Starting the Year out with Google Classroom
Welcome back to the new school year! Google has added some fantastic new features including . As you begin to set up your Google Classroom classes for the new school year, you might find these tips helpful:
1 – Archive Last Year’s Classes
Clear the deck for the new year by “Archiving” classes from last year. This will help you and your students from last year. Archiving removes the class thumbnail from the Home Screen. All assignments will remain in Google Drive and all posts are available to “Re-Use” in your new classes. Tip: If students come to your room with classes from last year, they can “unenroll” by clicking the three dots at the top of the class thumbnail from the Home Page. via GIPHY2 – Create NEW Classes for Newly Launched Features
Google rolled out some wonderful new features in mid August including enhanced grading and feedback with comment banks, better organization of assignments by topic with the Classwork page and more! However, these gems are only available with newly created classes. If you got a jump-start by creating your classes earlier this summer, they won’t have the new Classwork page. Remember, you can utilize the “Re-use Post” feature to move any content over. If your class is missing the “Classwork” page, it’s because you created it before these new features were available.
3 – Carefully Title New Classes
The Class title is important and should include the year and block/period to make it easier to identify classes over time. Although “Session” and “Subject” lines appear when you edit the class name, these lines are NOT part included in the Classroom folder in Drive or the Calendar title. Most crucially, when re-using a post, you will only see the class title to select your post from.
4 – Adjust Notification Options
You get enough email! Control your notification options by accessing Settings. You can select exactly which emails you receive by going to Notifications from top left corner of your Classroom Home Menu. via GIPHY5 – Build up Your Comment Bank
One of my favorite new features is the comment bank!! Don’t forget that you can add links to your comments and provide students with resources to access that can help them review concepts. Consider creating a comment bank in a Google Doc or Sheets with colleagues then all of you can easily copy/paste the comments into your own Google Classroom accounts. Multiple comments can be added provided they are separated by a new line (or new row in Sheets).
