GOOGLE CLASSROOM
A COMPREHENSIVE AND SIMPLE USER GUIDE TO ONLINE TEACHING AND LEARNING
WITH STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS, TIPS AND TRICKS FOR TEACHERS
TED INFUSED AND ANDREW LEBOWSKY
Table of Contents
Introduction
This is the ultimate teacher's guide, with the information that you need in order to help Google Classroom enhance your teaching in the traditional classroom. There is so much that you can do with the help of Google Classroom to get the results that you would like.
Teachers have the opportunity to track each student's progress in an assignment, where they can comment and edit. The instructor will rate the turned-in assignments, and return them with feedback to encourage the student to update the assignment and return it. When marked, the teacher can only edit assignments until the instructor hands the assignment back in.
Teachers can post advertisements to the class Stream, and students can comment on them; this enables two-way communication between the teacher and the students. Students can still post to the class Stream, but a teacher's announcement would not be as high as a priority, and can be moderated.
Chapter 1: Getting to Know Google Classroom
What is Google Classroom?
Thanks to all of the advances in technology that have occurred in the past few decades, there are now many different ways that you can work with your students to create a great learning environment. You are not stuck with a one-size-fits-all solution for classroom management. You can add in some other good things like links, documents, videos, and more, that you may not have had access to in the past. Some of these options will help you save time in the classroom, while still provide your students with a personalized learning approach that cannot be found anywhere else.
Think of how much time it takes: to hand out an assignment; to repeat instructions, hoping you get all of the assignments back; to hear excuses about why it is late; to correct all assignments; and then, move on to the next topic. This is all going to take up a lot of your time; plus, you are going to miss out on providing students with individualized attention, or a good explanation of why they got certain things wrong. There just is not enough time to get all of this done in a traditional classroom. Some students are going to end up falling behind, because they just do not understand what is going on.
Thanks to all of the great technology that is in the world around us, you can solve many of these issues. You can use emails to correspond with students and explain what they did wrong in their assignments, even if they are too shy to discuss this in the class. You can keep the instructions and all of the assignments online, so no one is able to lose them; they can look up the instructions and ask questions all at the same time. You can make it so that the system grades the papers for you instantly, to save even more time.
What Google Classroom Does
One of the first questions that you may have about Google Classroom is what this platform is going to be able to do. There are quite a few different platforms that are similar to this one, so you may be curious as to how this one is going to be the best option for you, compared to alternatives. You are going to get some of the great features that come with Google, which you are already familiar with; this is one of the main benefits that you will see when working with Google Classroom.
Luckily, there are quite a few different things that you can work with in Google Classroom. Some of the things that Google Classroom will be able to help you do are discussed below.
You can use Gmail at school. As a teacher, you will be able to create your own Gmail account. From there, you can search for any important messages, that may be school-related. You will not have to worry about the ads or any other delays that are common with some of the other email services. Many people are familiar with Gmail, so you will be happy to use this more often.
As a teacher, you will find that working with Google Classroom is going to help you to streamline your class. You will be able to do this by creating your assignments; being able to share your assignments and announcements with ease; and grading assignments without wasting a lot of time.
It is easy for both the teachers and the students to work together through Google Docs. You will be able to create as well as edit various presentations, documents, and spreadsheets, inside your browser. In addition, you will be able to do all of this while making sure that all of the changes are saved automatically. It is also possible for more than one person to work on something at the same time, without having any issues.
Your students will be able to share their work, as well as save their work, all on the cloud. This makes it easier for them to access the files whenever they want, even if they are not at home. This can be helpful for you as the teacher as well, because you can upload information to the cloud as well, for your students to get ahold of it. This helps save some of the hassle and the time that is expensed in sending attachments or merging together different versions of the same document.
The Google Calendar is a great option to use with the Google Classroom. Calendars can be shared. This makes it easier to plan for projects, and you can also integrate it together with your Hangouts, Contacts, Google Drive, and email accounts.
As the teacher, you are going to find that using Google Calendars can be great. You can put up an announcement or assignment, and give it a due date. Then, this due date and assignment will show up on the class page, for all of the students that are linked to this classroom to see. You will not have to constantly update students about when a due date is about to come. They just need to take a look at their own Calendar to find out this information.
If you feel that you need to set up a website that you can use for your class, Google Classroom will help out. This is something that you could do for a specific project or event; you can set it up so that the students are able to create some of their own websites as well.
If it is needed, you can conduct meetings that are face-to-face with the help of video calls to your students. This can be really efficient if a student has a quick question that they would like to have answered. Some teachers have been able to use this service in order to create their own virtual field trips.
Sometimes the chats and the emails can be all over the place, such that there are too many of them. The teacher is able to archive emails and chats, so that they can go through them at a later time if they would like. It is also really easy to organize your emails and chats, so it is easier for you to use.
It is possible to use some of the different add-on apps, that you need to make more things happen within the class. You could use Google + , Blogger, and Google Groups to make the class a bit more productive than a traditional classroom.
These are just a few of the things that you are able to do when working within Google Classroom. As the teacher, you are able to pick out the things that you want to do inside the classroom, and each class is going to be a little bit different. It is completely fine to mix and match things together, to customize the class that you are teaching.
Benefits of Google Classroom for Everyone!
Less Paperwork!
This is a benefit for everyone. Do you as a teacher tend to have worksheets that students may come to you with, days later, only to tell you that they lost it? Or maybe you need a new roll book for attendance? Or maybe you have this worksheet that you have found, but do not want to waste valuable class time trying to copy it? Or maybe you just do not want to deal with papers upon papers? If you are sick of it, then Google Classroom is for you.
