Google Classroom Updates

For the start of the 2018-2019 school year Google has updated Classroom.

Created by Scott Aten, August 10, 2018

You will notice some significant differences in Google Classroom when you begin to create your classes for this school year. This post will help you understand all the new features and how to best utilize them for you class and students.

New Classwork Page - Use this section to post assignments and questions. Using topics will allow you to group work into modules, units, or chapters.
New Grading Tool - When grading things students have turned in through Classroom, you can now toggle between students. You can also save common feedback in a comment bank.
New People Page - Replacing the "Student" page, the "People" page is the place to view the students in your class, from this page you can invite students to the class, invite co-teachers to the class, and guardians.
New Settings Page - The gear found on most Google products is now present in Classroom. As always this refers to "settings". The changes you can make in settings include: Title and description of the classroom, the class code to join the Classroom, what students can do in the stream, turn on/off show deleted items, and turn on/off guardian summaries (there is also a link to see a sample of the guardian summaries).
Copy a class - From the "Home" screen of Classroom you will see an option to "copy" from the three dot on each Classroom in your list. This is perfect for teachers who have several sections of the same class. Here is what will copy from an excising or archived class: Title, Section, Description, Course subject, Topics, and Classwork posts (copied as drafts with no schedule date). The following will NOT copy: Teacher announcements, Deleted classwork items, students and co-teachers, student posts, attachments that you don't have permission to copy. This process might take a while, so you will get an email notification letting you know when it is finished.
Control notifications by class - Both teachers and students can turn notifications off for any class.
Teachers can change grade point values when creating or edition assignments of questions.
Teachers and students can see updated labels—assigned, turned in, graded—for the status of a student’s work.

The one thing that you will notice right away that is not available is the "About" tab. If you go to the "Stream" you you will see a link to "About" in the upper right corner of the Classroom. However, you can't add content to this section like handbooks, syllabus, or other resources like we have in the past. In all the groups I am a part of, this has been a complaint about the new Classroom. It may come back at some point, but for now we are going to have to find a different way to provide this material. The "Stream" now only allows you to add announcements Or reuse announcements from other classrooms. All assignment information is found in the "Classwork" section. In the Classwork section you will be able to add Assignments, Questions, Reuse posts, and create Topics. To do this look for the "Create" button at the top of the Classwork screen.

For more helpful information and the archive of previous posts, look for items in the menu to the left.