Google Classroom is a place where you can easily post digital content for your students AND gather work or responses from them about it. If you've ever interfaced with a blog (like the one you're on for this course), you are familiar with the basic layout. Classroom is like a private blog where your students' digital work is compiled, creating a record for you and them (and their parents if you wish) of the work you do together. No more "lost" work. No more scattered links. And it's EASY!
There are several videos linked below. I recommend you watch then go do each in turn. (Watch one, do one. Watch #2, do #2.) These do not have to be done on the same day!
The first is setup and posting.
The 2nd is inviting students.
The 3rd is connecting content: drive, youtube, links.
The 4th is final details of student use.
A Clarification of Students Returning Work
In order to get credit, you need to:
- Join my fake class and mark the assignment complete (invitation will be in your email).
- create a class
- create a post of any type
- add content to that post (a link or a doc)
- invite me: linsem@victorschools.org
- I will then comment on your post
- and finally you will respond to my comment in your classroom
I recommend the classroom you set up for this course be a throw-away. Name it something generic like "Online Beginner Course" and create bogus, short entries. If you want to continue to experiment with google classroom, I am happy to be your guinea pig. If you wish, continue to use me throughout the course to test how it looks when you ask me to take a form, share a doc of my own, or other such activities.
However, while you're going through your paces exploring this technology, you should absolutely be thinking of how you ask your students to use the internet. Reflect on what you did last year, how you collected student work, and if this product would be useful or even enhance what you did. If you think you want to begin building a classroom you might actually want to use, go for it!
Feel free to share ideas or questions in the comments here or privately in email to me.
UPDATE! So it's the day after I posted the videos about Classroom, and Dave just shared Google's update. Notably, you will be able separate out assignments and discussion posts. It still looks murky to me on whether or not the hated chronological order in the stream will be undone (some of the features in this post they have NOT rolled out yet, just announced). Another big change is they've made it easier to reuse a class by having more powerful people control and resetting the class intro code. Creating quizzes within Classroom doesn't seem that big of a change... and might end up separating things if I've already got a body of quizzes made in Forms. This type of thing is something you need to accept if you plan on living in Classroom... Google changes their interface a LOT and more than that, they both add and remove capabilities often. Being a fluid user of buttons and just figuring things out is a life skill, right?!?!
Hey Michele- I joined late. Can I still be added to your google classroom?
ReplyDeleteI am wondering if you can have sub areas in googleclassroom --- I loved your idea of reading responses. Can I have 4 different book groups with their own conversations? Do you know how to do that within my main classroom?
ReplyDeleteAt this time you cannot. One way to do this is to create 4 assignments and tag them with different labels like "group 1" or "dragons" and the kids would know which they belong to. That way as the assignments continue across the year, they can find them easier. Any day now, they should be releasing the update/changes mentioned in the bottom of my class so watch for that... there was something in there about separating out the stream from the assignments. A different way would be simply have 4 classrooms, one for each of the groups. That would really keep dividers between the conversations, as they could not see each others work like in the first example.
ReplyDelete