Posted by Pepper Lebeck-Jobe, Classroom API Tech Lead
Classroom debuted last year to help teachers and students save time and collaborate with each other, and since then we’ve been working on how to make sure it worked well with other products that educators love and use in their classes.
Starting today, developers can embed the Classroom share button and sign up for the developer preview of the Classroom API. These tools make it easy for developers to seamlessly integrate with Classroom in ways that help teachers and students — like letting teachers create assignments directly from Quizlet, Duolingo, PBS and many other favorites.
By using the API, admins will be able to provision and populate classes on behalf of their teachers, set up tools to sync their Student Information Systems with Classroom, and get basic visibility into which classes are being taught in their domain. The Classroom API also allows other apps to integrate with Classroom.
Until the end of July, we’ll be running a developer preview, during which interested admins and developers can sign up for early access. When the preview ends, all Apps for Education domains will be able to use the API, unless the admin has restricted access.
A few developers have been helping us test the API, and we’re excited to share a few examples of what they’ve built:
Today we’re also introducing the Classroom share button, a simple way for developers – or schools – to allow teachers and students to seamlessly assign or turn-in links, videos and images from another webpage or product.
The share button only requires a few lines of JavaScript, and you can customize the button to meet the needs of your website. When teachers and students click the button, they can quickly share to Classroom without having to leave the site they’re on. More than 20 educational content and tool providers have already committed to integrating the Classroom share button, including:
To get started or learn more about either the API or integrating the share button, visit developers.google.com/classroom. And let us know what you’re building using the #withclassroom hashtag on Twitter or G+. As always, we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback and making sure that we’re addressing top needs. We’ll use the developer community site Stack Overflow to field technical questions and feedback about the Classroom API. Please use the tag google-classroom.
Posted by Iskander Akishev, Software Engineer, Google Calendar
The Google Calendar API allows you to create and modify events on Google Calendar. Starting today, you can use the API to also attach Google Drive files to Calendar events to make them—and your app—even more useful and integrated. With the API, you can easily attach meeting notes or add PDFs of booking confirmations to events.
Here's how you set it up:
1) Get the file information from Google Drive (e.g. via the Google Drive API):
GET https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files { ... "items": [ { "kind": "drive#file", "id": "9oNKwQI7dkW-xHJ3eRvTO6Cp92obxs1kJsZLFRGFMz9Q, ... "alternateLink": "https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/9oNKwQI7dkW-xHJ3eRvTO6Cp92obxs1kJsZLFRGFMz9Q/edit?usp=drivesdk", "title": "Workout plan", "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.presentation", ... }, ... ] }
2) Pass this information into an event modification operation using the Calendar API:
POST https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/primary/events?supportsAttachments=true { "summary": "Workout", "start": { ... }, "end": { ... }, ... "attachments": [ { "fileUrl": "https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/9oNKwQI7dkW-xHJ3eRvTO6Cp92obxs1kJsZLFRGFMz9Q/edit?usp=drivesdk", "title": "Workout plan", "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.presentation" }, ... ] }
Voilà!
You don’t need to do anything special in order to see the existing attachments - they are now always exposed as part of an event:
GET https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/primary/events/ja58khmqndmulcongdge9uekm7 { "kind": "calendar#event", "id": "ja58khmqndmulcongdge9uekm7", "summary": "Workout", ... "attachments": [ { "fileUrl": "https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/9oNKwQI7dkW-xHJ3eRvTO6Cp92obxs1kJsZLFRGFMz9Q/edit?usp=drivesdk", "title": "Workout plan", "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.presentation", "iconLink": "https://ssl.gstatic.com/docs/doclist/images/icon_11_presentation_list.png" }, ... ] }
Check out the guide and reference in the Google Calendar API documentation for additional details.
For any questions related to attachments or any other Calendar API features you can reach out to us on StackOverflow.com, using the tag #google-calendar.
Posted by Janet Traub, Program Manager, Google Apps APIs
The Google Apps Developer team recently hosted a 3-part Hangout On Air series that provided the developer community a unique opportunity to engage with the creative minds behind Google Apps developer tools. Each session covered topics ranging from business automation using Apps Script to Google Calendar API usage to creating Add-Ons for Docs & Sheets.
In the first installment of the series, Mike Harm, the creator of Apps Script and his colleague Kenzley Alphonse delivered a captivating session entitled, “Automate your Business with Apps Script.” Together, they reviewed the various features of Apps Script that can help developers build powerful solutions with Google Apps, such as simple scripts, to easily do a mail merge, export calendars into a Sheet, and to generate regularly scheduled reports.
The series then shifted focus to Google Calendar. In “Creating Calendar Events - Easy and Useful” Ali A. Rad (Product Manager) and Lucia Fedorova (Tech Lead) for Google Calendar API, explained how developers can benefit from injecting content into users’ calendars. In addition, they reviewed different approaches on Google Calendar to create events and meetings, such as API features, email markups, Android intents, Calendar import, and more.
We concluded the series with “How to Increase Traffic to Your Add-On with Google Apps Script.” This session, delivered by Apps Script Product Manager, Saurabh Gupta and Mike Harm, gave developers an in depth understanding of the Add-Ons framework, steps to deployment and strategies to increase adoption of their Docs, Sheets and Forms Add-Ons.
For more information on developing for Google Apps, visit developers.google.com/google-apps
