Google Classroom Tips

As the world continues to navigate through this challenging time, I wanted to share some insights with educators about Google Classroom. If your school is going down the Google Classroom route, here are a few tips to help you adapt and embrace this online learning environment.

1.      When you set a task or activity for your students to complete, log-in as a test student to see what the assignments look like from the students’ point-of-view. You may be surprised to find that it looks different to how you wanted it to.

2.      As a Google Classroom is cloud-based, there's no more “losing” of assignments by students. You can set due-dates for tasks and even grade students work.  

3.      Google Classroom is a great way of encouraging peer-to-peer interaction that is documented. Helping students to understand they have a digital footprint is a great place to start teaching eSafety principles.  

4.      Like real-world classrooms, some students won’t ask for help when they need it. They may not want to ask for help publicly. That’s why it's important to ensure students have the option to ask questions privately or via g-mail.

5.      Google Classroom allows you to see who’s completed what–and when–at-a-glance. In real-time, you can receive work and provide feedback to students.

6.      Google Classroom allows you to integrate Google Forms to poll students, create reader interest surveys and more. You can integrate the Google Suite in your digital classroom. If you're a secondary school teacher, one idea is to ask your students to record their academic growth over time using Google Sheets.

7.      It may be tempting to use lots of adjectives and flowery language when describing an activity or task, but it’s not a good idea. Keep the description of activities or tasks in your online classroom simple for students to understand.

8.      Google Classroom allows you to aggregate and post commonly-accessed websites on your timeline . This helps everyone to access the same learning materials including videos, blogs, documents and links.

9.      If you need help, ask for it. There are many teachers already using Google Classroom and they can be found all over the internet in lots of online communities. Check out my Twitter chat #eduLWDT and ask a question to the community.

10.  Let’s be honest, we could all do more to help the environment. Using Google Classroom will help us become paperless teachers; no longer relying on trees to teach.

I recently asked my Twitter followers for advice about implementing Google Classroom in schools. Click on the Twitter thread above to read their replies.

I hope you've learnt something new from this article.