Google classroom is made for simplifying online learning and creating a concentrative platform that will encourage students and teachers to stay organized teaching and learning.
Google Classroom was released on August 12, 2014, and got huge modifications over time to make it user-friendly. Now it has approximately 150 million users all over the world and you can find most of the schools organizing online lectures, classes, and assignments through Google classroom.
However, google classroom is not just a learning platform, it has some other great features also. It integrates the other Google G Suite integrations like docs, sheets, slides, Gmail, and calendar to ensure that users don’t feel a lack of anything while participating in online classes.
Students and teachers can communicate with each other, discuss critical topics, and teachers can grade assignments and publish results with advice and information.
If you are an educator or learner, you must be in need of such an online learning tool especially at the present time when school, colleges are closed due to the COVID-19. If you are already recommended for this helpful integration but don’t know how to use google classroom, this guide is for you.
Here you will get all the necessary tips and methods to use google classroom. So, let’s get into the discussion,
Contents
How to get started with google classroom?
To start with google classroom, you need a google account at first. We used to have one or multiple personal google accounts as required in every step of our online journey. Well, if you don’t have a google account, you must have to create one urgently to use google classroom.
For your information, having a google account means you can access another google G Suite for education applications for free. Although these have premium plans also, you can accomplish most of your requirements seamlessly.
Once you have a google account, follow the guide step by step to get started with google classroom.
Accessing google classroom
Google classroom is available for both web and android platforms. So, it is not a problem what device you are using, you can use google classroom to create classes or to join existing classes hosted by school teachers.
To access google classroom with computer, just go to the browser > search for ‘Google classroom’ and click on the first link of the page. Or click here to get direct access to that.
And if you are a smartphone user, then it is too easy to start with google classroom. As smartphones are handheld and provide flexibility regarding this. After entering or installing google classroom on your device, you have to give your google account to sign up.
You will see a full white interface like this,
Create or join your first class
Google classroom user interface is simple and easy to understand. As you can see in the above image or if you are following the step, you may have opened the google classroom interface in front of you.
The first thing you can see after signing up is, ‘create or join your first class’ which is indicating a plus sign. So, if you click on that, you will get two options,
- Join class
- Create class
Join class
If you need to join a class created by your school teacher, you can join with this option. To join other classes, you need class code. Ask your teacher for the class code and input it to enter the class.
Create class
Not to join? You can create your own class and invite students to join. To create a class, click on the ‘+’ sign on the right above and choose ‘create class’.
A window will appear to you where you have to choose to continue and you will get a new window to set up all the information about your class.
Look at the image, you can see the particular field of information asked. The first option ‘Class name’, you must give a name to your class to make it identifiable for your students. You can use the ‘Section’ field to differentiate classes of the same type or use it to create a time frame for different classes.
In the subject name field, put the subject name you are going to cover and keep room number 1. After filling all the fields, hit the ‘Create’ button and you will see your new class has been created and you can start your online work.
Invite students to join your class
As you have created your own classroom free of cost through google classroom, you are all set up and can invite whoever you want to join your class. You can invite students in three ways,
- Sending invite link
- Invite via email
- Class code
You can copy the invite link and send them to anyone you want. Get the option from the main screen of the classroom and click the three-dot icon over the class and copy the invite link.
When you have the invite link copy, you can share it using social media to invite students. However, students can easily find your class with just the class code. But you have to provide them with the code beforehand.
With the class code, students can easily find your class and instantly join it. The email option to invite is mostly used when you have started the class and notice some students are absent. You can invite them individually via email. When you send an email to them, they will be notified and can respond back.
So far, we have learned to create individual classrooms to conduct classes as a teacher or instructor. We also know about the process of joining individual classes on this platform. Next, we will go into depth of google classroom anatomy.
We will see customization and communication in the Google classroom next. Stay connected.
Communicate with students
You may have a question about how to communicate while taking classes online as it is a part of learning. Not to worry, teachers and students can communicate with others in several ways.
According to your requirement, you can communicate in google classroom in such ways,
- Announcement
- google docs
Teachers can communicate with students at any time by sending mail directly from the classroom. They can email individually or the entire class together.
Teachers can also post announcements as a reminder of upcoming events or anything which will be posted on the stream. When students access their class, they can see announcements and comment if they want.
If you want to post an announcement, go to the ‘Stream’ tab and click on ‘Share something with your class’. Then type what you want to announce for the class. the announcement will be visible to all the students of the class, they can comment and share opinions in the announcement.
Another way to communicate in the google classroom is using google docs for typing messages. create a google drive file and share it with your friends whom you want to talk to. and communicate via typing on that.
google classroom customization
you can customize your google classroom by changing its theme. You can also use any personalized theme to make the class interface look educative. in the Google classroom interface, you have a header section in the classroom where you can use a preferred or personalized theme.
look at the existing theme on your class interface, in the bottom right corner, you will get two options like, ‘select theme’, ‘upload photo’.
if you click on select theme, you can see a variety of themes categorized in the subject genre. you can choose any of them matching your subject and hit the ‘Select class theme’ button.
Also, if you don’t like any of the included themes and want to use one that you personally created, you can use that. Just click on ‘Upload photo’. you can create header images with interesting elements, emojis, and graphics and use that to the classroom header.
Create assignments
as offline classes where teachers give specific assignments or homework to students. Google classroom offers the same advantages where teachers can give homework to students with additional files as lesson materials.
When you create an assignment, you can post it immediately, save a draft, or schedule it to post at a later date. After students complete and turn in their work, you can grade and return it to the students.
Whenever you as a teacher create an assignment and post it, students will get notifications via email. students take part to complete the assignment and submit it to their teacher. After submitting assignments, students won’t be able to edit or change anything in the assignments.
However, teachers can grade assignments and publish results with notes and instructions. The result can be sent to parents via mail. if you don’t know how to create assignments in google classroom, just go to the classwork > create > assignment.
schedule assignments to post later
you can post assignments immediately or set a schedule to post later. to scheduled assignments, you have to create the assignments at first. in the above right corner of the assignment page, there is an option ‘Assign’, click on that if you want to post the assignment immediately.
but if you don’t, click the arrow sign beside the assign option and click on the schedule option.
After clicking on the schedule, you will be able to set a specific date and time to schedule the assignment. To schedule the assignment for another class, schedule it first for one class and then reuse the post for the other class.
Add lesson materials
While assigning daily work for students, teachers can include lesson materials if required. to make the assignment easy to understand and to help students. Teachers can create multiple choice questions, essays, worksheets, reading, etc to make the lesson easy to understand for the students.
you can input files from your device as lesson material, can share files from your google drive, also youtube videos can be included in google drive which is related to your topic. Even if you don’t need to go outside from the classroom integration to select youtube videos, you can do it by staying here.
there is a button called YouTube Play Button, when you click on that, it will allow you to search youtube videos or you can copy and paste the specific video link here.
Also, you can include website links and online resources which may come to the benefit of students to accomplish assignments properly.
Access the Drive folder
when you create a new class in google classroom, it will automatically create a particular folder in the attached google accounts drive. integrating google drive and other google applications with google classroom helps both students and teachers a lot.
The drive folder stores assignments of the students, lesson materials stored by the teachers, and also allows written practice in google docs.
teachers can control the accessibility of the google file drive and let students respond as they want. If the teacher doesn’t want to allow students to edit google drive files, they can keep the settings in ‘View only’, and if they want to change the file through students, they can select the ‘Edit’ option and allow students to edit the drive folder.
grade and return assignments
Finally, this is one of the best google classroom features that you have to use while conducting classes and assignments in google classroom. Grading helps teachers easily measure students’ performance. Teachers can grade with numeric numbers, include comments as feedback, and also can return assignments without a grade.
You can grade and return work from:
- The Student work page
- The Classroom grading tool
- The Grades page
That’s it for now, we try to illustrate all the necessary aspects of google classroom to know you. if you are about to use google classroom, the short implementation above will help you get all the points together. When you have the guide to follow in any journey, there is nothing to stop you from the way. This complete guide will help you realize what you can do on google classroom. If you want to know more details about each of the aspects described above, just give a check to our blog section. you will find other posts on google classroom to understand things clearly.