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Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

Posted by Caesar Sengupta, VP, Product Management

The best meetings are face-to-face—we can brainstorm openly, collaborate closely and make faster decisions. But these days, we often connect with each other from far-flung locations, coordinating time zones and dialing into conference calls from our phones. Meetings need to catch up with the way we work—they need to be face-to-face, easier to join, and available from anywhere and any device. Starting today, they can be: Any company can upgrade their meeting rooms with a new Chromebox, built on the Chrome principles of speed, simplicity and security.

Chromebox for meetings brings together Google+ Hangouts and Google Apps in an easy-to-manage Chromebox, making it simpler for any company to have high-definition video meetings. Here are a few highlights:

• Instant meeting room. Chromebox for meetings comes with a blazing-fast Intel Core i7-based Chromebox, a high-definition camera, a combined microphone and speaker unit and a remote control. Set up your entire room in minutes and easily manage all meeting rooms from a web-based management console. All you need is the display in your room, and you’re good to go.
• Simpler and faster meetings. Walk into the room, click the remote once and you’re instantly in the meeting. No more complex dial-in codes, passcodes or leader PINs. Share your laptop screen wirelessly, no need for any cords and adaptors. Integration with Google Apps makes it easy to invite others and add rooms to video meetings, directly from Google Calendar.
• Meetings with anyone, anywhere. Up to 15 participants can join the video meeting from other conference rooms, their laptops, tablets or smartphones. Need to meet with a customer who doesn’t use Chromebox for meetings? That’s easy too—all they need is a Gmail account. You can also connect to rooms that have traditional video conferencing systems using a new tool from Vidyo, and participants who prefer phones can join your meeting with a conference call number from UberConference.

Chromebox for meetings is available in the U.S. today starting at $999, which includes the ASUS Chromebox and everything you need to get going. That means for the same price that companies have typically paid for one meeting room, they'll be able to outfit 10 rooms—or more. CDW and SYNNEX will help bring Chromebox for meetings to customers and resellers, and Chromeboxes from HP and Dell will be available for meetings in the coming months. Later this year, we plan to launch in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand, Spain and the U.K.

Companies like Eventbrite, Gilt, oDesk and Woolworths have been testing Chromebox for meetings, and have told us that they love the simple setup, the ease of use, and being able to see their colleagues in other offices. More importantly, the low price will enable them to extend these benefits to even more employees, rooms and offices. Find out how Chromebox for meetings can help you and your coworkers see eye-to-eye. Happy meetings, everyone!

Posted by Tia Lendo, Google for Education Team

Today is Digital Learning Day - a time to celebrate the incredible ways schools use digital tools to help students learn. As a former 4th grade teacher, I'm constantly blown away by the ways today’s teachers have embraced technology. What is happening in today’s classrooms (collaborative writing, virtual field trips) seemed light years away just 10 years ago.

In honor of Digital Learning Day, we'd like to highlight a few benefits that teachers using Google for Education often mention: more powerful sharing, greater student ownership, new insights into the learning process, and connections beyond the school walls.

More powerful sharing
Google Certified Teachers like education trainer Jack West tell us about the transformative power of sharing with Google Docs. Jack says, “The essence of what we do as 21st Century teachers has been distilled by the visionary educators at Point England, New Zealand. We want our students to (1) learn, (2) create and (3) share. Until digital tools like Google Docs came around, it was difficult to help students share their work beyond the other students in their class.”

Students at Passaic High School work together on a timeline of the French Revolution

Greater student ownership
At East Leyden High School in Chicago, teacher Katie Diebold has found her students are more motivated when using digital tools. In her “Exploring Tech” class, she taught a unit on transportation. In the past she had her students do research and then make posters. But this year she had them use dynamic apps like Stupeflix, a video editing tool in the Chrome Web Store, to deliver their projects. Katie explained, “With Chromebooks we can provide students with more choices in how they do their assignments and learn in flexible ways. Students have a range of different tools they are able to use when completing projects to demonstrate what they have learned.”

At Passaic City Public Schools in New Jersey, the district is also using Google Apps and Chromebooks as a centerpiece of their 1:1 model. Even in the early days of their 1:1 program last year the district was seeing impact. Joshua Koen, District Coordinator of Technology, said that “the most obvious benefit of using Chromebooks at Passaic is that students can take an active part in developing their own lesson plans. Rather than a teacher dictating facts to their class, the students can build their own learning experience, working together to solve problems.”

New insights into student learning
Digital tools give teachers views into the student learning process that were never available before. A few months ago I visited a high school English classroom in which the teacher was “dropping in” on the papers students were writing with Google Docs. We opened up one student’s document and we saw that she had pasted the feedback from her last assignment as well as the scoring rubric into the top of her current paper. The teacher was impressed and immediately added a comment into the document praising her approach.

Posted by Matthew O’Connor, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog)

When you’re building a healthcare-related application, not only do you need the right code and a reliable user experience, sometimes it feels like you need to be a lawyer too. Often, there are several additional steps to take to into consideration. In particular, some healthcare-related applications and services in the United States are required to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. HIPAA establishes standards around privacy, security, and breach notification to protect individually identifiable health information. When building in the cloud, it can be challenging to ensure that you’re complying with these regulations.

To serve developers who want to build these applications on Google's infrastructure, we're announcing support for Business Associates Agreements (BAAs) for our customers. A BAA is the contract between a Covered Entity (you, the developer) and their Business Associate (Google) covering the handling of HIPAA-protected information.

Today’s news joins our other compliance efforts across Cloud Platform and Google Enterprise:

• ISO 27001: ISO 27001 is one of the most widely recognized, internationally accepted independent security standards. After earning ISO 27001 for Google Apps in 2012, we renewed our certification again last year for Google Apps and received the certification for Google Cloud Platform.
• SOC2, SSAE 16 & ISAE 3402: Companies use the SOC2, SSAE 16 Type II audit, and its international counterpart ISAE 3402 Type II audit, to document and verify the data protections in place for their services. We’ve successfully completed these audits for Google Apps every year since 2008 (when the audits were known by their previous incarnation, SAS 70) and we did so again last year for Google Apps and Google Cloud Platform.
• HIPAA: Late last year, we started entering into BAAs to allow Google Apps customers to support HIPAA regulated data. This year we have begun entering into BAAs with our Google Cloud Platform customers.

We’re looking forward to supporting customers who are subject to HIPAA regulations on Google Cloud Platform. If you are a Covered Entity under HIPAA and would like more information, please contact our team.

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Dan Maas, Chief Information Officer for Littleton Public Schools, a school district just south of Denver, Colorado, with 15,000 K-12 students across 13 elementary schools, 4 middle schools, 3 high schools, several alternative programs, a preschool, and 2 charter schools. Check out their case study to learn more.

What motivated Littleton Public Schools to move to Google Apps?
Students today are growing up in a different educational world. Online tools have fundamentally changed how today’s kids learn, interact and work with each other. Moving to Google Apps was a natural step in creating a modern learning environment for our students, because the tools are intuitive and familiar to them. Before using Google Apps, the district was hosting email servers for teachers and staff, but had no collaboration tools and homework was done largely by emailing attachments or making paper submissions, a cumbersome process. Our top priority was to address these challenges.

LPS buildings average 50 years in age, but with Google, the learning is in the cloud.

How is the district using Google Apps now, nearly two years after deployment?
Today, every Littleton staff member, teacher and student in 4th grade and above has a Google Apps account — some schools have even started introducing their kindergartners to the Google tools. Adoption has been incredible across the board: during the 2011-2012 school year, Littleton students created more than 200,000 new Google Docs, and by the spring of 2013 they were averaging over 20,000 each month.

Are there any teachers or departments in particular that have embraced Google Apps in innovative ways?
I'm inspired by literally hundreds of classrooms in our district and how they're using technology to help their students learn. Katie Christie’s 5th grade class at Runyon Elementary School, for example, is using Apps in a particularly impressive way as part of the "Inspired Writing" initiative. The curriculum revolves around a Google Site that houses learning objectives, resources and videos, assignments, student and teacher work. Mrs. Christie posts assignments daily on a Google Calendar, which is embedded into the class’s Google Site and can even be added to a student or parent’s personal Google account. Google Docs lets students do different kinds of creative homework, including using Google Drawings to creating flowcharts for a book report and relying on Presentations to collectively create and speak to a deck about astronomy. It’s validating for us to know that Google holds her work in equally high regard — Mrs. Christie was recognized as a Google Certified teacher last spring.

Even second graders are using Apps for writing projects like pen pals among multiple schools, where kids don't write together several times a year, but several times every day.

Are you seeing any cost savings from using Google Apps?
We’re saving more than $42,000 each year with Apps, since we no longer have to maintain email servers, storage or licensing software. That’s not even including all the time we’re saving our IT team, since they no longer have to waste hours clearing out full email inboxes and resolving downtime issues.

What are you personally most proud of when you look back at how Littleton has changed since moving to Google Apps?
I love seeing how the technology empowers our students. Google Apps are great equalizers – regardless of their home situation, every student has the opportunity to learn with Apps. These tools, paired with the skills students gain in school, are universal and will serve them for the rest of their lives. It’s so inspiring to me and all our teachers to see the students light up and become masters of their own direction.

LPS students create 20,000 Google Docs every month as a normal part of their learning.

One cannot underestimate the power of collaboration. Any given feature set of a software or cloud application will evolve over time, so the specific skills are not as important. But the habits of mind that one develops by working with collaborative documents are truly different than what a 20th century education encouraged. Collaboration means inclusion; inclusion means more brain power applied to a problem; more brain power means better solutions; and better solutions produced by an inclusive process means better overall understanding. What more could any educator hope for?