Google Classroom

I have been using Google Classroom a bit but I haven't used it a ton.  I plan to make a tutorial for getting started with Google Classroom one of these days for any newbies out there, but I will tell you that your school needs to have a Google school account and you need to request access from your administrator for your teacher account before you can even get started.  This post will be more useful for you if you are already using Google Classroom, as I will cover some tips and tricks that I learned for using it.  These are things I learned in the workshop that I did not stumble across on my own while working what little I have with Google Classroom.

First of all, you can look at students' work while they are in progress before they turn it in.  Once the student has created a doc, pres, etc within the assignment you created, a folder will be created in your class folder for that assignment.  All of the files that students have created will be in that folder while they are working and you will have access to them from that folder before they even turn them in.  This is a handy tool to give feedback while students are working.

A follow up to stalking students while they are working... If you have used Doctopus with Goobric before, now they are fully integrated with classroom!  I never used them before because it seemed so complicated to create rosters and assignments.  Classroom makes the process much more streamlined.  This video does a great job of explaining the process:

The video above is extremely helpful in breaking down the process of integrating Goobric (and therefore also Doctopus) with Google Classroom.  Lots of good info and tips in there, so I will not reiterate them here.  Here is one more video with some tips for Google Classroom that are helpful for beginners and one more here that is superr long but probably very informational!

For those of you that are familiar with Flubaroo, it is supposed to work pretty seamlessly with Google Classroom as well.  It is one of those things that I am hoping to start using in the future, but don't know too much about yet.  Basically, it is a way to automate grading for multiple choice questions you create in a Google Form format.

Now, speaking of Google Forms, one of my colleagues had been running into trouble with assigning a Google Form to his students and not getting them to appear as "Done" in Classroom once they have submitted the form.  Forms doesn't really play well with Classroom yet, although they are updating all the time so hopefully this will be fixed in a future update.  One really useful thing that we did at this workshop was join each other's classes as a student so that we could see the student view as well.  This was extremely beneficial and I highly recommend it if you have a colleague that wouldn't mind being a guinea pig for you.  So we played around with forms and it turns out, in order for you as the teacher to see that a student has completed the form through Classroom, the student would have to click the "Mark as done" button.  It sounds simple enough, but to rely on a student remembering to click it once they have completed a form and clicked submit on the form is a losing prospect, if you ask me.  So for now, we will just have to track completion on the report that you get from form submissions, as you have outside of Classroom.

Another application within chrome/drive that is supposed to play nicely with Classroom is called Autocrat, which is an add on for Google Sheets.  This was just mentioned as something to look at, which I haven't really done yet.

One kind of sidestep--have you noticed that Classroom now allows you to save drafts of announcements and assignments?  I love this because it allows me to create something but not "post" it until I am ready.  I didn't really like that I couldn't plan in advance without Classroom pushing out whatever I was working on to students before I was ready.  This is especially annoying when Classroom emails students notifications about anything you post.  It is an awesome feature normally, but becomes frustrating when you get questions from students like "were we supposed to do that assignment for today?" when really you didn't even want them to see it until a certain point during class.  So this issue is no longer an issue!

Here are a couple of features that were mentioned, I stumbled across, etc that were not specifically related to Google Classroom:  First, the facilitator mentioned Read&Write, which is an extension for Google Chrome.  R&W will read text in Google docs and other supported pages aloud.  And it is pretty cool.  Only problem is she told us after we installed it that we only get a 30 day trial.  The cost for an individual license is $100 a year.  BUT guess what!  If you read the info when you install the extension, it mentions that teachers get a free premium account.  Here is the website to register.  We will have to get creative if we want to use it for students who have tests read, etc in their IEPs, if we only have it available on our computers, but it is pretty awesome that they let us have a free account.

Next, I have a colleague who has been using a flipped classroom model for the last school year and has yet to find a system that will allow her to verify that students have watched a video.  We went to a standards based grading workshop last summer where we learned about Blendspace as a way to incorporate interventions within your own classroom (because we got to do what we got to do until there is a systemic change in our building!  See my post on PLC's where I mentioned the way interventions are "supposed" to happen).  With Blendspace, you can create lessons for a group of students to work through independently  while you are working on remediation with others.  On Blendspace, you are supposed to be able to confirm whether students have watched a video.  But, wouldn't it be nice if you could link to a video on Classroom and it were able to track if they actually watched it?  Sure, they can click "Mark as done" but that wouldn't really tell you what you wanted to know.  Let's hassle Google about this feature!  But in the meantime, it got me thinking about a post I had read about a website called Edpuzzle.  It looks like it is an app you can add to Chrome too.  With Edpuzzle, you can use any Youtube video (either your own or someone else's)--you can crop videos, add voice messages at various points, embed questions, and best of all, see which students have watched the videos and even which sections they may have had to re-watch.  It looks pretty awesome, I'm excited to try it!  Here is an overview of its capabilities:

I also got some other ideas for my transition from Moodle to using more of Google Classroom and Sites.  I got to meet a while back with one of our technology specialists for a one on one development about Moodle backup that was really useful  Keep a look out for a post about it in the future and I will include some of my other ideas there.