Digital updates: September 2026

Google Classroom starts the school year with a redesigned homepage: a dashboard for teachers and a Due soon list for students. Students in years 10–13 now see a Gemini tab in their classes, and Gemini can generate a rubric while you set an assignment. NotebookLM has been renamed Gemini Notebook; your notebooks and shared links carry on working.

Elsewhere, Gemini in Google Docs can work through a document’s comments and create images and diagrams, Google Forms can build a quiz from files in your Drive, and the Google Meet homepage now gathers your upcoming meetings and the notes and recordings from past ones. This post covers the whole summer since July’s update, so it runs longer than usual. Features that need the AI Pro licence are in last week’s AI Pro update.

Google Classroom

A redesigned homepage

The Google Classroom homepage has been rebuilt around what each person needs to do. Teachers get a dashboard with a Recently due module listing work from the past week that needs marking, Class insights on how students are getting on, and a Feature spotlight of tools worth trying. Students get an Enrolled view with a Due soon list that keeps deadlines in front of them. Your classes are still there, in the side navigation and in a classes module on the homepage, and every new module can be collapsed.

If you have more than one role—a teacher taking a professional development class, say—you can switch between the Teaching and Enrolled views, and Classroom remembers which one you were in.

Navigate your Classroom homepage

Gemini in Classroom for students

Gemini in Google Classroom is no longer limited to students aged 18 and over. At Outwood, that means students in years 10–13, who have Gemini Notebook, now see the Gemini tab in their classes. From the Gemini tab, students can turn the materials you’ve shared into flashcards and practice quizzes tailored to the class. Those with Gemini Notebook access can also sync class materials to a notebook to build study guides and audio overviews.

The starter prompts on the student Gemini tab now use context from Classroom. When a student picks a prompt, they choose the class and assignment it relates to, and Gemini works from the assignment’s title, instructions, and materials. On the new homepage, hovering over an assignment in Due soon offers Learn with Gemini for guided help based on the class curriculum.

Learn about Gemini in Google Classroom

Generate a rubric while setting an assignment

When creating an assignment, the Rubrics section can now generate a Classroom-ready rubric with Gemini, based on the assignment itself. Review and edit the criteria before attaching it. This joins the option to convert an existing rubric document and drafting a rubric from the Gemini tab.

Create or reuse a rubric for an assignment

Gemini Notebook

NotebookLM has been renamed Gemini Notebook. It’s the same tool, and your notebooks and shared links carry on working. The new name and logo are still appearing across the apps, so you may see the old name in places for a while. If you’re new to it, the Gemini Notebook page explains what it does and how to get started.

Copy a notebook

You can now make a copy of a notebook someone has shared with you, complete with its sources and its studio content—audio and video overviews, study guides, flashcards, quizzes, and slide decks. Share a notebook with a class and each student can take their own copy to add notes and generate their own practice quizzes, without touching the original. Copies don’t stay in sync with the original, chat history and notes aren’t copied, and Drive sources come across only if the person copying can open them.

Allowing copies is on by default for notebooks you share; turn it off in the notebook’s sharing settings under Allow copies.

Create a private copy of a notebook

Google Docs

Work through comments with Gemini

Gemini in Google Docs can now read, summarise, and act on the comments in a document. Ask it to “summarise the unresolved comments” or to tell you what the head of department asked for. It can also leave comments on your behalf (“add a comment asking Sam to check the dates in the trip section”), draft replies to open threads, and turn reviewer feedback into suggested edits that you approve before they apply. You’ll find it in the prompt bar at the bottom of the document and in the Gemini side panel. Gemini may also offer to summarise comments when you open a document with a lot of them. It works for anyone with edit access.

Respond to and manage comments with Gemini in Google Docs

Create images and diagrams with Gemini

Gemini in Docs can now create and edit images, diagrams, and infographics alongside your text, using the document itself as context. Ask for “a diagram summarising this policy at the top of the document” or “an infographic for each section”. Then refine what it makes—“change it to 16:9”, “match the style to the rest of the document”—and apply the same change to several visuals at once. This works on the web only.

Create personalised documents with Gemini in Google Docs

Writing tools in 11 more languages

The Gemini writing tools covered in May’s update—Help me create, Help me write, Match writing style, and Match doc format—now work in 11 more languages, including Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Czech, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian.

Write and edit with Gemini in Google Docs

Google Forms

Create a quiz with Gemini

Help me create in Google Forms can now build a quiz. Describe the quiz you want and, if you like, point it at Docs, Slides, or PDFs in your Drive to draw the questions from. Gemini produces a quiz with the right settings and the correct answer marked for each question, using multiple choice, checkbox, and grid question types. Preview it, insert it, and edit it as you would any other form.

Create a form or quiz with Gemini in Google Forms

Google Meet

A new Meet homepage

The Google Meet homepage on the web now shows your upcoming meetings with their descriptions and calendar attachments, and the notes, recordings, and transcripts from past ones. That makes it easier to prepare for a call and follow it up without hunting through Drive or your inbox. Week and month navigators let you look ahead or back.

Use the Google Meet homepage

Meeting files organised in Drive

Recordings, transcripts, and notes from Meet calls now land in a Google Meet folder in the host’s My Drive, with a subfolder for each meeting; recurring meetings share one folder. Attendees who have access to the files see shortcuts to them in a Google Meet folder of their own. Your existing Meet Recordings folder has moved inside the new folder as Legacy Meet Recordings.

Record a video meeting

Google Calendar

Share your calendar without revealing private events

A new sharing permission, Make changes (see private events as free/busy), lets someone manage your calendar while your private events stay hidden. They can create, edit, and delete your other events, but private ones appear only as busy blocks, can’t be moved, and don’t show in their searches. Useful if a colleague handles scheduling for you.

Alongside this, visibility now applies to a whole recurring series rather than to a single occurrence, and existing series have been set to the strictest visibility of any event in them.

Share your calendar

Stop RSVP emails for an event

A new per-event option, Get an email when guests respond, is ticked by default; untick it and you’ll no longer receive RSVP emails or out-of-office auto-replies for that event. Responses from colleagues using Google Calendar still show on the event. Handy for large meetings and whole-staff events, and for recurring events it applies to the whole series.

Track responses to your event

Join Teams, Zoom, and Webex calls from an invitation

When an invitation from outside Outwood—from Outlook, say—includes a Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Webex link, Google Calendar now picks out the meeting link, ID, and passcode. A Join video call button then appears on the event, on the web and in the mobile apps. Going the other way, an invitation you send with a third-party conferencing link now puts that link in the event’s location, where Outlook and Apple Calendar show it as a button.

Add or remove a video conference from your Calendar event

Make the most of a large monitor

A new Responsive to your screen density option scales your calendar to fill a larger monitor, making events easier to read, alongside the existing Comfortable and Compact layouts. Change it under Appearance in Calendar’s settings on the web.

Change event colour set and density in Google Calendar

Block unwanted invitations

You can now block someone in Google Calendar. Blocking removes the current event, stops any further invitations from that person, and adds them to your account-wide blocklist, so they’re blocked across other Google products too. This covers people with a Google account; for anyone else, blocking their address in Gmail stops the emails that create events.

Block someone in Google Calendar

Google Vids

Video summaries from documents

Google Vids can now turn a Google Doc, PDF, or Word file into a short video summary, generating a script, narration, and visuals from the document. It’s a quick way to turn a policy, a set of meeting notes, or a piece of training material into something staff or students can watch instead of read.

Create summary videos from documents in Google Vids

Record a presentation from Slides

A new Record option in the right-hand panel of Google Slides records you presenting the deck with Vids and gives you a shareable link when you’re done. Vids’ transcript-based editing and AI voiceover are there for polishing the result. If you used the older Slides recording, it’s still there under View > Slides recording.

Record a presentation in Google Slides with Google Vids

Higher quality video clips

AI-generated video clips in Vids—covered in July’s update—now come from Google’s latest video model, with better text rendering, more realistic movement, and more convincing scenes. The same update lets you edit an uploaded video with a text instruction, but that part isn’t available in the UK for now.

Use AI to generate video clips in Google Vids

Direct the emotion and pacing of voiceovers

You can now steer an AI voiceover or avatar by typing tags in square brackets in the script—"[excitedly]", “[pause]”—and typing “[” brings up a menu of tags for pacing, emotion, and sound effects. Apply audio tags adds suitable tags across a script for you. This builds on the bracket notation introduced in April’s update.

Create voiceovers with AI in Google Vids

Convert Slides to video in more languages

Converting a Slides presentation to a video with an AI script, voiceover, and music now works for presentations in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish as well as English.

Convert Google Slides into Google Vids

Google Chat

Group conversations with people outside Outwood

You can now start a group conversation in Google Chat that includes people from outside Outwood, where previously only a one-to-one message or a space could. Add them when you create the group; they receive an email invitation and join once they accept, and the conversation carries a badge to show it includes external members. External people can’t be added to an existing internal-only group.

External group messages in Google Chat

Hide the member list of a space

Space owners and managers can now choose who can see a space’s full member list: owners only, owners and managers, all members (the default), or the whole organisation. This suits spaces on sensitive topics, where someone might want to join without their membership being visible. Anyone who posts in the space is still visible to the other members. Find it in the space’s settings under Membership > View members.

Manage view members permissions in Google Chat

Gmail

A warning before you reply all from BCC

If you were BCC’d on an email and select Reply all, Gmail now warns you before sending, so you don’t reveal that you were copied in.

Google Drive

Timestamped comments on videos

When you comment on a video in Google Drive on the web, you can now anchor the comment to a point in the video. Each one appears as a marker on the timeline, and clicking a marker jumps to that moment and highlights the comment. Replies, @mentions, and resolving work as they do for any other comment, which makes reviewing a student’s video project or a recorded presentation much more precise. Timestamped comments show as ordinary comments in the mobile apps.

Comment on a video in Google Drive

Google Sheets

Combo and multi-series scatter charts

Google Sheets now offers combo chart types—a clustered column chart with a line, with the line on a secondary axis if you like, or a custom combination. It also supports scatter charts where each series has its own x-axis. Both survive an Excel import intact; previously a secondary axis or extra x-series was dropped.

Add and edit a chart or graph

Tables and pivot tables survive an Excel import

Excel tables now import into Sheets as Sheets tables, keeping their structure and formatting, and pivot tables built on a table come through as working pivot tables rather than static grids. Grouped date, time, and number fields in a pivot table are also preserved on import and kept in the pivot table editor as reusable fields. That means you can remove a grouping from the layout and add it back later without setting it up again.

Use tables in Google Sheets

Gemini in Google Workspace

Custom instructions in more apps

The standing instructions you can give Gemini—covered for Docs in May’s update—now apply in the Gemini side panel in Slides too, so a preference like “use British English and keep it brief” carries over. Manage them from the side panel’s menu under Settings > Personalisation.

Customise Gemini in Workspace’s responses with your instructions

Gemini app

Interactive simulations and 3D models

When you ask the Gemini app about something that’s easier to see than read, it can now answer with an interactive visual. Ask it to “show me how DNA works in 3D” and you get a structure you can rotate and zoom; ask to see a pendulum trading energy back and forth and you get a working simulation. Prompts beginning “show me” or “help me visualise” are the way in.

Google Chat as a source

The Gemini app can now draw on your Google Chat messages, alongside Gmail, Drive, and Calendar. Connect it under Settings > Apps, where it appears as “@Google Chat” under Google Workspace, and you can ask Gemini to find a detail buried in a conversation, pull the latest deadline mentioned in a space, or summarise the messages you missed today. Chat stays disconnected until you turn it on; the Gemini introduction page shows where the switch is.

Connect Google Workspace apps to Gemini

Workspace Studio

Copy and move Drive files, and reply in Chat

Three new steps widen what a Workspace Studio flow can do for you. Copy Drive file or folder makes a copy each time the flow runs, so a flow can generate a document from a template. Move Drive file or folder keeps project folders tidy without moving files by hand. Send a Chat reply posts a reply into a specific space or thread, formatted with Markdown—the plain-text shorthand for bold text, lists, and code blocks.

Guide to starters and steps in Workspace Studio

Add sources to a notebook automatically

Flows also gain an Add a source to Gemini Notebook step, which adds text, a Drive file, a web page, or a YouTube video to one of your notebooks each time the flow runs. A flow could add each new form response, or each week’s meeting notes, to a notebook, so it stays up to date without you adding sources by hand.

Learn about the Add a source to Gemini Notebook step

Canva

Canva Code 2.0

Canva Code builds interactive things—a quiz, a randomiser, a game-show format, a small website—from a plain-language description, and its second version is now available to everyone. You can start from one of more than 50 templates or paste in HTML, and build it inside an existing design as a page in a deck or whiteboard. The result edits like any other Canva design: swap in images from the library, change colours and fonts, and click into text to retype it. Finished pieces adapt to any screen size and can be published to a link or shared within Outwood.

Canva Code

Visual Suite upgrades

Canva has added more than 100 upgrades to Docs, Presentations, Sheets, Whiteboards, and Websites since the start of the year. The full set is now rolling out to everyone. On a whiteboard, Follow Collaborators keeps your view in step with a colleague’s, and one-click reactions let the group respond on the spot. Docs gain full-width banners and drag-and-drop visuals. In Sheets, a prompt can turn your data into a chart that drops straight into a doc or deck. Presentations add one-click presenting and generated presenter notes, and Websites get a custom navigation bar for up to 20 sections. As with Canva Code, the AI-generated charts and presenter notes are for staff, not students.

Canva Visual Suite

Ready-made activities in Learn Grid

Learn Grid now includes thousands of AI Drafts: pre-generated games and student-led activities—drag-and-drop sorting, multiple-choice quizzes, worksheets—ready to use as soon as you find them, without spending your AI credits. Every learning game comes with a Canva Sheet that fills in as students answer, so you can see progress and spot misconceptions.

Learn Grid

Assign and Live Learning Sessions

Assign hands each student their own copy of a piece of work, shows progress as they go, and sends results back to Google Classroom. Live Learning Sessions put the whole class in one shared design for brainstorms, mind maps, and group activities, and you can now pause a session to bring everyone’s attention back to the front.

Canva’s Back to School toolkit

Adobe Express

On-brand edits and layout fixes with the AI Assistant

Attach a brand in the AI Assistant’s prompt bar and its edits—colours, fonts, text, and shapes—follow that brand automatically. You can also ask the AI Assistant to tidy the spacing and alignment of a design, and it rearranges the elements for you.

Fix design layouts with AI Assistant

Restore an earlier version

The Version history panel now lets you go back to an earlier version of a design and recover edits you’ve lost.

Restore earlier versions

Resize and style captions

Video captions can now be resized on the canvas with the handles, with the change applied to every caption in the file. They can also be given a font, style, and size from the captions panel, including brand fonts and fonts you’ve uploaded.

Caption a video

Embed YouTube videos

Paste a YouTube link into a design to add a playable video. You can also now add emojis to text using your device’s own emoji picker.

Embed YouTube videos

Generate sound effects

Describe the sound you need and Adobe Express generates it for your video or animation, with the option to speak the timing and energy you’re after.

Generate sound effects

Invitations with RSVPs

Design an invitation, create an event link, and send it out; guests RSVP through the link and you track responses as they arrive.

Create events

Embed a design in a web page

Turn a design into a live, interactive embed you can add to a website, blog, or online document.

Embed Adobe Express files

Dark mode

Select Dark in the theme settings, or leave it on Default to follow your browser’s appearance.

Enable dark mode

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