As we enter our 5th week of working from home / teaching from home, I wanted to take a few moments to remind teachers of 5 things that might make your life a bit easier when using Google Classroom as the information hub for you at home learners.
Turn off Classwork on the Stream Notifications
Your students will find it easier to find your assignments if you have them organized by topic on the classwork page. If you are posting only announcements in the stream your students will find it easier to find them.
Click on the gear (top right in classroom) and set Classwork on the stream to “Hide Notifications”
Make each task set for students an assignment
Resist the urge to put all the work you want your students to do into a single post in the Stream. If you create an assignment with due dates then the students will be able to use the ToDo list to see all the work and when it is due.
Assignments are more than just a place to turn in work. You can create an assignment with a due date for offline tasks as well. For example you could instruct the students to read pages 78-86 in the textbook and once completed they click the “Mark As Done” button.
Organize your Classwork with Weeks as Topics
When you create topics for the stream it allows the students to more easily find their classwork. Topics don’t have to be Topics! they can be week names or whatever you want them to be. You can drag and drop topics and re-order them as well.
If you already have topics such as Poetry or Music created, don’t worry just add your weekly topics at the top of your classwork page (most recent week at the top). Your students can use the topic menu on the left column to show only the topic they are looking for.
Post assignments from other websites directly to Google Classroom
One of the easiest ways to post content for your students into Google Classroom is to use either the Share To Classroom button that is commonly found with other social media buttons or if you don’t see that option you can use the Share to Classroom Chrome Extension. You can create an assignment, ask a question and insert it into your class all without leaving the website you browsing.
Include a Parent Corner in your Assignments
Your parents have taken on a greater role in the instruction of your students, so why not give them some information about the assignment in the description. In her book Google For Littles, Author Alice Keeler suggests something called “Parents Corner” which is a section in each assignment that explains to the parents how to help the students with that assignment.
Hopefully these tips will help you make better use of Google Classroom for your students as we go though these last few weeks of the 2019-2020 school year.
Google Certified Trainer