Google announced new features in Classroom app, for more ways to save time, engage your students and keep everyone organized.
Since Classroom launched last year, teachers have been using their class stream to host student debates, Q&A and discussions. It helps teachers to create and collect assignments paperlessly, including time-saving features like the ability to automatically make a copy of a Google document for each student. It also creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student to help keep everyone organized.
Students can keep track of what’s due on the Assignments page and begin working with just a click. Teachers can quickly see who has or hasn’t completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback and grades right in Classroom.
It is available to anyone with Google Apps for Education, a free suite of productivity tools including Gmail, Docs, and Drive. The Classroom app for Chrome OS works like a bookmark to the web version of Classroom.
Keep students engaged with question-driven discussions
You can post questions to your class and allow students to have discussions by responding to each other’s answers. After you post a question, you can also see the number of students who have and haven’t answered. A question may have attachments, such as a Google Drive item or a YouTube video.
For example, you could post a video and ask students to answer a question about it, or post an article and ask them to write a paragraph in response.
“Often, teachers want to do a quick check-in on what their students are learning. Now with this built in to Google Classroom, teachers can easily do this on the fly, any time,” said Michael Fricano II, who teaches at Iolani School in Honolulu. “Your class can have a really engaging, focused conversation.”
Reuse posts
Now you can reuse assignments, announcements or questions from any one of your classes — or any class you co-teach, whether it’s from last year or last week. Once you choose what you’d like to copy, you’ll also be able to make changes before you post or assign it.
“The reuse post feature gives teachers the gift of time. Making changes to something already created is way easier than starting from scratch,” said Heather Breedlove, Technology Integration Coordinator at Flagstaff Unified School District in Arizona. “It’s working smarter, not harder.”
Calendar Integration
In the next month, Classroom will automatically create a calendar for each of your classes in Google Calendar. All assignments with a due date will be automatically added to your class calendar and kept up to date. You’ll be able to view your calendar from within Classroom or on Google Calendar, where you can manually add class events like field trips or guest speakers.
Move posts to the top of the class stream
When you want to make sure an older item is easy for students to find, you can now move any post to the top of the stream.
By default, posts in the class stream are arranged in order of the date and time they are posted. The most recent announcement you post, assignment you create, or question you ask, becomes the top item in the class stream.
You can change the order of posts in the class stream by moving any item to the top of the stream. However, it only stays at the top until the next post is created.
Due dates optional
For long-term projects or student-driven assignments, you’ll now have the option to create assignments that don’t have due dates.
Attach a Google Form to a post
Many teachers have been using Google Forms as an easy way to assign a test, quiz or survey to the class. Teachers and students will soon be able to attach Google Forms from Drive to posts and assignments, and get a link in Classroom to easily view the answers.
YouTube is an important source of educational content for many schools. Because it also contains content that an organization or school might not consider acceptable, last month Google launched advanced YouTube settings for all Google Apps domains as an Additional Service. These settings give Apps admins the ability to restrict the YouTube videos viewable for signed-in users, as well as signed-out users on networks managed by the admin.
Google said, “Most of these features are rolling out this week; stay tuned in the next few weeks for more back-to-school goodies in Google Classroom, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, all designed to help you make this school year yours.”
