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Using Google Classrooms, Drive, or Hangouts/Meet with Circle

Google apps are unusual in that many Google services overlap with each other. If you are trying to enable Google Classroom, Google Drive, or Google Hangouts, please use the guide below to get yourself up and running with these services.

Allowing Google Classrooms, Drive (Docs, Sheets, etc.), or Hangouts for a profile

  1. Open the profile for which you'd like to enable Google Classroom.
  2. Tap Filters.
  3. Make sure Google Services and any other Google apps you'd like to load are set to Allowed in the list.
  4. Tap to open the Categories section and ensure that Science & Technology, Business, Chats & Forums, and Education are set to either Allowed or Unmanaged. 
  5. Finally, review the other Apps, Websites, and Categories in this family member's Filter settings and ensure that everything else is still set as expected.

For some more assistance on how to change Filter settings, check out our Filters Feature Guide.

Why are these steps necessary?

It may not seem intuitive to you that these steps would be required, so we'd like to offer a bit more explanation for what is happening here.

These Google services utilize a wide variety of underlying tools in order to make them work. For example, the Google Classroom service shares the same resources like Google's video chat service, but each of these is classified by Circle in a different way. To allow one, the other must be allowed as well.

Setting up additional Custom Filters

Want to make sure all Google Docs, Hangouts, Meet, or Classroom or links work to load? You may need to add the additional domains as Allowed / Unmanaged using a Custom Filter.

  • meet.google.com
  • classroom.google.com
  • hangouts.google.com
  • googlevideo.com
  • docs.google.com
  • googledocs.com
  • forms.google.com
  • edu.google.com 
  • accounts.google.com

You can also use Custom Filters to make sure other sites load correctly by tapping on the site in History >> Visited or Filtered and selecting Set as Allowed or Set as Unmanaged.

Last Resort

As a last resort you can set up google.com as a Custom Filter that is Unmanaged. This will make sure any websites that use the top level domain of google.com (meet.google.com, classroom.google.com, etc.) will always be available, even during a Bed Time, Focus Time, Time Limit being reached, etc. To do so:

  1. Open the Circle app and then tap on the profile you'd like to create that Custom Filter for.
  2. Tap on Filter.
  3. Tap on the Custom Filter icon in the top right corner of the app.
  4. Add google.com as url.
  5. Tap on Allowed twice to switch it to Unmanaged.

Helpful related articles

  • Circle Feature Guide: Filter Settings
  • Filter Level Defaults
  • Filter Popular Apps, Websites, or Categories
  • Managing or filtering YouTube with Circle
  • Using Microsoft Skype, Teams, Office, or Sharepoint with Circle
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