A recent story: I used to use a really powerful google sheets extension called "chromebookinventory". One evening in mid-August I sat down in my classroom surrounded by wheeled racks of chromebooks only to get a message that this extension was no longer supported. After a few minutes of panic, I remembered GAM. I had used GAM for other tasks in the past and I knew it could handle Chromebook assignment, but I needed to be able to easily integrate a spreadsheet. So...I sat down and spend about 2 hours with GAM, the GAM wiki page, and ChatGPT (for coding) and managed to string together the correct commands for pulling and pushing Chromebook assignments from a Google Sheet. Thanks to GAM and ChatGPT, I'm a much happier tech guy!
Click here to learn how to install GAM (it's a little advanced and mostly designed for folks who work with Google Admin Console)
Google Admin Manager (GAM): The School Administrator's Time-Saver
For Google Workspace for Education administrators, managing thousands of student and staff accounts across a school or district can be a mountain of manual, repetitive work. This is where GAM (Google Admin Manager) becomes an indispensable tool. As a powerful, free, open-source command-line utility, GAM allows admins to perform bulk operations and automate countless time-consuming tasks that the standard Admin Console doesn't easily support.
Instead of clicking through accounts one-by-one, a school admin can use GAM to:
Bulk-manage users (create, update, delete, suspend thousands of accounts from a CSV file).
Automate Google Classroom tasks (verify teachers, bulk-invite or remove guardians).
Efficiently manage Chromebooks (enroll/deprovision devices and set policies in bulk).
Simplify user offboarding (transfer ownership of files and remove departing users from groups).
By leveraging the command line for powerful, scriptable bulk actions, GAM drastically reduces the administrative time spent on routine user and device management, freeing up IT staff to focus on strategic support for teachers and students.