Google Classroom has become one of the main tools many teachers are using to distribute materials and connect with students. I have received a lot of feedback from teachers asking for a breakdown of Google Classroom and all that can be done with it. So I decided that I was going to put together a little series I am calling The Road to Google Mastery: Merging onto the Google Classroom Expressway. Our first stop on our journey will be The Basics of Google Classroom.
So to first be able to use Google Classroom, you must first create a class. To do so, head over to Google Classroom’s page. From there, click on the plus (+) in the top right-hand corner and choose “create class”. After clicking the plus, you can enter your class name, section, subject, and room. After you have entered the information you want, click create. After clicking create, you new class will open.
After you have entered your newly created Google Classroom, you will notice that it is broken up into five main parts: Stream, Classwork, People, Grades, and Settings.
The stream is the first thing your students will see once they enter the Google Classroom. The stream is where you as the teacher can post announcements. You can also choose to have your assignments, quizzes, and materials post on the stream as well. Another option you can have is how students are allowed to interact with the stream. You can choose to let students post and comment on the stream, just comment on posts on the stream, or no interaction.
In the classwork section, here is where you are going to, you guessed it, add classwork. But there is so much more to the Classwork section than meets the eye. Yes you can add assignments, but you can also add quizzes, questions, materials, and reuse a post from a previous Google Classroom. In the Classwork section, you can also create Topics to help organize the Classwork section.
Next is the People section. Here, you are going to see all of the students that are enrolled in your class. If enabled, you can invite guardians to each student so they are able to receive Guardian Summaries. (We will cover this in the settings section of this post). You will also see any co-teachers you have invited to your Google Classroom.
Next is the Grade section. Here, you will see a list of all of the assignments you have in Google Classroom. You will see the title of the assignment, the due date, and how many points it is out of horizontally along the top of the page. Going down the page, you will see a list of your students. In each column under each assignment, you will see the score each student received on each assignment. If they do not have a score, you can give them a score here. Hovering over each grade will bring up the vertical ellipsis (three vertical dots). Clicking on this allows you to return the assignment to the student or view the assignment.
Our last stop across the top navigation of our Google Classroom is the Settings wheel. By clicking on the setting wheel, you will see three main sections: Class Details, General, and Grading.