📝 EOY Google Classroom Cleanup

Author: Marshall Beyer | Read Time: ~ 5 minutes | Publish Date: May 9, 2021

Photo by Nathan Dumlao* on* Unsplash

The end of the school year brings on many things. One of those things is cleanup and in today’s day and age that relates to both the physical and virtual classroom. Having everything cleaned up can really put you in a good mindset heading into summer. In this post, we are going to talk about things you can do to ensure that your Google Classroom is in a good state heading into the summer.

Return All Assignments / Student Work

One thing you want to make sure you do when you get to the end of a school year is return all of the assignments back to your students. This way, when you go an archive your classroom, your students will still have access to their work. To return students work, go to the Grades section of Google Classroom. At the top you will see a list of assignments. Click the vertical three dots and choose “Return All”.

Archive Class

Once you have returned all work, you can go ahead and archive the class. A question around this topic I get a lot is “Why cant I jusdt delete my Google Classroom?” The reason for this is that next year, if you want to use an assignment that you used this year, you can use the Reuse Post feature in Google Classroom.

To Archive a class, head over to your Google Classroom dashboard. Click on the vertical three dots on your classroom tile and choose the Archive option.

If you accidentally archive a class that you did not mean to, you can still access it by clicking on the three horizontal lines menu in the top left-hand corner of the Google Classroom dashboard, scroll down and click on Archived Classes.

Turning Off Student Posts/Comments

This leads us to our next step which is disabling the ability for students to post or comment in the aforementioned archived classroom. To ensure that students cannot go back into an archived classroom and post without you knowing, we are going to go ahead and disable this feature. To do this, head over to your classroom settings by clicking the settings wheel in the top right-hand corner of your Google Classroom. From there, under the General section, for the stream click the dropdown and choose Only teachers can post or comment. Then click the blue save button in the top right-hand corner.

Organize Google Drive Files

An optional thing you can do is organize your Google Classroom folder in your Google Drive. You might notice that once you get into that folder, it can be a little overwhelming. Each class you have will have its own folder so if you created multiple classes you have a folder for each of those classes. Something that you could do is create an Archived Classes folder. Then you can drag all of the classes you archived this years folders into the archived classes folder. That way they are “out of the way” but you can still access any documents and templates within those archived class folders.

Optional: Unenroll Students from Class

Another option you have is you can unenroll all students from your Google Classroom. To do this, head over to the People section in Google Classroom. From there, click the checkbox to select all students. Click the Actions dropdown and choose Remove.

Hide or Delete Old Classroom Calendars

If you access Google Calendar, you will notice that for every Google Classroom you create, there is an acompaning Google Calendar. At the end of the year, if you do not want to see those calendars, you can choose to either hide or delete the calendar.

To hide the calendar, simply hover over the calendar name you want to hide, click the vertical three dots that appear, and choose Hide from list. You will now not see that calendar or any events associated with that calendar.

If you want to delete the calendar altogether, again you are going to hover over the name of the calendar you want to delete, click the vertical three dots, and choose Settings and sharing. Scroll all the way to the bottom and click delete.