How to Organize Google Classroom | EASY Tutorial

hello there and welcome back to my channel if you are new here my name is michelle 4a and i'm a fourth grade teacher in maryland the number one question I have been asked by teachers since we started teaching online due to köppen 19 is how do you keep Google classroom organized so today's video is going to be all about keeping your Google classroom organized and concise and clear for both yourself and your students now obviously this is a fake Google classroom page that I created but all of the tips and tricks I am showing you I am personally using in my own Google classroom let's start with this stream page as you can see when you start posting announcements and posting assignments and posting materials it can get cluttered very very quickly so I'm going to show you a quick tip that you can use in order to keep it more concise and organized so I'm gonna go up to the gear icon which is my settings and I'm gonna come down to the general settings now first of all when it comes to your stream you have a choice you can be the only one to post on there along with any other Co teachers that you have in the class or you can allow students to post on the stream as well I've done it both ways and I can say that I no longer allow my students to post on the stream page so if you do not want students to post on the stream page you would want to click here and then choose students can only comment that will allow them to comment on posts you have made but they cannot create their own posts next let's talk about class work on the stream I personally like to use my stream page for just announcements and reminders but I don't want students to have it all clogged up with their assignments as well because those are also found under the class work tab so instead of showing condensed notifications I actually like to change this to high notifications this is going to eliminate all of those assignment posts and only have announcements you'll see the difference when I hit save now on my stream page it's just text announcements or pictures that I've attached but none of the assignments are on there and it just keeps things a lot more clean for students now let's move over to the class work tab this is where all of your assignments and materials and quizzes and things that you post for students is housed now it's all fun and games until you start posting a lot of assignments and then very quickly it becomes overwhelming I just put in like two weeks worth of assignments and as you can see it looks like just one really long list and it's very difficult to navigate so I recommend creating topics in order to keep these assignments organized there are so many different ways you could organize them I know some teachers who organize them by subject areas I know some teachers who organize them by the day of the week personally I used to organize it by either subject or sometimes I even had separate Google classrooms for my different subjects and then I would organize by like category or like unit but since we have shifted to online teaching and I'm pushing out all of my assignments through Google classroom I am choosing to organize by the week I personally think it's easiest if students can see all of their assignments for the week in one place and they can look back at last week's assignments or look at the current week that's what works for me and that's what I'm going to show you but that is not the only way to organize things in order to create a topic I'm gonna click on create and then choose topic and then I'm just typing the title so since I'm organizing mine by weeks I'm gonna do week of four twenty seven two five one and I'm going to click Add this is going to put it at the bottom of my page underneath all of these assignments since those assignments are not currently organized into topics but you will notice that I also put the topic over here on the side the great thing is once you create these topics you or students can click on the topic and it will bring you just to those assignments that's why I choose to do it by week because that way each week my students can click on the week and it will take them to all of their assignments I'm gonna go back to all topics and because I play two weeks worth of assignments I'm gonna add another topic so this time it's going to be week of five four to five eight and I'm going to click Add and you will notice this one is now on top of the other one what I really like about this is every new week when I create a new topic it's going to put it at the top and that's where most of my students are looking for their assignments so for me that just works really well now because I have all these assignments that are created and they're not currently organized into the topics I'm going to show you how to do that so I'm going to start here at the bottom this was the first assignment I created reading practice lesson 1 so I'm gonna click these three ellipses and I'm going to select edit and over on this side you will see topic when I click on this I can now choose which week I want this to go under so I'm going to choose week of four twenty seven two five one and then I'm going to click Save and you will notice it will now move that assignment underneath of that week so I'm going to quickly go through and reorganize all of these into the separate weeks all right so now we've gone through and organized the first week of assignments into that topic but I did want to show you another way that you can organize the assignments into the topic instead of going through edit this is a lot faster her but if you have a long list of assignments it can get kind of tricky as you're clicking and dragging you can actually click on any assignment hold down the click and then drag it into a topic this is a game changer and makes it super super easy so I'm gonna go ahead and just drag the rest of these under that topic and then I will be good to go now I always like to stay about a week ahead so I'm gonna go ahead and create a topic for the next week so again create topic and this time it's going to be a week of 511 to 515 and I'm going to click Add now you will see there's a little blurb that says students can only see topics with published posts I like to schedule my post in advance and if I schedule the whole next week of assignments my students will not see that topic or the assignments until they actually post so on my page I can see them but my students can't and again now that it's organized I just want to show you this one more time I can click on the topic on the left-hand side and then I can view all of the assignments and that makes it really really easy not only for you but also for students now topics will show up to ten assignments at a time which for me works perfectly because I am posting two assignments a day Monday through Friday for a total of ten assignments but if you have more than ten assignments in a topic it will have a view more button and then you can click on that to see the rest of the posts let me show you what that looks like quickly if you look at week of four twenty seven two five one you will see all of the assignments are showing but if I click and drag this one there now when I scroll down I have the view more button and I just click on it to show the rest of the assignments now personally when I look at this it looks a lot better but it's still not good enough because I feel like it's still overwhelming for students so what I like to do is actually add in the day of the week and the day that I am posting the assignment that way students can tell if it's a new assignment or one that's already been posted so let me show you what I mean I'm going to come down to week afore twenty seven two five one and this reading lesson is what I would post on a Monday so I'm going to click the three ellipses again and go to edit and in the title I'm going to type Monday for 27 reading lesson one practice and click Save I'm going to go ahead and do this for the rest of that topic just so you can see what it looks like afterwards [Music] so now I have the day of the week and the date that I'm posting the assignment I personally think that it looks a lot easier to follow than the one that's above it but there's still room for improvement you could also add in emojis now what moe G's can be used for a lot of different things first you could actually use emojis to color code you could color code by the day of the week you could color code by the type of assignment or the subject area the options are truly limitless you also could use emojis to designate the subject you could use a pencil emoji for writing or you could use a book emoji for reading finally you can use emojis to be able to show students which assignments are going to be graded I know personally we are posting practice assignments for students and then graded assignments for students so in order to bring their attention to the ones that are going to be graded I can actually put in an emoji now the website I use for this is emoji copy comm it is a free website you don't have to create an account in order to use it I will link it for you down in the description box and not only is it a website but it also is a Chrome extension when you open it up you will see all of the emojis that you have on your phone you can even click the categories up at the top you can change the skin tone and you can even change the size of the emojis whether you want them to be small medium or large I have mentioned color coding if you scroll down to this symbol section you will see there are colored circles and there are colored squares you could use these in order to categories the days of the week so for example maybe Monday is red Tuesday is orange Wednesday is yellow and so on that way when students see the color they start to associate it with that day of the week I also mentioned you could use emojis to show this subjects so if you scroll up to the object section this is great for showing different subject areas because there are rulers or an abacus for math there's no books and pencils and books and all kinds of things you could use to show the subject areas I personally love to use emojis to be able to show which assignments are going to be graded there's two different emojis that I like this one is the exclamation mark so if you come back to the symbol section this red exclamation mark right here is great for getting students attention and then if you scroll up to the travel and places section you will see this cop or police car light and that is also a great way to get students attention I'm going to use the red exclamation mark now in order to add this emoji into Google classroom I'm just going to click on it and you will notice that it gets added to the bar down at the bottom and then I'm going to click copy now I'm going to come back to my Google classroom tab and I'm going to paste it into the title of the assignment so let's take this graded one up at the top I'm going to click the three ellipses go to edit and now I'm going to paste it in the front of the title so when I click Save you will notice that that red exclamation mark is now in the front of the assignment now obviously the emojis are meaningless if you don't tell your students what they actually mean so my best recommendation is for you to actually record a tutorial video for your students going through Google classroom and showing them how to access different things and what different things mean I've thought about creating my own tutorial and posting it so you all could just refer students to that but the problem is we all organize our Google classrooms differently and they all look different so my tutorial would not necessarily be helpful for your students but you can use screencastify or QuickTime or Google meat or zoom or any other screen recording program and you can just create a tutorial for your students show them around your Google classroom things I would definitely point out to students are accessing the classwork tab to see all of their assignments showing them how to view one topic at a time telling them what your emojis mean if you are choosing to include them and also the upcoming section if you don't know what I'm talking about for the upcoming section if you go back to the stream page over the left-hand side you will see a box that says upcoming now this is only going to tell students about assignments that are due soon which they can get behind if they don't realize there's other assignments that aren't popping up there so make sure they know how to go to the class work tab but if they click view all it will actually bring up a list of all of their assignments the teacher view does look different than the student view mine is showing how many assignments are turned in and how many I have graded and returned but on the student side it will show them which assignments they have completed which assignments have been graded and which assignments are still missing now if you are a teacher I highly recommend using this part of Google classroom you can also get to it by clicking on the menu which is the three horizontal bars on the left side and then clicking on to do this will allow you to grade your assignments so much faster because instead of clicking through every assignment on the classwork tab you can see them all in one line and it just makes things so much cleaner so that is it those are all of my best tips for keeping your Google classroom organized I hope this video was helpful for you if it was please give it a thumbs up and it shared out with your teacher friends your school your district whoever you think would love to see it don't forget to hit that subscribe button and the notification bell so you do not miss any future videos as always thank you for watching I love you all so much don't bring it to pitch pancit pants on and I will catch you in the next one 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Channel: Pocketful of Primary

Views: 686,467

Rating: 4.9738541 out of 5

Keywords: teacher, classroom, vlog, 4th grade, pocketful of primary, tips for new teachers, tips for teachers, new teacher tips, teacher tips, classroom vlog, vlogger, teacher vlog, teacher vlogger, google classroom tutorial, educational technology, organization, how to, distance teaching, distance learning, online learning, online teaching, google for education

Id: sYJErrN0A8k

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020