Wow, it’s been too long since my last post! I’m sure you all can sympathize…a new school year is upon us, forcing us out of our summer relaxation, back to the world of being on time, meeting deadlines, and the most important task of all: educating and inspiring young people!
It’s no wonder teachers are exhausted 🙂
As I’ve began using Google Classroom, I’ve noticed a few things I thought I’d share.
When creating assignments, Classroom provides three options to distribute documents to students:
- allow students to view
- allow students to edit
- make copy for each student
One issue my colleagues and I had with this is the lack of the student commenting feature. After tinkering with the options, a colleague noticed that choosing the “allow students to edit” feature doesn’t allow them to edit the original document, but DOES give them the right to comment on the document! Awesome!Next point…we know that Google Classroom creates a folder in your Drive titled “Classroom,” which includes all of your classes. Within each class, Classroom creates a folder for each document you share with your students…also in Drive. This allows teachers to open the students’ files in Drive and view student progress in real time. Awesome, right?
I began to assign a few of my classes a specific document yesterday, and decided to look in my Drive folder for that assignment to see how my students were progressing with the assignment. I opened an assignment folder for a class I had not seen yet that day, to see if any students were working ahead. When I opened the folder I almost immediately panicked because I couldn’t see any assignments! The assignment folder had been created, but nothing was there! Aargh! I immediately deleted the assignment in Classroom and started again…something I did not need to do. The documents will appear in the assignment subfolder in the Classroom folder in Drive ONLY after the student opens the document on their Classroom/Drive. Imagine my sigh of relief.
Here’s a few additions I’m still waiting not very patiently for…
- A Co-Teacher option…this is extremely beneficial in a CWC environment
- A Group option … I miss the ability to place students in groups and share a different document version with each group. I know there are ways around this, but this is one feature I desperately miss from Doctopus!
- A test creation and discussion board feature … I use Schoology for this now, and it’s great. It would just be nice to be able to get all of these features from Classroom!
If you’re interested in using a document I created for a professional development session with instructions for using Google Classroom, please click here.
On a side note, I’m in the process of creating a brief eBook about my journey in flipping my classroom. I’m hoping to finish this eBook within the week, and get it up on Amazon soon. Watch for updates!
Thanks for reading 🙂
Great info! What devices are your students using? Mine will have iPads ( hopefully ) next week and I am curious how well they will play together.
I'm on Twitter: @mrpirkl