Enabling Students to Print to the Printer in Your Room

Can students print to your room printer from the MacBook or Chromebook carts? The answer is yes, after a fashion.  But public printing isn't “click-to-print-easy”, alas.  You'll have to enable Google Cloud Print to some printer to which you have network access, and a number of steps are involved.  Here's the skinny:

• The Google Chrome browser must be installed on the teacher’s machine.
• The teacher must first log onto their Google Organizational Apps account.
• The teacher locates Cloud Print under Chrome’s Advanced Settings (towards the bottom).
• The teacher clicks a button to register with Google the printer they wish to share. [When they do this, Chrome automatically detects and displays the printers to which the teacher has access.]
• The teacher clicks a button to Manage the registered printer.
• The teacher changes the Share status of the printer to “Anyone with the link has access”, and copies the link that Google generates and provides.
  
• The teacher posts the link in a location where students can find it, such as on the teacher's page in the Computer Lab Portal, or in the teacher's locker on their Professional Page in SchoolLoop.
  

Students may then send documents to the shared printer as follows:

• First, they must log into their Google Apps for Education account.
• Next, they find and click the link that the teacher shared.
• Then, they click the blue “Add Printer” button.

At this point, any Google Drive document which the student has created will print pretty much as normal, via control-P / command-P or the File / Print menu command. Unfortunately, it takes further finesse to print the following common document types:

• Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files. [You can upload these to Google Drive and try opening them in a Google app to convert them, however, and generally get acceptable results.]
• Clip-art or photos downloaded from the web.
• Anything else non-Google.

To print the above:

• Student must navigate to google.com/cloudprint.
• Student clicks the red Print button.
• Student selects "Upload File to Print".
• Student chooses the file on their computer which they wish to print.
• Student selects the shared printer (displayed now in a dialog box).
• Student configures any desired printing options.
• Student clicks the blue “Print” button.

Important Notes:

• A default limit of 15 pages per user per day applies to public printing. (The teacher can raise or lower this limit, if desired, when sharing out the printer. Probably 5 pages is a good limit for our students.)
• Document reproductions by Google’s print-drivers-in-the-cloud don’t always match documents printed directly. For example, I have seen significant spacing and orientation problems in cloud-printed Excel and PowerPoint files. Since Cloud Print is still in beta testing, perhaps we can look forward to better fidelity soon.