Finishing Up the Year in Google Classsroom (June)

1. Return all student work in each class. This makes sure that student retain their ownership of all documents/projects for use in Student-Led Conferences, Portfolios and more.
2. Edit each class to make sure the school year is added to the title. Doing this makes it easy to re-use posts for next year.
3. Archive this year's classes. This prevents students from doing any additional work in that class and teachers from accidentally using an old class when making assignments for next year.
4. Begin reflecting on assignments. Create a list of ones that worked well, ones you won't reuse and ones you'll change when reusing.
   • A helpful way to do this is to create a "Keep for Next Year" classroom (which only you will use) and use the re-use post option to start populating the class with posts you'll use again. You can even edit them and make them better, all before you set up classes with students for the next year.

Getting Google Classroom Ready for the New School Year (August)

1. Create a Google class for each section of students you will teach (even if its the same class content for each section). Don't worry, you won't have a problem assigning the same thing to multiple sections. Creating separate classes ensures that grading and giving feedback is efficient as well as giving the option to customize assignments for each section depending on student groupings. This also ensures that GoGuardian can be used correctly.
   • For teachers in 7-12, it's recommended you put the Bell # in the title.
   • For teachers in 5-6, it's recommended you put the homeroom teacher's name in the title.
   • For teachers in K-4, it's recommended that you make a class for each core subject with your name in the title. It's also a good idea to make a separate ELA RTI & MATH RTI class that shares students in the whole grade & includes all team teachers as co-teachers.
2. Add any co-teachers so they aren't duplicating classes for students. This helps students and staff have trim Google Classroom pages that don't have a lot of duplication.
3. Start scheduling assignments, posting learning targets and adding class documents. Class documents, like syllabi, and course expectations, can be posted ahead of time under 'Class Materials' in the 'About' section of each class. You can schedule posts of your learning targets to coincide with certain weeks, etc. If you are going to re-use assignments from last year, start setting them up by scheduling or saving them as drafts in your new classes.

Google Drawings

Google Drawings is the powerhouse that Publisher promised to be, but never really got there. Whereas mostly teachers used Publisher to create 'decorated' worksheets and other items for their classrooms, its tools were rarely used by students to communicate learning.

Fast-forward to today's Google Drawings. Students can use Google Drawings to show their work in math, document experiments or explain processes in science, illustrate facts and fiction in ELA and create biographical posters and timelines in Social Studies.

One of the recent trends used by organizations to publish findings is the visualization of research data and facts in an infographic. Students need to probe their understanding of concepts deeply if they are going to produce infographics that communicate a knowledge to others.

Want to learn more about the process or get started? Click this link to go to the FCSD Tech Tools listing for Google Drawings. [only available to users within FCSD]

Ten Ways to Use Google Drawings in the Classroom

7 ways to use Google Drawings in your Classroom

10 Ways to Use Google Drawings for Learning

Dan's rating:

• 💻💻💻💻💻 (out of 5)
• I would frequently use this in my instruction.

Highlights:

• extremely flexible drawing/publishing tool
• collaboration
• works with Google Classroom assignments
• variety of outputs (digital, print, embed, publish to the web)

Learning Curves/Roadblocks for the teacher:

• start simple, Google Drawings can do A LOT
• don't just give them the information, make the students CREATE the information
• have students share what they've discovered about Google Drawings to learn from each other
• understand that Google Drawings is a drawing tool, not a paint tool (manipulate pixels, etc. like Pixlr or Photoshop)