Google Classroom
Tip: Before you begin a new year with Google Classroom you want to make sure that you clean up your classes from last year. This removes clutter for you and your students!
Google Classroom can be even more powerful with a few tips and strategies to make it efficient and effective.
Google Classroom streamlines the management of student work — announcing, assigning, collecting, grading, giving feedback and returning. It has certainly saved many teachers hours of work.
Without a solid workflow and some strategy, grading digital work can be cumbersome. Google Classroom does make working with student work more efficient — but only if you understand how Classroom works and how to use it to your advantage.
Matt Miller, Ditch that Textbook
Tips for Teachers
Google Classroom has improved vastly over the years, and teachers have learned how to make the most of this flexible assignment manager and communication hub.
Members of the Shake Up Learning community were asked to share their favorite Google Classroom tips. You can find them here:
Google Classroom Cleanup
This video walks you through 5 tips for cleaning up your classrooms including: Returning student work, un-enrolling students,archiving your classes, removing old calendars, and organizing your Google Drive folder
Table of Contents
Getting Started with Google Classroom
Creating your first class
In the Chrome browser, go to classroom.google.com (login with your spsdme account if you haven't already). Select "teacher" when asked if this is a student or teacher.
Click on the "+" and create a new class.
Name your class (use consistent naming convention) IN THE "SECTION" FIELD ADD YOUR (TEACHER) NAME
Change the theme (optional).
What's in my classroom?
In your Classroom you have 4 sections:
Stream: where you communicate news and class announcements (you can enable student responses to announcements)
Classwork: the main section that you will use as the heart of your class. Here you will post assignments and questions, and can organize them by topics for students.
People: students and co-teachers that belong to your class
Grades: If you choose to use Google Classroom grading - keep in mind you will also have to post them in IC as well.
Create assignments
When creating assignments you have the option to create ones for your whole class, a copy for each student or individual students. You can attach docs, files, videos and can schedule the assignments to arrive at a later date and time. Naming conventions are critical for future organization, so naming your files as "#+3 digits+assignment name" is the recommended format. Check out the video for more.
Tech Tip: Assignment organizational tips from Shake Up learning (these are suggestions, but choose only what works for you!)
Use topics for better organization
Creating topics is like having your course divided into modules and can help you with organization. When you create topics, you will need to post something under the topic before your students see the topic. You can re-organize your topics after they have been created.
Tech Tips:
Have a topic/section called Classroom Materials for references materials like syllabus website links, grading policies, etc
Having a topic called "Today" or "This week" to point kids to this section to help students. (optional)
Posting to the classroom Stream
The Stream is a place where you can post announcements and share class information with students. You can also enable student comments so that students can respond to a question posted by you, respond to each other or ask questions themselves. Keep in mind that monitoring becomes important when you enable student posting to the whole class :-)
Managing your Classroom notifications
Google Classroom notifications can be helpful or overwhelming - completely depends on the person and how y set up your notifications. This video will take you through managing the notifications in a way that works best for you. This is for teachers - students should check the Student Resources section of this website and parents should check the Parents page.
Organizing your classes (move, copy, archive & delete)
You can move, copy, archive and delete your Google Classrooms. This video shows you how to use some of these organizational tools
Add a comment bank to use when giving feedback
As teachers we frequently use consistent comments when giving feedback. In Google Classroom you can create a comment bank and pull your comments from there when giving feeback to your students.
Use “Questions” in Google Classroom to create online discussions
In this tutorial, we are looking at how to create a discussion board in Google Classroom.
Did you know that Google reads every piece of teacher feedback ? If you have feedback on things that could improve your Google Classroom experience. click on the "?" icon in your classroom and provide Google with your suggestion(s).
Best Practices
Add the teacher name to class section
Number your assignments (example: "Summer Essay #001)
Use a daily or weekly checklist - Weekly is better in hybrid/remote learning
Weekly topics to organize content
Create a "Resource" topic - keep it at the top of the page for easy access
Make GC an "one stop shop" - students should be able to get all information without having to click on many links to go elsewhere
Bonus Tips
Bookmark the Classwork page - you will spend most of your time on the Classwork page
Use "Command + F" to find things in GC
Customize the stream
Customize notifications
Customize your class header with Google Draw