8 Google Classroom tips every teacher should know
Get the most out of Google Classroom with these top tips and tricks to help teachers and students adapt to new ways of learning — and succeeding — in the classroom.
1. Tailor your lessons for your students
In most classrooms, students have different preferences, levels and abilities when it comes to learning. While an article might work for some, a video could be better for others. Meeting students where they are is essential to helping them learn, but isn’t always easy to scale.
Classroom can help get the right lesson to the right student. Under the “Classwork” tab, click “Create” to create an assignment for your students. Select which students in the class will receive it by unselecting “All students” and choosing the specific students for that lesson. From there, create as many assignments as you need for groups or individuals. In the next few months, we will be making this even easier by enabling educators to create groups of students to organize their class and deliver personalized instruction. Educators can create or update student groups right from the assignment creator so they no longer need to manually find each individual student (available with the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning Upgrade).
2. Encourage a feedback loop with rubrics
When creating an assignment, you can make, reuse or import a rubric so students can understand expectations and their grades. This information makes it easier to have a conversation with students based on their assignments. You can even share rubrics with other educators to save time or weigh certain criteria differently. Simply choose the “Create rubric” option when creating your next assignment. Students will see the rubric before turning in their work, and you’ll be able to grade against the rubric when returning it to them.
3. Get early insights into student learning
With Classroom analytics, you can get a birds-eye view of how your class and students are doing. You can see how students are performing in terms of grades, assignment completion rates, how many missing assignments they have, or how often they’re accessing Classroom on their own. As we add more analytics capabilities to this page, you’ll get more insights about how to support all your students, when you might need to intervene, and how you can differentiate your instruction. To view analytics for your class, click the “Analytics” icon on a class card on the homepage or in the header bar in a class. Available with the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning Upgrade.
4. Use practice sets to offer support where students need it, at scale
Practice sets help teachers provide students with a way to engage more deeply with a subject when they need a little extra support. Unlike the experience of a static worksheet or PDF, students can see in real time whether they got an answer correct. Teachers can also provide a bank of resources specific to each problem for when students get stuck, like a text hint (“Remember to isolate the variable”) or a YouTube video that reviews the underlying concepts to the problem. Students can show their work using the keyboard or stylus, with teachers receiving snapshots of that work each time a student attempts a problem.
It’s easy to get started with practice sets. First, import an existing Google Form or PDF to instantly transform it into an interactive practice set, or start fresh by creating your first problem. Add a problem question (multiple choice, or short answer, or something else) and tag each problem with a learning skill. AI will suggest learning skills and additional resources as you build your practice sets. An insights dashboard shows how students performed on every practice set assignment, with helpful details and insights like how many tries it took for each student to arrive at the correct answer, or how many students struggled with a particular question. Available with the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning Upgrade.
5. Help students learn at their own pace with interactive questions for YouTube videos
YouTube is a common learning tool in Classroom today and with interactive questions for YouTube videos, it’s never been easier to use. Add questions at any timestamp and the video will pause and prompt students to answer. They’ll receive real-time feedback and can go back and rewatch segments to help them arrive at the right solutions. Like with practice sets, you’ll get an insights dashboard with details about how students engaged with the video. Soon, educators will be able to test out AI-suggested questions, making interactive videos a snap. Available with the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning Upgrade
6. Don’t start from scratch — import and share
Want to share practice sets, video activities and classes with a fellow teacher or use something you loved from a previous year? No problem. Enable link sharing for your practice set, video activity or an entire classwork page to share directly with other teachers in your organization. From there, they can import classwork or make a copy of your practice sets or video activities to use for their students. Available with the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning Upgrade.
7. Add flexibility to your assignments and grading
Give students one last shot to get in any missing assignments, or disable submissions after the due date. On your dashboard, go into “Assignments” and uncheck “Close submissions after the due date.” You can always go in and add a final due date to close out the assignment for good when you’re ready.
There might be times when you want to have more control over what counts toward a student’s final grade. By marking an assignment as “excused,” you can prevent it from counting toward the average in times when you don’t want it to. Under the “Grades” tab, click the three dots and select “Excused.”
8. Record your screen with Screencast to meet your class’s diverse needs
If you’re using Classroom on a Chromebook, take advantage of the Screencast app. Screencast allows you to record your screen with your own video embedded, so your students can see you and your screen. Screencast provides an automatic transcript and AI-enabled editing tools. Don’t love how a specific 14 seconds came out? Simply trim it away by deleting the transcript text.
Once you have that video lesson recorded there are endless possibilities to provide students with an effective and personalized experience. For example, upload your recording as an unlisted YouTube video and assign it as an interactive questions video in Classroom. Pause after key moments of the lesson to prompt your students with questions and get insights about their performance and engagement, all while helping them learn at their own pace.
