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Google Renames Apps for Edu, Adds 'Machine Intelligence'

Google has changed the name of its popular service Google Apps for Education to G Suite for Education.

With this change comes several new features that have been added to some of the apps included in G Suite. These features use “machine intelligence” to facilitate and add more functionalities to Google Apps, according to Google’s education blog.

Explore in Google Sheets is a new feature added to Google Sheets to allow students to create smarter spreadsheets. Explore is designed to make it easy for students to “summarize spreadsheet data with automated charts and insights.” Students who can’t write formulas can now use Explore to instantly convert questions into formulas.

According to Google, “Students can simply enter a question using natural language and Explore in Google Sheets will use natural language processing to translate the question into a formula and offer an instant answer.”

Explore has also been added to Google Docs, bringing with it a number of features, such as the ability to search and find related documents from Drive. One can also obtain automatic recommended topics to learn about, and for educators, the ability to conduct image searches and get results limited to those that “comply with SafeSearch and are approved to use with Creative Commons,” according to Google.

Explore in Google Slides brings new features designed to help students create polished presentations. Explore offers a number of layout suggestions to help students better format their slides.

Google Calendar uses machine intelligence to help you easily find a time when invitees are free, and it also suggests available rooms based on your previous bookings. And, when the list of invitees grows long and no times are available, Calendar will suggest times across the group where the conflicts are easiest to resolve, such as recurring one-on-one meetings.

To learn more about G Suite for Education and its new features, visit Google’s blog discussing the new suite.

About the Author

Richard Chang is associate editor of THE Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].

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