add trendlines, and to further visualize trends, you can add miniature charts, or sparklines, into individual cells.

Get answers to your surveys
Forms is a great way to gather information, and across 2014, we added lots of new ways to ask questions and get answers. You can customize themes in Forms to add your own flare and create short URLs that are easier to share. There are also lots of new question options, like limiting one response per person and shuffling the answer order.

Add tons of functionality from 3rd parties
Add-ons for Docs, Sheets and Forms are tools created by developers that help you do those extra things you need help with, whether it’s printing mailing labels or adding MLA-approved citations, right from your document.

Let there be tables
You can add borders and backgrounds to your tables, and merge cells together to get your tables to look just how you want. And when you convert your legacy files to Docs, the table cells and borders will still be there so you can keep working.
And let everyone, including blind and low-vision users, get work done
Across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms, it’s much easier to use a screen reader, with better text-to-voice verbalization and improvements to keyboard navigation. You can now use braille support to read and enter text in Docs, Slides and Drawings. And you can collaborate easier with others in Docs, Sheets, Slides or Drawings because screen readers announce when people enter or leave the document, and you’ll hear when others are editing alongside you.

We’ll continue to make a ton of updates behind the scenes to ensure everything keeps running faster and smoother next year. Four cheers (Docs! Sheets! Slides! Forms!) for a happy work life in 2015.

Posted by Steve Cook, Co-founder, CookNSolo Restaurants

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Cook, co-founder of CookNSolo Restaurants, a Philadelphia-based group of food enterprises. 

What happens when you stick two guys with a passion for food and restaurants in a room with a laptop? For me and my co-founder, Mike Solomonov, that scenario led to the creation of CookNSolo Restaurants, which has more than 10 restaurants in Philadelphia, from Percy Street Barbeque, inspired by authentic Texas-style barbeque, to Zahav, a high-end Israeli restaurant. People (mostly my wife) often ask how we keep up with the pace of opening and managing so many restaurants. Our answer, and secret sauce, is Google Apps.

Our most popular restaurant is Federal Donuts, a spot dedicated entirely to donuts, fried chicken and coffee. We launched it as a creative side project, but after months of consistently selling out before noon, we realized that fried chicken and uniquely flavored donuts like Salted Tehina, Marshmallow Marshmallow and Chocolate Sea Salt, really hit the spot for Philadelphians. We opened four more locations. As we grew, and as we fried more chicken along the way, we came up with another creative idea: use the 1,000 pounds of chicken bone leftovers we produced each week to make delicious soup, and donate the proceeds to a local non-profit dedicated to helping Philadelphians suffering from hunger, homelessness and poverty.

That’s how Rooster Soup Co. was born — and the idea took shape in a Google Doc. Mike and I jotted down the concept in a shared document, adding our thoughts and ideas as they came to us, and commenting on one another’s additions as we went. Whether we looked at the doc from our laptops in the same room or pulled it up separately from home, we always knew we were working with the most up-to-date document. As our idea became a more formal proposal, and our proposal needed a timeline, budget and input from our partner, the Broad Street Ministry, we extended the collaboration to six more CookNSolo team members. We added them as editors, so we could all work together in the same document, regardless of where we were and when we could get the work done. That collaboration led us to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the new restaurant, where we’d make and sell the soup, then donate 100% of net profits to the Broad Street Ministry. Our Kickstarter closed in July, and we beat our funding goal of $150,000 to start the nonprofit.

As we continue to grow our business, we need to rely on technology more and more everyday to help us keep up the pace. We use Google Apps, which is helpful for staying on top of our customer service — not an easy feat when you grow from 2 guys to over 150 employees. For many customers, trying to contact a restaurant can feel like shouting into a black hole, so we pride ourselves by replying quickly by email. With Google Groups, any customer support or reservation inquiries go to a team of people, so if one person is on vacation, another can pick up in their absence and send a response within 24 hours. We’re also dependent on Calendar: we create invitations to track private events at each of our restaurants, inquiries about large catering order and delivery deadlines.

Along the way, Google Apps has been instrumental in helping us manage our business growth, stay creative and stay true to our mission. Who knows what's next for us, but I can guarantee that we’ve helped create our recipe for success with Google Apps.

Posted by Barry Toole, ‎Voice and Convergence Manager, MWV

Editor's note: Today Avaya is announcing its Avaya Agent for Chrome, a new solution that delivers a web-based contact center application through the simplicity and speed of Chromebooks. Our guest blogger is Barry Toole at MWV (MeadWestVaco), a global leader in packaging solutions. MWV is using Avaya Agent for Chrome to streamline contact center operations for their customer service teams. Please note: this blog post content was updated on December 16, 2014 to include requested changes from MWV and Avaya.

What do perfume dispensers, frozen pizzas, and six pack beverage carriers have in common? Packaging. At MWV, we help shape consumers' experiences with products through packaging for food, beverage, tobacco, beauty and personal care, healthcare, and home and garden markets around the world. We’re everywhere our customers are – operating facilities in 30 countries and marketing our products on every continent. The global nature of our business means that many of our interactions with customers happen over the phone, and we need to make sure we’re offering the best possible experience.

We’ve been using Google Apps for our business since 2009 and recently simplified our IT environment by introducing 500 Chromebooks across the company. Employees love that Chromebooks boot up in seconds, eliminating the long reboot cycles we experienced with our old PCs. We’ve been an Avaya customer for more than 40 years and see them as the leader in contact center software. When we got the call that they were producing a contact center application for Chromebooks, we jumped at the opportunity. We knew the migration to the Avaya Agent for Chrome would be seamless because everyone here is already familiar with the Chrome browser; we easily got up and running.
We introduced the new solution to agents in our customer contact center, who take high-value orders, and employees in our logistics group, who coordinate the delivery of raw materials and finished goods. Both groups need an easy-to-use, fast solution that lets them work from anywhere. The Avaya Agent for Chrome eliminates the need to download software, saving time for end users and IT.

The Avaya Agent for Chrome also supports employee mobility. Agents can now work from home on their Chromebooks with full Avaya contact center functionality. In the event of a snowstorm or network interruption, we can move our operations to any site that has Wi-Fi. Employees no longer need a physical phone and can simply and securely carry out their jobs using only their Chromebook. As a result we’re saving costs on additional hardware.

Moving to Chromebooks has helped prepare us for a future that demands fast action and flexible ways of working. We plan to expand the Avaya Agent for Chrome solution to all MWV employees who directly interact with customers — in total, about 100 people in the contact center and logistics groups. As we scale our business to better serve our customers, we look forward to this solution growing with us without adding extra cost or complexity.

Our new partner program is simple in design, having just three tracks, each designed to address specific customer needs (partners can join multiple tracks):

• The Sales Track is for partners whose core competency is marketing and selling Google for Work and Education products at high volume. Selling includes ongoing account management
  and renewals associated with a partner’s customers.
• The Services Track is for partners who provide the full range of services to customers, such as selling, consulting, training, implementing and providing technical support for Google for Work and Education products.
• The Technology Track is for partners who create products and solutions that complement, enhance or extend the reach or functionality of Google for Work and Education products.

To ensure the best customer experience, we have also updated the requirements and application process for the Google for Work and Education Partner Program, which will roll out in early 2015. Partners will receive a range of benefits to help them better support customers, including:

• Access to Google for Work Connect, our one-stop community for partners to access marketing campaigns, sales content, support resources and training
• Ongoing program communications
• Console to manage customer accounts
• Use of the designated Google for Work or Google for Education Partner badge
• Resale discount on the list price of our suite of products
• Listing in our partner directory

We will also offer an updated Premier tier, which is reserved for partners that have demonstrated higher levels of excellence within their track. Premier partners will receive exclusive benefits and support, including:

• Designated partner manager support
• Co-marketing opportunities with Google
• Access to marketing funding and other financial incentives
• Exclusive training and events
• Use of the exclusive Premier Partner badge

From Cloud Sherpas to Sprint, Ancoris to Devoteam, CDW to Promevo, and many more, our partners are helping transform businesses around the world. With the new Google for Work and Education Partner Program, we will continue to invest in creating world-class business relationships with our customers and provide the support and investment our partners deserve.

Posted by Rudy Blanco, Digital Learning Coordinator at The DreamYard Preparatory School

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest author is Rudy Blanco, Digital Learning Coordinator at The DreamYard Preparatory School, in the Bronx, New York. He is a product of the New York City public school system and spent three years as a special education teacher at DreamYard Prep. In his current role, Rudy focuses on teaching students and other teachers how to learn through the use of technology.


DreamYard Prep is a public high school in the Bronx where arts and scholarship closely overlap. As a Title I public school in an underserved community, we see the unique potential of technology to prepare our students for an increasingly digital world. The culture at DreamYard Prep encourages teachers, students and staff to try innovative approaches. If you have a crazy idea, you try it out, remix it and make it work. Through this experimentation, we’re trying to achieve our ambitious goal of infusing our curriculum with the arts, social justice and digital learning.
For us, technology is a way of showing what we’ve learned, publishing and amplifying it. Before we started using Google Apps for Education three years ago, we had very basic Word Processing and outdated computers. We wanted to introduce technology that would improve gateway skills like research, communication and productivity. So at the start of the 2011 school year, we created Google accounts for all teachers, students and staff. We now have 650 Apps users and 150 devices, including 60 Chromebooks and 15 tablets. This year, we introduced Classroom to 13 classes across grades and subjects.

By using Google Drive and Classroom, science teacher Emily McLaughlin saves over eight hours each month that was previously spent printing, copying, distributing and grading student packets. Now, she simply creates a Google Doc and uses Classroom to share it with her students. Emily and her students work together in Docs, making edits and conversing through comments. A new set-up in Emily’s classroom reflects this collaborative learning — students gather in pods of four rather than facing the front of the class. These pods of students give each other feedback and answer questions together. Even across classes, students work together. Ninth graders in my digital literacy class, for instance, teach their research skills to 10th graders in Emily’s class. We want students to know they have the power to teach not only themselves, but also each other.

With Google Drive, students can edit, store and share everything. They type assignments in Google Docs, create presentations using Slides, and organize their body of work in Drive folders. At any moment, an administrator can click a button to pull up work by all 370 of our students: .jpgs of visual art projects, English papers, lab reports, and videos of peer interviews. The revision history and comments in Docs allow us to see a project’s evolution over time.

We took this archive one step further and kicked off a portfolio program in partnership with Parsons The New School for Design. Each student creates his or her own blog, archive of work from grades 9-12, and a digital portfolio using Google Sites or platform of choice. The program began last year with four teachers and has since doubled. We hope, over the next several years, to expand the portfolio program to all classes at DreamYard Prep and help every student share his or her story with the world.

Posted by Carolin Silbernagl, Co-Founder and CEO, dotHIV

Editor's note: In honor of World AIDS Day, today we hear from Carolin Silbernagl, Co-Founder and CEO of dotHIV, a charity and domain registry that supports AIDS organizations by selling .hiv web addresses.

In the 1980s, when the death toll from AIDS and HIV-related illnesses began to mount, the end of AIDS was impossible to imagine. Three decades later, thanks to medical breakthroughs and the diligent work of activists, wiping out AIDS is no longer just a dream. At dotHIV, we raise money for AIDS organizations by selling the .hiv extension to nonprofits and businesses. Through a simple redirect, .hiv domains work as second entrance doors to existing websites: yourdomain.hiv then leads to the same homepage as yourdomain.com. And for each click on any type of .hiv URL, we donate money to HIV/AIDS charities.

The dotHIV team

The idea behind dotHIV came about in 2009, when a few friends in the advertising industry were working on a pro bono campaign for HIV prevention. We had grown tired of the usual approach of putting up posters and shooting TV commercials and thought: why not place our message in a space that people look at every time they open a web browser — and raise money at the same time? Their agency offered to let us borrow office space and software to get the idea off the ground, but as our footprint grew globally with employees and volunteers around the world, we realized we needed better tools to help us collaborate from our many remote locations. That’s when we turned to Google Apps. We were already familiar with the tools and knew how powerful they could be in helping us work faster and more efficiently, and since it’s free to nonprofits, we focus less on operations and more on getting out the word about dotHIV.

Google Apps is at the heart of everything we do. We have full-time employees, part-time volunteers, an advisory board, business angels and sponsors, located across four continents, so it’s essential to have tools that make our remote team feel like a real team. We hold daily standup meeting using Google Hangouts, so we get to see each other face-to-face consistently (and to remind us that we’re in this together). We write up and revise all our website content from a Google Doc, so each stakeholder can add recommendations and changes as comments or suggested edits rather than editing directly in a silo and emailing their version as an attachment. Project timelines live in Google Sheets, which are updating constantly, so no matter what time zone you’re in, we know where we stand in a process.

Once we create documents and presentations, we store them in Google Drive so we have access anytime we need them, from any device. We’re also using Drive to build up an archive of photos and videos that tell the dotHIV story.

We’ve even tapped into Google Cloud Platform to build new features for our website. For example, we used App Engine to create a click counter that will appear on every web page with a .hiv address. Whenever someone clicks on these pages, it triggers a small donation to an AIDS support group, with the funds coming from our domain registrations.

We started dotHIV with a small group of believers. Today, we’re a global network of experts who are using our diverse experience to support the fight against AIDS, and who are hopeful that the end of AIDS is in sight.