Google Classroom email summaries for guardians

[cbsc]

We recently set up Google Classroom email summaries for our parents, and in most circumstances the parents received the initial invitation and accepted without issue.

 

However a number of parents have reported that they didn't receive the email.

 

We have asked that they check their SPAM folder, but they advise that the email's definitely not arrived.

 

There appears to be a pattern, and in most circumstances the parents are using either a Hotmail or Yahoo email account.

 

Has anyone else experienced a similar issue, and were you able to resolve it?

 

I read somewhere that perhaps the parent may also have a Gmail account, and that it is somehow linked to their Hotmail or Yahoo account. This isn't something we have managed to ascertain yet.

 

Thank you in advance.

[Ditto]

It's a couple of years ago, but I definitely saw this issue. From memory, our logs showed the email being received by Hotmail/Yahoo, but from there I don't recall finding an explanation. I think some did show up in SPAM, but I'm sure some were filtered out by Hotmail/Yahoo but not reported - effectively they just disappeared. I'm not sure I recall a solution, but you might want to consider providing parents with advice to white list your school domain - the challenge is that there are so many email clients, it can be tricky covering all scenarios.

[dhicks]

Has anyone else experienced a similar issue, and were you able to resolve it?

 

Just had a third parent with issues, out of parents for 400-ish pupils over the past 6 months or so, so not a large amount. It's tricky to pinpoint what the issue is - there's always parents who don't quite get what they're being asked, or can't figure out where their spam folder is, etc, but this parent seems to have checked all the obvious bits and just seems to not be receiving the summary emails.

 

I read somewhere that perhaps the parent may also have a Gmail account, and that it is somehow linked to their Hotmail or Yahoo account. This isn't something we have managed to ascertain yet.

 

Hmm - something to check, this is an @Outlook.com address we're dealing with here.

 

My solution so far has been to create an internal email address and forward emails on to the parent from there, which seems to work okay. Not ideal, and not hugely scaleable, but should work okay for smaller amounts.

[paulkerton]

If they are signed in to a Google or G Suite account when they receive the email, it will attach to that particular email address for that account. Perhaps it's that?

Make sure you tell them to sign out before accepting invites.

[cbsc]

Thank you everyone for your replies so far.

 

Just to confirm, the issue is that some parents are not receiving the initial email inviting them to receive weekly summaries.

 

We have gone to a Classroom and chosen "remove guardians" for the parent in question, and "invite guardians" to re-invite them. This has made no difference, and the parent reports again not receiving the initial invitation email.

 

This has affected in the region of 30-40 parents so far, all of which that have Hotmail or Yahoo email accounts, although perhaps many haven't reported the issue yet. I have asked some of the parents whether they have Google/Gmail accounts, but haven't heard back yet.

@Ditto you mention logs showing the emails being received. Could you point me in the direction of where I would find these logs? As far as I can tell, the emails that are generated via Google Classroom (initial invitations and weekly summaries) are not logged in the usual "email log search" section of the admin console.

@dhicks that sounds like a good workaround. We probably have too many affected parents to make that viable at this stage.

@paulkerton that's interesting, thank you. I am trying to ascertain the unique circumstances for a few select parents so I can pin-point what's going on, and await their replies. One of the questions I have asked is whether they have a Google/Gmail account, and if so whether they are signed in on the device they use to check their Hotmail/Yahoo accounts.

[Ditto]

Hmm - odd that there not in the normal logs, even if under a system generated user. I wonder there is anything in the Vault? @paulkerton may have a point. I have seen issues where a parent has a google account linked to an ancient email address that they had forgotten about. What I have discovered is your problem is far from unique and apart from repeated retries, there doesn't seem to be any indication of a resolution - see https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/thread/36958097?hl=en

[BFCIT]

We also have this issue, in particular effecting hotmail.com accounts, hotmail.co.uk appears to work fine, email not in spam/junk folders, invitation simply not arriving. I've resorted to asking the office to request a non hotmail.com email address from parents.

[dhicks]

If they are signed in to a Google or G Suite account when they receive the email, it will attach to that particular email address for that account. Perhaps it's that?

 

Ah ha - yes, could well be in this particular case, there's an email address listed in the Gaurdian request data output from GAM that doesn't match the address we sent the request to. I've removed the original Guardian request, I'm waiting for the parent to get back to me so I can create a new request and have them walk through the setup process on Googel Meet so I can see what's happening.

[paulkerton]

Ah ha - yes, could well be in this particular case, there's an email address listed in the Gaurdian request data output from GAM that doesn't match the address we sent the request to. I've removed the original Guardian request, I'm waiting for the parent to get back to me so I can create a new request and have them walk through the setup process on Googel Meet so I can see what's happening.

 

I will be honest. I did create a big reply to this a few days ago, and I even did screenshots with GAM sheet exports, but I shut down the computer at the end of the day before I hit reply.

Seems like I didn't need to though, as you are already on top of GAM!

 

I usually send an email out a day or two before I do a mass invite to let them know about that issue. Parent using G Suite at work wondering why they're suddenly getting their kid's information to the plumbing business.

[dhicks]

I'm waiting for the parent to get back to me so I can create a new request and have them walk through the setup process on Googel Meet so I can see what's happening.

 

Yes, turns out they had an outlook.com email address but were logged in to Google with a GMail account, and it turns out if you're already logged in Google doesn't seem to give you a just-use-this-email-address option, it assumes you want to use the Google account you're logged in with. All sortable by starting the process in a private / incognito browser window.

 

Of course, I was sorting out the above at 8:30am this morning when Outlook.com conked out, which added some difficulties...

[cbsc]

Yes, turns out they had an outlook.com email address but were logged in to Google with a GMail account, and it turns out if you're already logged in Google doesn't seem to give you a just-use-this-email-address option, it assumes you want to use the Google account you're logged in with. All sortable by starting the process in a private / incognito browser window.

 

Of course, I was sorting out the above at 8:30am this morning when Outlook.com conked out, which added some difficulties...

 

Interesting!

 

Just to clarify (from your experience)...

 

Google Classroom is configured to send emails to an outlook.com email address. In this case the parent has a Gmail account that's signed in on the device they check their emails on (presumably a smart phone), and subsequently the email is getting delivered/diverted to their Gmail account as opposed to their outlook.com account? Is this for the initial invitation email (which is the problem we are experiencing) or the weekly/daily summaries?

[dhicks]

Google Classroom is configured to send emails to an outlook.com email address. In this case the parent has a Gmail account that's signed in on the device they check their emails on (presumably a smart phone), and subsequently the email is getting delivered/diverted to their Gmail account as opposed to their outlook.com account?

 

I think so, yes - I was connecting to the parent's laptop via a Meet session and intructing them what to type / click, there wasn't a chance to rummage around and figure out exactly what was going on. They were initially using a smartphone, as you suggested, which would mean they would follow a link from their (Outlook.com) email into a browser window already logged in to a GMail account. I'm pretty sure we've had several other parents do this with no problem - the emails just turn up in their GMail inbox, all's fine.

 

Is this for the initial invitation email (which is the problem we are experiencing) or the weekly/daily summaries?

 

I think the parents were getting the initial invitation email okay, they just weren't getting (or couldn't find) the summary emails. We set the summaries to come daily, we'll see if they start arriving okay this week.

[paulkerton]

I now have a parent who says they didn't receive the invite from an outlook.com address

It was definitely sent.

I don't want to be suspicious here, but if we're finding a commonality here, it's either people who have outlook.com addresses all have issues checking their email or more likely.... you know...

[ITGuyNW]

We need to setup email summaries for parents at some point. I can't wait for that..

[jthompson]

Hmm - odd that there not in the normal logs, even if under a system generated user.

 

I don't think the invitation emails are sent from your domain, they're sent from some kind of Google owned domain like classroom.google.com (as are the guardian summaries themselves and things like Google Drive notifications), so you won't see them passing through your G Suite email logs and you therefore won't see any bounces, either.

[Ditto]

I now have a parent who says they didn't receive the invite from an outlook.com address

It was definitely sent.

I don't want to be suspicious here, but if we're finding a commonality here, it's either people who have outlook.com addresses all have issues checking their email or more likely.... you know...

 

Absolutely I saw this a while back. Not one gmail account holder had an issue, always outlook or hotmail.

[paulkerton]

We need to setup email summaries for parents at some point. I can't wait for that..

If you have GAM setup, and you can get an MIS export that has student email address in a column, and parent email address in another column, then its fairly quick to do.

 

If you can't get those columns together from your MIS, then it may take you some time.

Just let them know it's going to arrive before it does, else you'll have panic set in with parents thinking it's someone attempting to hack. I speak from experience on that one.

[the_quick]

We use Salamander for these. Started this year. And we have share of above problems:

 

1. Parent receive invitation to account we hold on sims, but accept it on a different account. This is usually cause by having to emails account opened on same browser, especially when it is Chrome and some is signed in with a Google account - this will take over. We just delete the guardian on one google classroom and this removes from all the classes in Google Classroom, adding to one class does the same in reverse - so not a big issue

 

2. We have seen some parents not receiving invitation when it went on mass, but they did when we did it manually. I wonder if hotmail start blocking google domain classroom.google.com - as it has seen lots of emails coming from this domain.

3. Some parents that have 2 children in our school don't see summaries for one of the children, after manually resending invitation it works

4. General problems with parents being bit confused.

[cbsc]

We use Salamander for these. Started this year. And we have share of above problems:

 

1. Parent receive invitation to account we hold on sims, but accept it on a different account. This is usually cause by having to emails account opened on same browser, especially when it is Chrome and some is signed in with a Google account - this will take over. We just delete the guardian on one google classroom and this removes from all the classes in Google Classroom, adding to one class does the same in reverse - so not a big issue

 

2. We have seen some parents not receiving invitation when it went on mass, but they did when we did it manually. I wonder if hotmail start blocking google domain classroom.google.com - as it has seen lots of emails coming from this domain.

3. Some parents that have 2 children in our school don't see summaries for one of the children, after manually resending invitation it works

4. General problems with parents being bit confused.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

We also are using Salamander for the Guardian invites.

 

Regarding your second point, we have also manually removed guardians and then invited them again, to no avail. I have done this for a number of parents, and none of them have received the invites.

[cbsc]

I have just got off the phone to Google Cloud Support, and received a follow up email.

 

They have confirmed that the issue is on their end "where the invites for Guardians are not being generated by our system for certain address and we are currently investigating this further at the moment trying to determine a root cause".

[ITGuyNW]

If you have GAM setup, and you can get an MIS export that has student email address in a column, and parent email address in another column, then its fairly quick to do.

 

If you can't get those columns together from your MIS, then it may take you some time.

Just let them know it's going to arrive before it does, else you'll have panic set in with parents thinking it's someone attempting to hack. I speak from experience on that one.

 

Our MIS doesn't have pupils email addresses in.

 

There's a few different systems I need to sync up for it to run smooth. Just finding the time..

[dhicks]

Does Google Classroom send out an email summary if there's been no activity over the week / day? I have a couple of parents who aren't getting any updates, I'm wondering if that's because emails are getting lost somewhere or if there are simply no emails being sent out at the moment (pupils are in school, there probably isn't much Google Classroom activity at the moment).

[paulkerton]

Does Google Classroom send out an email summary if there's been no activity over the week / day? I have a couple of parents who aren't getting any updates, I'm wondering if that's because emails are getting lost somewhere or if there are simply no emails being sent out at the moment (pupils are in school, there probably isn't much Google Classroom activity at the moment).

If there is nothing to update parents/guardians on, it doesn't send an email.

[the_quick]

I think either the invite emails are not being sent or sky email system is blocking those.

 

I have a parent I have sent invite twice already @sky.com - apparently no emails received. So it makes me wonder.

[dhicks]

Does Google Classroom send out an email summary if there's been no activity over the week / day?

 

Gah - looks like we'd run in to this problem:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/215738-allowing-guardian-summaries-administrator-google-classroom.html

 

By default, depending on what type of school you are, Google either enables Classroom summaries (junior schools) or doesn't (senior schools). I think we /were/ classed as a junior school, so previously just adding guardians to pupil accounts got summary emails sent out to parents, but at some point our status has changed (either in the general kerfuffle at the start of lockdown or because we have now opened a senior school), so this year's batch of teacher-created Classrooms don't have Guardian Summaries enabled by default, hence parents who'd completed the Guardians sign-up still weren't getting anything coming through.