Plus
Now available for Google Workspace for Education Plus customers, parents and guardians can preview classwork in Classroom. This is extra information beyond the standard Guardian Summary emails included in Classroom. With this information, parents and guardians can better support their students by accessing to more details about assigned work.
What You'll Learn
In this article we’ll cover:
Recommendation for the feature
Requirements and configuration
How it works
Watch a video to see this feature in action
Common questions
Recommendation
We recommend enabling Guardian access domain-wide for all verified teachers in K-12 schools and having those teachers turn the feature on for their classes, parents/guardians, and students. We recommend guardian summaries remain OFF for higher education institutions. Using guardian summaries with parent view ensures that guardians are consistently informed about their student's assignments, supporting a more engaged and informed parent community.
Requirements and Configuration
As long as you have guardian summaries already configured for your domain, your teachers have Plus licenses on their accounts, and teachers invited guardians to receive summary emails; there is nothing new to set up in the Admin console. Guardian previews are now built in for Plus domains.
Because this feature grants parents and guardians view access to certain Drive files, you will need to review your sharing settings or trust rules to ensure that files owned by staff are accessible outside your domain. Otherwise, guardians will not be able to view files.
As has always been the case, teachers need to turn on guardian summaries for each class. This is a standard beginning-of-the-year process (or the beginning of the semester/trimester/quarter, depending on your school). Thankfully, when teachers turn on summaries for one class, Classroom will prompt them to enable them for the rest of their classes with one click to save time.
Teachers an also turn this setting ON for all classes by navigating to Settings > Guardian access, then toggling the Enable guardian summaries in all of your future classes to ON.
When teachers turn this on, Classroom automatically creates the guardian preview link. Additionally, teachers will see a Share with guardians button on the People tab for a class to quickly communicate this link to parents and guardians. This link is also under Guardian Access in a class's settings.
Admin Console Setting - Guardian access
In case you do not have Guardian summaries configured on your domain, here is how to do it.
Navigation Path:
Apps > Google Workspace > Classroom > General Settings ~ Guardian access
- Go to the Classroom Settings page.
- Click on the General settings card.
- Hover over and click edit for the Guardian access setting.
- Check the checkbox for Allow parents and guardians to access classroom information.
- Be sure All verified teachers is also selected.
- Click Save.
How it Works
Once teachers enable guardian summaries for their classes, View in Classroom links are included in the daily or weekly summary emails.
These links take parents/guardians to a special parent view of the Classwork tab for that class, where they can see:
- Upcoming and past assignments or materials
- Instructions and information added by the teacher to individual assignments/materials
- Due dates
- Files attached by the teacher (PDFs, Docs, Sheets, Slides)
Parents/guardians will not be able to see:
- Stream
- Student work or submitted files (even for their own students)
- Forms
- Practice Sets or YouTube assignments
- Grades
The guardian preview of Classwork looks like this:
Note: To access this page, parents/guardians must have a Google account. This will not be accessible to users without a Google account.
Behind the scenes, Classroom and Drive use special classworkpreviewers groups to automate giving parents/guardians view access to files attached by teachers to assignments. Please note that once posted, it may take 24 hours for attachments to become visible for parents/guardians.
See it in action
Watch this Office Hours recording to see this feature.
Common Questions
Your parents/guardians or teachers may have questions about this new feature. Below are some common questions and answers.
Why isn’t a class included in the summary emails?
Either there is no new or missing work in that class, or the teacher didn’t turn on guardian summaries.
Why can’t I (parent/guardian) log into Classroom?
If you don’t have a Google account, you cannot log into Classroom. Beyond that, the teacher needs to invite you as a guardian for your student.
Why can’t I (parent/guardian) view an attachment on an assignment?
After an assignment is posted, it may take up to 24 hours before attachments become viewable by parents/guardians. Additionally, Forms, attachments from Classroom Add-Ons, Practice Sets and YouTube assignments are not viewable by parents/guardians. Only files like PDFs, Docs, Slides and Sheets are viewable.
Where do I (teacher) find the link for parents?
Each class’s link is in the class’s settings page. Simply copy and paste into an email. There is also a share button on the People tab in each class. Clicking this will start a new email with all your parents/guardians Bcc’d and the link inserted in the email body.
Can I disable Guardian Previews but keep Guardian Summaries on?
No. These two features are connected. If you turn on Guardian Summaries for a class, the Guardian Preview function is on as well.
I have privacy concerns…
This is a valid question. Since parents/guardians cannot see student work or grades and can only see the files the teacher attaches to an assignment, student information is kept safe. If parents/guardians want to see grades or other more sensitive information, they would need to do so through your SIS.
Do the files that parents/guardians see get saved to their Google Drive?
No. The only way they can view these files is through a special Classroom link. The files are not present in “Shared with me” in Drive or searchable in Drive.
Resources
Enable guardians to preview assigned classwork within Google Classroom
About guardian email summaries
Email summary and guardian preview example (Edu Plus SKUs)
Get Classroom email summaries (for guardians)
What are guardian preview links?
| Document Version | Date | Description of Change |
| 1.0 | 8/12/2024 | Original publish |
| 1.1 | 8/13/2024 | Updates for Kyle's thoughts |
| 1.2 | 9/4/2024 | Added 9/4/2024 Office Hours recording |
| 1.3 | 9/9/2024 | Fixed line break in What's new |
| 1.4 | 10/7/2024 | Un-promoted |