Welcome to my YouTube channel for the new EdTech classroom
My name is Sam Karrey and I'm a public school teacher in San Francisco. Today
I'm going to be showing you how to set up and optimize your Google classroom.
If you're going to be using technology in class
you're going to need a home base where you can post links videos assignments and more
I
Believe Google Classroom is the best choice to use as your hub because it seamlessly integrates with so many
programs, and it has an intuitive interface that's relatively easy to use.
Whether you're a Google classroom newbie or veteran looking to refine your practice,
I hope this video tutorial helps you set up the foundation for future technology success in your class. I
Use Google classroom to organize materials and as a home base to push out assignments to students
There are lots of other bells and whistles with Google Classroom that I'm not necessarily going to cover here
I'm just going to go over the basics to get you set up to optimize future EdTech use in your classroom.
So the first thing that we obviously need to do here is set up a class. I'm going to do that by pressing
"create or join class"
I'm gonna create a class. If I were a student I could click the join class and
then I'm going to
give it a name. So in this case, I'm going to give my class the New EdTech Class
Tutorial. Once you create your class you'll be taken to the home screen where you'll see a class code that you can share with your
students.
This class code is the simplest way in my opinion to get students to sign up. You just share the code with them,
they go to Google classroom, they join a class and they enter this class code. You'll see that there's a default theme
I like to change that theme to make it more specific to me. Very easy.
You go to upload photo. If you have some photos in your photo gallery, you can select a photo, find a picture you like,
and you're good to go
Now I primarily use the stream just to make
announcements to students and I'm actually going to show you a little bit later how I set the settings so that it's not posting a
ton of stuff on the stream and confusing students.
So if I have something that I want to say to kids like "Hello, welcome to my class"
I can post it here. The main tab that we're going to use today is gonna be the classwork tab
This is the main tab that I use to organize all of my class materials.
It's also the place where I push out assignments to students. So it's really important that you know how to use this. effectively
All right, I'm going to show you how we're going to be creating different assignments
which is really going to be the main purpose that you're gonna be using
Google classroom.
So we're gonna hit the blue create button and I'm going to go to my first choice assignment.
I'm going to title my assignment, so for this I'm just going to post "Chapter 4 Reading," and
you're gonna see that there is a place where you can choose if you want to assign that assignment to particular students. Now
I don't have any students enrolled in this class yet,
but if I did you could see their names on the drop down menu and you can choose to assign some assignments to
just a few students, or to all students which will be the default.
It's really great for differentiation allows you to put up assignments and give them just to a handful of students if you want.
There's a place where you can write
instructions and then change the point value if your school's on a different point system, or you could also choose the ungraded
option which I do quite often
for due date. You can put
whatever due date you choose. I'm going to choose tomorrow to have this assignment due, then I'm going to assign a particular
topic. Now right now I don't have any topics created and topics were actually something I just recently started using them.
I'm probably a little bit late to the game, but they're really a game changer in terms of organizing your materials.
So what I'm gonna do here is create a topic, and this is a homework assignment
so I'm going to
create a homework topic, and you'll see how it starts to really nicely organize
materials so that they're easy for me to find, and easy for students to find as well.
There are different ways that you can attach assignments to the
assignments you've created, or attach papers or links things like that that you need. One is the attachment that'll pull files from directly from
your computer.
One is from Google Drive,
YouTube, and then links to different websites.
I most often use the Google Drive link, and the reason for that is because I create all my assignments in Google Drive.
And I also like to be able to use this function where I push out
assignments to students and they each get a copy. So I'm going to show you what that looks like now just a quick trick.
I do like to look up the assignment first in my Google Drive.
But it pops up in my recent files. That way I'm not even trying to find it,
It's right there for me to add. Super simple. Now here is a really important part of the assignments.
It's gonna default to students can view file, and if you set it up like this
you're gonna have all students jumping into the same file at once, and that can be okay if it's something like a reading, but if
it's a file that you want students to edit, I would suggest that you select make a copy for each student.
That's gonna avoid any confusion in your classroom where you have some issues with students all
going on and editing the same file at the same time. It's just definitely the best way to do it.
I pretty much make a copy for each student for every assignment that I create.
And you'll now see that we have a homework assignment with chapter 4 reading and there's a copy of that assignment right there that
students can access. I
also use the
question feature quite often. This will be something that I might by just have students do a quick write class.
I might ask a question for students, like "Why do you think it's important to use technology in class?"
Again, I'm going to create a new topic.
So this topic I'm going to create class work, so that I have some different
tabs within my organization system again to keep it nice and easy to organize. Now
you can change if you want to be a short answer, if you want to be multiple choice question.
I pretty much always use short answer "Students can reply to each other" is something that I like on because
I do like to encourage conversation,
but you will have to moderate the conversations if you're doing that.
"Students can edit answers." If you
don't want students to be able to see other student answers and then go back and edit theirs, then I would suggest that you leave
this off. I usually leave this off; if a student really wants to go back and edit their answer
I might go back in and change that for them. Once you hit the ask question
it'll post the question to your Google Classroom and see that you have a question where
students can reply they'll start to see the replies popping up there as well.
Next, I'm going to show you how to post materials. This is something else that I use quite often
I post different materials for students, like videos that I might want them to watch.
I might want students to watch this video before class tomorrow to get a little preview.
So if you're doing a little flipped classroom just pushing out some videos to students
these can also be
tutorials that you make yourself, which I love to make and post, then this is a great way to post them for students.
Again, you can create a topic. So if you want to create a topic like
supplemental
materials
Click the YouTube link here.
You can either search for the name of the video, or if you know the URL, you can put that in. I'm gonna search for
Crash Course Indus
Valley, see what pops up. I should see my Crash Course Indus Valley come up right away. Hit "Add."
So now you see what it looks like after I've added more topics as well as assignments.
I have some homework assignments, class work assignments, supplemental videos,
projects, instructional videos,
which I'll go over later in another tutorial,
about the class materials, like a class syllabus that I would want students to be able to access.
If you want to switch around the order of the topics, super easy, you can go "move down."
That'll bump that down
You can also bump assignments up. Now once you start to get a lot of different assignments in your Google classroom
it's useful to use command F if you want to find something like Indus Valley.
It's going to show that you have that assignment there. So it's also helpful to teach kids how to use the command F function
The last thing I'm going to show you here about creating assignments is a really useful
function where you can actually go back and reuse old posts, and this is a huge time-saver if you've created Google
Classrooms in the past you can access all of them in your reuse area.
So I'm gonna look back at a class that I made a couple of years ago
And I'm going to find some
assignments here
that I might want to be able to reuse so notice when you click to reuse that it has it all set up if you
had instructions the instructions will be there.
It's going to already have the assignment. Make a copy for each student pulls it out of your Drive, assign it, and you're done.
It's a huge time-saver and a great feature of Google Classroom
The next thing that I want to show you is how you can use Google Classroom to give students feedback and even grades.
I don't always grade assignments through Google Classroom,
but when I do,
there are some features that make it really easy to use you can click on the student who turned the assignment in,
view their assignment.
If you want to leave a comment on their work, in this case,
the student was turning the question into a header, or turning the header into a question. If I want to leave a comment like "add
more information"
I can do that, and comment, and the student will be able to see it. Now I can also add a grade.
So if I want to grade this assignment two out of the four, I could add a private comment
to the student that I want them to see and then
when I'm ready to submit their work to them, I can hit return. They'll get an email that their assignment was graded.
Another really important feature of Google Classroom is the comment bank. I know when you're grading papers
you're probably making the same comment over and over, so classroom has a feature for that. If you go up to the comment bank you
can add a
comment to the bank. I've already added sentence fragment, and add more detail. I might add a comment like
"run-on sentence," and
the way that you access those is again by going to the comment function, so you can right click their comment and now
I'm going to do a hashtag and I'll see that I have a drop-down menu of a bunch of different comments.
So if you find yourself making the same comment on papers a lot,
it's really useful to put them in the comment bank. The last important thing
I want to show you about optimizing your Google Classroom is
changing some of the default settings so that it runs a little bit smoother
So if you go up to the Settings button, you'll see you have a lot of different choices on your stream.
You can choose whether or not you want students to be able to post a comment.
I typically only like students to be able to comment so that the stream doesn't get cluttered with a lot of different student conversations.
There's other platforms that work for that
Classwork on the stream is going to be defaulted to just show you a running stream of all the assignments that
you've posted and that can be a little bit visually confusing, so I like to
just hide
notifications and that way it only shows the
announcements that I make. It doesn't show all the different assignments that I've posted. For that they'd go to class work.
"Show deleted assignments" I go off.
"Guardian Summaries." You can leave those on, but I don't actually use the Guardian Summaries.
And the reason for that is because if you're not collecting all your assignments through Google classroom
students are actually gonna have to go in and choose
"submitted" when you post an assignment with a due date, and
If you have summaries turned on and students do not hit that submitted button,
they're gonna get a report that their student has missing work and you're gonna start getting a flood of emails.
It's happened to me before, so I would just avoid using summaries
particularly, if you have another grading system that you use. Like I said, there's other bells and whistles with Google Classroom
For example, you can set it up with Google Forms and pass out quizzes to students through Google Classroom.
I really just use it as an
organization system for my materials, and it's the hub where I always direct students to go when we're learning about a new programs,
or I want them to access some different material.
I believe it's critical that you have a Google Classroom set up and with a few small tweaks,
you can really make Google Classroom effective and help you save some time.
Thank you so much for watching my video!
If you'd like to see more of my education technology tutorials hit that red subscribe button below.
You can also find a link to my website as well as my twitter handle, and my podcast where I have
conversations with other educators about how they use technology in class, and industry professionals about the latest and greatest in education technology.
Thanks again and have a great week!