Google classroom

Google Classroom

We had a great workshop with Middle School Teachers about Google Classroom.

Let's remember a few takeaways:

• You have to use your School Google Account and have the students use theirs. Google Classroom for schools is separated to within school accounts so that it can be FERPA compliant. You can make Google Classrooms with a regular Google Account but it is not secure.
• Using Google Classroom is not an "all or nothing" proposition - consider using it for a special unit or project to get your own feet wet. One idea was to put study guides for midterms on it.
• Google Classroom can help you go paperless. When you want to share something on Google Classroom. Here is the workflow I would suggest.
  • In your Google Drive make your Google Doc that you want students to fill out or Google Forms to make a quiz.
  • Then in Google Classroom, choose to add from your Drive.
    • You can choose to make a copy for each student or only allow them to view it or to all be able to edit the same document. This gives you a lot of flexibility.
  • I never publish right away - I Save as Draft to make sure that everything is right and send when time is right in class. Students may need to refresh to see the update.
• You can only send something once - so they get an alert on their devices, but if you notice a mistake and change it, it will change for them but they won't get a notification that you made a change.
• Using your Google School Account also will not limit students from the size of files that they can send - it will allow you to use the automatically created classroom folder to store student work.

Online Resources

There a lot of great online resources for using Google Classroom, and many of the best are done by Alice Keeler.

here is a link to her site and her 2018 tutorials.

https://alicekeeler.com/google-classroom/

However know that Google Classroom is constantly changing, so pick a tutorial that is not any older than 2018 or 2019 or you might get confused. To make it easier for you, I watched a few tutorials to find a few good ones if you would like to watch and learn more.

Here is a comprehensive tutorial that is much too long for setting up your classroom for the first time, but it goes over everything but is 38 minutes long. https://youtu.be/q9NIca6Xskk

Locked Mode in Quizzes

Since Locked Mode is a new tool in Google Quizzes and we had some questions - I wanted to let you know that you can only access this from Managed Chromebooks and if someone is using their phone or a desktop, the quiz will not work. Here is a short video that talks about it and the limitations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uARN8GQJ_Y In an interesting note- when I looked for a video on how to use Locked Mode - the 4th result was how to Hack Locked Mode to Cheat - Honestly, I believe you will have better results with trusting your students and setting appropriate ethical behavior expectations!