In this video we're gonna look at how to use
the new Google Classroom.
If you're use to the old Google Classroom or if you've never used
Google Classroom at all, this video will help you get started
with the updated version of Google Classroom.
So here I am a google.com signed into my account,
and I'd like to get started using Google Classroom. Maybe with my students,
or maybe with another audience.
To do this, I can go here to the Google apps symbol
and just click and look for classroom.
Here it is. For me it's on the second page
of Google apps. For you, it might not be there.
It just depends. So if you don't see it there
you could alternatively just go to classroom.google.com
hit enter or return on the keyboard
and it should take you in to Google Classroom.
And you can see I have a pop-up here, and I have a class
that I created previously.
Now let's talk for a minute about why you might want to use Google Classroom.
Basically this is a system
to help with student learning, and also to help the
teacher to teach the class. It's basically an
LMS. A learning management system.
And with this most recent update
Google has made Google Classroom even more of a
complete LMS. The first thing
you need to do if you're going to start using Google Classroom once you've
gotten signed in and gotten to this point is
you'll want to click this plus sign to create or join a class
and so that you can see this all a little bit better
first of all I'm going to go full screen, and second of all I'm
gonna zoom in a little bit so you see things a little bit bigger
on the screen. So like I say I need to start here with
create or join a class, so I'll go ahead and click that plus sign
and in this case I want to create a class.
So I just click create a class. I get a little
bit of a warning here. It says are you using
Classroom at a school with students? If you are
you can't really use Google Classroom with just any account.
You have to have a free G Suite for Education account
through your school. Now my guess is that
most of you watching this video that is the situation for you.
You have a free G Suite
for Education account that was provided to you by
your district or your school. But there are people who use
Google Classroom in other ways.
It doesn't have to be at a school with students
So I'm going to check this box, click continue, and
begin creating my class. So let's say I've decided to
offer a class to help people learn English.
I''ll just type in the title of this class,
the section, in this case it's just the one
class. I'll just call it section 1. But if you teach
in a secondary school, or if you have class periods and things like that,
you could use sections as the same kind of
of thing as a class period.
Next the subject. And then I click create and
it's creating the class for me. It takes me to a little intro here
that talks about the three main sections
of Google Classroom. We have Classwork,
where we can organize content, we can
ask questions for the students, we can assign work
but in addition to classwork we have Stream were we can
communicate with our class, and we have People were we can organize
who's in the class, we can invite people to the class, etc.
So really those are four of the main areas
of Google Classroom that you have to become familiar with.
These four here. Stream, Classwork, People, and the settings.
Let's start with Stream.
As I mentioned earlier, Stream allows me to communicate with my class,
I can post announcements, and I can respond to student posts.
Now at this point I don't have any students in this class. I'll show you how to get them in in a few minutes.
But let me just give you a quick glimpse into how you can use Stream to send information
to your students. I'll I have to do is go down to the lower right corner,
click this plus sign, and it pops up with a couple of options.
I can reuse a post that I've used before.
Or I can create a new announcement from scratch.
And that's what I want to do.
So I click create announcement. Google Classroom
wants me to decide who is the intended audience here.
Is it just Introduction to English, or is it also my Spanish 2 Class?
And if I want, it can be for both.
But in this case it's just for Introduction to English
Next I can decide do I want to send this to all students
or to a subset of those students
and I'm going to leave it at all students.
So now I can post my announcement just by typing here in the text area.
So remember to read and sign the class disclosure document by Friday.
So there's my announcement.
Now if I want to, I can attach items to this announcement.
I can attach a copy of the class disclosure document.
And I could do that by just uploading it from my computer
I could go to my list of recent documents,
I could just go to my Google Drive
or to Starred items in my Google Drive.
So these are some really good settings that I can use to pull documents.
To pull files into my announcement and attach them.
You can also link to your Google Drive
which is really similar to some of the options that I showed here.
I can also attach some videos from YouTube
using a URL from YouTube, or
I can search YouTube for the specific video.
And then finally, I can also put in links.
Links to other resources on the internet,
or whatever it might be.
But for now I'm happy just with this.
Now I can click post and my students would be able to see this announcement immediately.
Or I can click this arrow here and choose to schedule the post.
Instead of having it post right now, I want it to post let's say at 8pm.
Click schedule. And I want it to post not on Sept 3rd,
but let's say Sept 14th.
I click schedule, and now I have a saved announcement.
It hasn't been posted yet, but it will be on Sept. 14th.
So I think this Stream page really is a handy
and a pretty simple way to communicate with students
and with the class as a whole.
As it says here I can also respond to student posts.
So I may see posts from students showing up here that I can reply to
and answer their questions etc.
So think of Stream as being kind of like Twitter
or Facebook, and how a stream of information is brought to you.
And then you can react to it.
It's similar here in Google Classroom.
A stream of announcements that I can send out
but also a stream of student posts, student questions, things like that,
that I can respond back too.
Now as I post these announcements, each new announcement
is eventually going to push the prior announcements down
and so I'll end up with a list here of announcements and posts.
Okay let's move on now to Classwork.
And for a lot of us this really is going to be the heart of using Google Classroom.
Here on the classwork page it says we can create assignments and questions
we can use topics to organize classwork into modules or units.
And we can order work the way we want students to see it.
Let's look at what Google means by that.
And we're going to start by creating a topic.
So I click create, topic,
and the topic is going to be Basic English Conversation.
I click add.
And now I have a topic.
Now think of each topic as being like a module or like a unit of study in a class.
So I'm going to go ahead and create another topic.
Maybe English Family Vocabulary
I click add.
It says I can reorder them. That's great.
I'm going to create one more topic and click add.
Now if I do want to reorder this,
I can just by clicking on these three dots and
choosing move up, or move down
So that's how you go about re-ordering the topics in Google Classroom.
Now even though I've got this page set up the way I want it to be,
I've got my three topics,
There's really not anything of substance here.
Each of these topics is completely empty.
So I want to create something. I'll create an assignment.
Again, I wanna make sure that I'm creating this assignment for the correct class,
and for the right group of students,
and then I'll give it a title.
I'll call this Conversation with Another Student.
I can type some instructions.
So there are some instructions that I've put in there.
Next I can assign points for this.
It can be ungraded, or I can say it's worth 100 points or maybe 50 points.
Due date. This is important.
I could put in a due date of whenever I think it makes sense.
You can even put in a time that the work is due if you'd like.
And then I could also attach in the same way that I could in the Stream with the announcements
I could still use Google Drive.
I could still put in videos from YouTube and links.
Now watch what happens if I assign this.
If I just click assign, as is, then it adds the assignment here
to the list of classwork.
But it's not organized into the structure that I built here with my topics.
What I should've done, instead of
instead of saving when I did,
I should have added it to one of these topics.
Now I can fix that. I'll just go here to the three dots,
click edit, and then where it says topic, I'll just
change it from no topic, to basic English Conversation.
Click save.
And now this assignment is neatly organized in the Basic English Conversation topic.
Now I can also create questions.
And you can think of questions as being kind of like a discussion.
Maybe the question is, "Why is it important to improve our English skills?"
I can put some instructions in there,
and just like I did with assignments
I can change the number of points it's worth, the due date, etc.
I'm gonna select the topic as Basic English Conversation.
I'm going to set the question type to short answer,
but notice that there is a multiple choice option.
Students can reply to each other, and maybe I want students to be able to edit their answers
in case they make a mistake.
I can click ask to officially create and publish this question,
or I can schedule it for a future time.
Just like I did with announcements in Stream.
I'm going to click ask
and it should organize that question in my Basic English Conversation topic and it did.
Now going forward
as people turn in this work, as my students do the conversation with another student
or answer this question,
I can click on the particular item, see how many people have turned it in,
how many people have been assigned,
and I can actually view the assignment itself.
It should list all the students who have done the work,
and then I can grade and review their work as necessary.
Same thing with this question.
I can take a look at who's participated in answering this question.
Now before we leave the classworks page
I wanna point out a couple of other really handy
tools that we have here.
One is this: It's the class drive folder.
And if I click on that it takes me directly to a folder created in my Google Drive
that is associated specifically with this Google class.
And so I can put documents in here
like the class rules, the class disclosure document,
permission slips, things like that,
that I want to be able to draw from
and I want to be able to provide to the students in my class.
So that's a nice feature.
If you're not familiar with how to use Google Drive,
please watch my Google Drive tutorials.
But I love that fact that I have a folder automatically created for me
where I can put files for my students.
There's also an icon here for Google Calendar
and if I click that it takes me to my Google Calendar and I can add events to the course calendar
it automatically creates the course calendar for me
but I can add events to it so that the students can see what is coming up.
I really do think this classwork page is the heart of Google Classroom,
and I think it is excellent and very well organized.
It's a really good setup.
Just to the right of that we have People.
And here on the people page it lists the teachers, the students that are in the class,
and I can manage the people that are part of this class on this page.
I can also add people to the course.
If you remember at the very beginning of the tutorial I showed you that I could
add a class or create a class
and I chose to create a class.
But if students sign in to their Google Classroom accounts
they can add a class and use this code to be added to this specific class that I'm teaching.
There's another way you can add them though
you can just click this invite students button and type in a name or an email, or an email list
and it should invite them to be part of this class.
So we've looked at three of the four main areas of Google Classroom that you need to be familiar with.
Let's look at the fourth and that is the settings.
Here in setting I can edit the title of my class, I can look at the class code, and I can change that if I need to
just by reseting it.
I can also display it nice and big for the students to be able to see it,
I can copy it,
and I can also disable that class code if I need to.
In setting I can also change how the Stream works
Can students can post and comment?
or can they only comment?
or do I want it to be only teachers that can post or comment?
So there are some good options there.
And then finally do I want to show deleted items?
By default only teachers can view deleted items.
So if I want students to be able to see them I should turn that on.
I think I'll turn it off.
I'm gonna ex out of class settings.
Now if your class settings look a little different it's probably because you're part of a school account
and the school's administering that the way they want it to be.
At this point I'm gonna go here in the upper left corner, click on those three lines,
and it opens up with a couple of short cuts.
The first is back to the Google Classroom home page.
Where it says classes, if I click,
it takes me to what I see whenever I log in to my Google Classroom account.
But also, this is similar to what the students will see.
Let's say four or five of their teachers are using Google Classroom.
Each of those classes will show up here.
And then they'll click on the one that they want to interact with,
that they want to use.
We can go to the class folder by clicking here.
And then also we can click on these three dots to do some things.
As a teacher look what I can do.
I can copy this course. Let's say I'm going to teach it again in the near future.
I can copy the course, make a few changes perhaps, and then click copy, and now I have a copy of that course
minus the students. Right,
so all of the coursework is there, the settings and things that I've setup
but the students don't copy over.
You can also archive a course.
A class let's say that you no longer need, maybe you don't teach it anymore,
you and your students able to make changes. You can view this
in archive classes in the classroom menu.
So I click archive. Now when I go here it does have an option for archived classes.
Now here in this same menu notice I have a quick link to the calendar for the course
and also to each of the classes that I am a part of
and to the settings.
Now let's say I just want to get back in to make more edits.
All I have to do is go here and either click this link to get back in to the course
or click these three dots and click edit.
So I'll do that, and I do that so I can show you one last thing about
how to set up your course.
Here in this Google Classroom
I really had no choice about this image that was put here.
It's a good one. I like it. But Google selected it randomly.
So if I want to I can go here to
select theme, and I can change the theme from those old books to
maybe something a little bit different.
maybe this book here
click select class theme, and it changes.
You can also upload a photo of your own from your computer
and have it added here as a banner for your course.
Also there is a shortcut here in the about link.
If you click that,
there's an option for you to display the course code again
to help students get in to this course.
So, I think this new version of Google Classroom is fantastic.
I think it's a big upgrade.
A big improvement.
I love the fact now that we can organize the content here on Classwork
and then we can just click to see the work that has been turned in
and grade it and do the work we need to there.
Thanks for watching!
I hope that you found this tutorial to be helpful.
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