Google Workspace Wednesday

Issue #97 / 23-APR-25

Introducing even more high-quality Google Slides templates to elevate your presentations

Last year, Google released a collection of modern, professionally designed templates in Google Slides to help make it easier for users to build presentations. Now, Google is introducing a second wave of templates that cater to a wide range of use cases such as business proposals, product pitches, marketing plans, quarterly reviews, team intros or celebrations, and more. These make it easier for you to get started building impactful presentations for collaborative teams, businesses, educational users, and more.

Developers can now start building with Gemini 2.5 Flash

Google is rolling out an early version of Gemini 2.5 Flash in preview in the Gemini API via Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. Building upon the popular foundation of 2.0 Flash, this new version delivers a major upgrade in reasoning capabilities, while still prioritizing speed and cost. It is Google’s first fully hybrid reasoning model, allowing developers to turn thinking on or off, and set thinking budgets to optimize the balance between quality, cost, and latency. Even with thinking off, developers can maintain the speed of 2.0 Flash and improve performance.

Adding new capabilities to student groups in Google Classroom

Google is introducing improvements to student groups in Classroom that enable teachers to email groups, which is especially useful when educators want to communicate with a sub-section of their class. Teachers can also now sort by groups when grading on the Student work page. This makes it easier to grade more efficiently and understand student performance based on groups. And teachers can now edit student groups when creating an assignment so that they can quickly adapt instruction without having to go to the People page.

Updates for configuring your preferred language for “Take notes for me,” recorded captions, and meeting transcripts

Google recently announced additional language support for “Take notes for me,” recorded captions, and meeting transcripts in Google Meet. You can now set your preferred language for these features from the Calendar invite, and your preferred language will apply to every meeting in a series. You can also set it during the meeting when using Google Meet on Android and iOS devices.

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