When you automate your Google Workspace for Education workflows, you’re future-proofing your operations.
As an account administrator, automating your existing Google Workspace Workflows helps boost your teams’ productivity 10x. This way, they can focus on things that matter because most of the mundane and repetitive tasks are taken care of.
Does creating an individual file folder for each student eat your teachers’ time? Do you want an automatic method to send “Welcome” and “Thank you” emails to your students? How about the total elimination of manual data entry?
If this sounds good to you, then you are in for a ride. This article will cover some of the repetitive tasks that you can solve when you automate your Google Workspace for Education account.
What is Google Workspace for Education? How Is it Different from G Suite?
Just a recap. . .
Google Workspace for Education is an ecosystem of cloud-based tools by Google that enables online education. It has been around for some time supporting remote learning systems. With the onslaught of COVID-19 and no clear signs of letting up, schools were scrambling to shift to online learning methods. This drastic shift put an increase in demand to online learning platforms such as Google Workspace for Education.
G Suite
G Suite for Education is the predecessor of Google Workspace for Education. The latter is the newer and more intuitive versions of core Google Apps for the education space. This version also offers a security upgrade to protect each member.
A standard Google for Education account costs at least $3 per member each year. But if you are certified by your government as a learning institution with full accreditation, you can get the Fundamentals tier for free.
Benefits When You Automate Your Google Workspace for Education Workflows
Google for Education suite is a powerhouse on its own, what with all it can do while being user intuitive. Throwing in automation adds a layer of connectivity into the mix, allowing you to do the following:
- Increase your team’s work efficiency by taking care of mundane and repetitive tasks.
- Cut manual data entry and save time when you automate your Google Workspace for Education workflow. Especially your recurring ones.
- Automatically generate user documents from pre-made templates.
- Prevent data loss and ensure data security with the right Google Workspace automation platform.
- Automatically create schedules for all kinds of Classroom activities.
- Easily grade and review students’ output.
Automate Your Google Workspace for Education Workflows: Code vs. No Code
There are two main methods on how you can automate your Google Workspace for Education workflows:
- Coding using App Script
- No code 3rd-party Google automation platforms such as zenphi.
App Script
Using App Script requires you to have a good knowledge of JavaScript, its programming language. Writing scripts using App Script when you automate your Google for Education results in dynamic workflows.
The problem with this, most teachers in K-12, and even higher education have zero knowledge of coding and its nuances.
Ordering them to grasp and understand the concept of JavaScript would mean additional workload on their part. And this undertaking can take weeks or months to accomplish, something you should not do to your teachers.
The other option is bringing in a coding specialist to write the scripts to automate your Google Workspace for Education Workflows. But this will mean paying for the new talent, and coding specialists are not exactly cheap.
zenphi
For teams who are not on the techy side of things, the second method is recommended. No code Google workflow automation platforms allow you to connect and integrate Google Apps, sans the coding. All you have to do is spend some time to understand how each Action functions to build the right automated workflows.
An Action is the building block of every flow within zenphi. Each performs a specific function such as locating files, logging data, retrieving and parsing unstructured data, and more.
zenphi’s clean, simple, and intuitive user interface makes it easier for beginners to study the art of Google Workspace automation.
How to Start to Automate Your Google Workspace for Education Workflows
One good example of how you can automate your Google for Education Workflows is your Teacher Performance feedback.
As simple as generating an automated “Thank you” email to students who sent their feedback can shave several minutes or hours off your staff’s load. With automation, an email is automatically sent for every form submission instead of writing individual emails to each participant.
Creating the Form
The first step is preparing your Teacher’s Assessment form. For beginners, you can simply head to the Google Forms interface and click the + button to create a blank survey.
Once you have your blank form, start writing your assessment questions.
Make sure that you have a specific folder within your Drive to store the form. This makes organization and locating files easier.
Choosing the Trigger Action
The next step would be logging into your zenphi dashboard and clicking the Create Flow button. If you have no account yet, you can easily create one using your Google Workspace for Education credentials.
Next is choosing the Trigger Action of your flow. In zenphi, this means the action that will initiate or kickstart the flow. And in this example, it is the New Response trigger.
For every submission of the “Assessment: Mrs. Jane Smith” form, this zenphi workflow will kickstart.
When you click Create you will arrive in the blank flow where you can then drag and drop actions. Click the “Untitled Flow” if you wish to assign a name to your new flow.
The next step is configuring the Trigger action and pointing to the right form. Start by clicking the Form icon to get to the setting section.
In the Connection field, make sure that you point to the Google for Education account that houses the “Assessment: Mrs. Jane Smith” form.
For the Select a Form field, start by clicking the Google Drive icon. Look for the folder storing the “Assessment: Mrs. Jane Smith” form.
Adding the Send Email Action
And now we arrive at the last step for this example of Google Workspace for Education Automation. We will be adding zenphi’s Send Email action into the flow.
To configure this action, click the gear button.
For the Name field, you can leave it as it is or name it however you want. In the Connection field, choose the Gmail account from which the “Thank you” email will come.
In the To section, click the parameter icon. And from the Trigger dropdown menu, select Initiator Email. This will fetch the email address of the form sender.
Input the email subject directly.
For the Email Body, you can either directly input your thank you message or click the parameter icon to insert some tokens.
Remove Data Entry When You Automate Your Google Workspace for Eduaction
If you hate the thought of manually copy and pasting enrollee information into your spreadsheet, zenphi has a solution. Its Append Row action can automatically update your existing Google Sheets files.
