This time of year, I usually get asked a lot by teachers, “What do I do with my Google Classroom at the end of the year? Is there anything special I need to do?” Today, we are going to be discussing some end of the year Google Classroom tips.
So the first thing you should do is make sure that you have returned all of your students work. When students turn in work through Classroom, Google changes ownership from them to you. This is just like if they were to physically turn in an assignment to you in person. Once they give you the paper, you technically own it until you give it back to them. So if a student opens an assignment that they have turned in, but you have not returned it, they only have viewing rights. Returning their work to them gives them ownership rights again. This is super important if you decide to clean up your Drive and remove student files from your Drive. If you remove files from your Drive and you have not returned it to the student, it will be deleted on their end as well. To check to see if you have returned classwork to students, head on over to your classroom, click on Grades at the top. From there, you will see all of the assignments you have posted and how your students did on them. If it says that a student Turned In, then that means you have not returned it to them. To quickly return all turned in assignments, head up to the name of the assignment, click on the verticle ellipsis, and choose return all. Now all of the turned in assignments will be returned to your students for that assignment.
The next thing you can do is unenroll your students. This is something that you might want to do to prevent students who are now no longer in your class accessing content from the class in the future. This would also be helpful if you did not want students to show your future students certain class content. To unenroll students from your class head over to the people section in Classroom. There you will see two sections: Teachers and Students. Under the student section heading, you will see a checkbox and next to it you will see a grayed out actions button. By clicking that checkbox selects all of your students. Then you will notice that the grayed out actions button is now live and clickable. Click on Actions and then click remove.
Okay so you have returned all of your students work, you have unenrolled them fro your class, and now it is time to archive the class. Another question I get a lot is “Why can’t I just delete my class? Why do I only have the option to archive it?” I then get to explain to them a magical feature in Classroom which is reuse post. Archiving classes lets you reuse posts that you have used in previous classes. To do this when you create your new classroom next year, you would head to Classwork, click the create button, and then instead of choosing, for example, assignment, you would choose re-use post. From there, you will see all of your previous Google Classrooms. You can then go into a classroom that you want to use an assignment from that class, you can click on the particular assignment, and then you will see a blue reuse button. You also have the option to check the box that says “Create new copies of all attachments”. After clicking reuse, you will then be brought to the familiar new assignment window where you can then post that assignment into your current classroom.
To actually archive your class, head over to the Google Classroom dashboard view. Click on the verticle ellipsis and choose Archive.
This final tip is one that I got from reading Eric Curts blog Control Alt Achieve. He suggests that you create an Archive folder in your Google Classroom Drive folder. If you were not aware, when you create a Google Classroom, Google creates a Classroom folder in your Google Drive and a corresponding folder for that classroom is created in your Google Drive Classroom folder. If you have been using Google Classroom for a while, you will have many folders in your Google Classroom Google Drive folder. You can create an archive folder and move the archived Classroom folders into that folder. To achieve this, head on over to Drive and select the Classroom folder. Once you are in the Classroom folder, click on New and folder and create an archive folder. Then you can move all of those archived classroom folders into your archive folder. The classroom folders are still there but for me, it is more visually appealing just seeing the current classroom folders.
Check out my Wakelet collection where I share some resources on Google Classroom Cleanup. That collection can be found here.
Also, check out an episode on my podcast where I discuss End of the Year Google Classroom Cleanup Tips. That episode can be found here.