Google Classroom Pro Tips for Teachers

in this video i'll be giving you my best pro tips to help you make the most out of google classroom this year hey everybody it's sam carrey with new tech classroom and on this channel we show you how to teach with technology to create engaging relevant learning experiences for students a well-optimized learning management system is a critical component of any classroom that uses technology google classroom is a relatively flexible learning management system that gives teachers lots of choice for how they would set it up and that comes with pros and cons so in this video i'll be sharing my best tips for organizing materials in google classroom and also how to do things like optimize the settings and how to teach students how to use your learning management system so that it doesn't become a barrier to learning so my first tip is that you should make sure you're posting absolutely everything to google classroom by everything i mean all the assignments you would pass out to students all the tutorials all the handouts all the announcements everything should go on google classroom so why is this important one reason is that it communicates to students and families that your google classroom is a reliable place to go for all the information that's needed another is that if you reliably post everything to google classroom it virtually eliminates the issue of abstinence students not knowing where to go to find work the issue of students losing work and not knowing how to get an extra copy and it also just helps make your class more accessible in general because all of the resources can be found in a single well-organized location plus an added benefit for you is that you can reuse posts year after year which is ultimately going to save you a lot of time in the long run my second tip is to hide notifications for assignments on the stream if you don't do this the default setting is going to push everything that you post onto the stream so you'll see here that by default the stream would show your announcement as well as assignments you post it it's not hard to envision how incredibly cluttered the stream could get after posting just a few assignments and announcements so to clean this up what you want to do is go up to the settings cog and then scroll down to classwork on the stream and there you'll want to select no notifications so now when we go back to the stream you'll see that the only visible post is an announcement that's going to help clarify for students that announcements are found on the stream and assignments are found on the classwork tab tip number three is to change the settings so that students could leave a comment on one of these announcements but couldn't create their own post on the stream the reasoning for this is that it still allows students to share their voice and add comments but they have to be about a post that you've already created if you don't change this setting then you risk having your stream be cluttered with all kinds of student posts plus your posts and at worst has some inappropriate things posted on the stream that are there for a while before you're able to catch them and take them down so to change this we're gonna go back to the settings scroll down to stream and then change the settings so that students can only comment tip number four is to organize your topics based on date ranges as opposed to categories topics are a necessary tool for keeping everything organized and you should definitely use them again it's both a pro and a con but one issue that can easily come up when you're creating topics is that you create topics based on ideas that you have in your own head as opposed to a logical way of organizing assignments that would be easily predictable for students so one common way people end up organizing their google classroom is by creating different categories like homework projects group work things like that and then you'll also see some google classrooms where topics are created based on subject areas like math science reading etc and the problem with both of those types of organization systems is that it requires students to essentially read your mind they have to figure out on their own where are my new assignments a new assignment might be in math it might be down in reading and it requires students to have to click all around in your google classroom to find what they need i'm a fan of limiting students needing to click around so i think the best way to set up google classroom is instead by using weeks and date ranges so here for example i would set up one topic to be week one and then i would write the date ranges for week one and then i would set up a second topic to be week two and then include the date ranges for week two and since i already have assignments in here all i need to do is drag and drop them to the topic categories where they need to go now notice that i used week one plus a date range here that was intentional and it leads to my fifth tip which is to use your own internal labeling system based on generic numbers rather than date ranges now that might sound a little bit confusing but just bear with me here for a second so the idea here is that i'm thinking ahead because i want to be able to reuse my posts year after year and if all i did was label my assignments based on actual dates then those assignments are going to be very hard to find because the dates are going to shift around so what i want to do is create my own internal labeling system that's predictable and that will more or less stay the same year after year so i already have week one and week two here so what i'm going to do is i'm now going to go in and edit my assignments and i'm going to re-label them so in front of every assignment under the category week one i'm first going to put the number one then i'm also going to add a period and then i'll put a number that represents the day of the week so one corresponds to monday two to tuesday three to wednesday and so on so if i create an assignment here that says 1.2 that means it's an assignment that i gave out week one on tuesday and i'll go ahead and just put those labels in front of all my assignments here as well now of course you don't have to use this exact labeling system but once you have it you can put those numbers on every single assignment not just on the actual label in google classroom and that's going to help you cross check and find documents that you're looking for in google drive or wherever else you have them and although it's an internal labeling system it can also be useful to teach the students because then they can correlate an assignment in google classroom and let's say something is missing in the gradebook they can go back and easily find it based on the label in google classroom tip number six is to create assignment bundles rather than posting lots of different individual posts with assignments and materials so let's say for example that i wanted to have students watch an ed puzzle video to learn about ancient greece and then i wanted to have them fill out a graphic organizer to show what they learned other than creating two separate assignments i'm just going to create a single assignment and then i'll post the ed puzzle video in this assignment as well as the graphic organizer that they're going to use to show what they've learned from the video this is a continuation of the idea of limiting the places where students need to click around to find things my seventh tip is to leave any evergreen resources that you have unassigned to a topic so let's say for example that i have a document here that i want students to be able to access over the course of the whole year that just has a bunch of different tutorials that they can watch so the first thing i'll do is go up here to create and then rather than choose assignment i'm going to choose material then i'll attach that resource document to this material and now rather than choosing a topic i'll just leave it unassigned when we go back to the classwork tab you can now see that that resource document sticks to the top of google classroom so even when we create new topics and post new assignments that resource document is always going to be at the very top and since we posted this as view-only material every single time you make updates to the document those updates will show up and that way you can continue to post new resources that students would need throughout the entire school year tip number eight is to share the direct link to assignments if you're going to create a hyperlink or if you're going to embed that assignment somewhere else if you don't share the direct link and all you do is go up and copy and paste the link to google classroom it's just going to take students to the classwork page as opposed to taking them to the specific assignment instead what you want to do is hover over an individual assignment click on the three dots and then select copy link now when you share that link with students it will take students directly to that specific assignment and if you've set it to make a copy for students it's going to take them to their individual assignment with their individual copy tip number 10 is to use the comment bank in google classroom to save you time when you're grading so the way that this works is that you'll click on an assignment that a student has turned in and then you're going to see that it's going to pull up a grading dashboard there you can leave a comment on a student's work by right-clicking clicking comment and then writing your comment once you add the comment click on the three dots next to the comment and then select add to comment bank now once it's added you can go back highlight another part of this document select comment again and this time you want to type hashtag and then you'll see that the comment you just put in the bank is going to show up so that's one way to create comments on the spot but you can also just pre-write your own comments and add them to the comment bank here so i'm sure you have lots of comments that you would repetitively leave on student work throughout the entire year just pre-write those here in the comment bank and then when you go to add a comment on a student's work and type hashtag you'll see all of the comments that you already added to your comment bank show up now tip number 10 is to install the moat extension so that you can add audio notes directly in google classroom and this actually relates to the previous tip because you can also save your audio notes and i'll show you how to do that too what you're going to do is go to the google chrome web store download moat for free and then once you have it downloaded and installed you'll notice this little purple m show up in any place in google classroom where you would normally be able to type a comment so here in the grading dashboard you could just click that purple m record a comment that you want to leave for a student about their work and when a student logs in they'll be able to listen to your comment now when you click on that comment and then select save as that's going to allow you to save this audio comment in essentially the same exact way that you would with your text-based comment in google classroom so you could pre-record comments or just make them as you go and then reuse them over and over again just another quick way to automate your systems and save you a little bit of time tip number 11 is that you should have somebody else log into your google classroom to see whether or not it makes sense oftentimes when we're setting up our learning management systems we're doing so from our own perspective so it's really important that you get the perspective of somebody else and that they communicate back to you whether or not your organization system is clear or not to really make google classroom as student friendly as possible i'd recommend that you try to get your entire school together to log into each other's google classrooms to make sure that your organizational practices are aligned and that the student experience is relatively similar when they go into different classes and they experience different teachers google classrooms you can imagine if a student has five different classes and has to log into five different google classrooms that all look quite different how confusing that could be and this is also an activity you can do at any point in the year you can still optimize your google classroom mid-year it doesn't just have to be in the beginning a 12th tip is to use a scavenger hunt as a way to introduce students to your google classroom and yes this still applies even if students claim to already know how to use google classroom because there are lots of features they probably don't know about and your google classroom is always going to be slightly different than a previous teachers having students do a scavenge hunt is going to be more engaging and it's actually going to make the learning much more sticky because they're experiencing things and doing things on their own as opposed to just listening or observing as you explain to them how it works so in this sample scavenge activity students would do things like go find an announcement in google classroom post their response then take a screenshot to prove that they had done so they could also do things like figure out how to leave a private comment versus a public comment and how to use the calendar function so that they can get a big picture overview of all their assignments if you're interested in this scavenger hunt as well as a student-facing tutorial explaining to them how to do it those are actually part of our how to get your technology integrated classroom up and running online course that's also part of our academy there's a link to find out more information about that course as well as our academy in the video description below my 13th tip is to make a video tutorial explaining to students and families how your learning management system works so you want to start with the experiential discovery based activity in the scavenger hunt but then you want to follow that up with a tutorial that students and families can re-watch as many times as they need to to learn the key features of your lms the benefit of making your own tutorial is that you probably have your own little idiosyncratic ways that you set up and use google classroom and you can explain all of those but if you'd prefer you can also use a pre-created tutorial we do have one on our copa compliant student channel so i put the link for that in the video description below if you want to just take it and play it for your class regardless of whether or not it's a pre-created one or one you make it's important that you're showing them lots of the different features in google classroom that they probably don't know about so for example on the main dashboard you want to show them how they can find their assignments for all of their classes and how they can see what work is upcoming what work is missing and what work they've already completed you'll also want to show them how to do things like upload external documents to google classroom as part of an assignment how to make sure that they click that turn in button as well as how to leave a private comment or ask a public comment for the whole class my 14th tip is to change the email notification settings on your main google classroom dashboard to do this you'll want to go up to the three lined menu and then scroll down to the settings cog and there you'll see that the default is that you're going to get emails for virtually every single thing that happens in google classroom this is going to result in getting a huge bomb of emails so at minimum i would at least turn off comments on your posts if you don't turn this off and you post an announcement every single time a student responds you'll get a separate email and if you're added as a co-teacher on other teachers classes you'll be getting emails for those classes as well now another strategy here would be to set up a filtering system in gmail so that all your google classroom emails are routed to a particular label that you could just check at one time rather than having them all go into your inbox and if you want to learn more about that as well as other gmail tips then be sure to watch that video above

Channel: New EdTech Classroom

Views: 106,923

Keywords: new edtech classroom, sam kary, new edtech, education technology tutorials, edtech, education technology, how to use technology in the classroom, edtech classroom, thom gibson, edtech tutorials, google classroom tutorial, google classroom pro tips, google classroom for teachers, google classroom tutorial for teachers, google classroom tutorial for teachers 2021, google classroom teachers, how to use google classroom, google clasroom

Id: ybKFOf4xSU8

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021