Some teacher tips for using Google Classroom during “Remote learning”

Tip Number 1:
Need to see if students are reading your posts? Use the “Question” feature under the “classwork” menu and type up any instructions students need for that day’s assignment. Choose a multiple choice question and include the options “Yes, I’ve read today’s assignment and understand” or “I have questions and will be e-mailing you” or even ask something like “How are you today? Good / Been better”. You could even put a curricular question. The idea is that by just clicking one of the two options, the assignment is “turned in”.  If you just post an announcement in your stream there is no way to know who’s viewed it. And if you post an assignment, kids must click that “turn in button” which they sometimes forget to do.

Tip number 2:
To see how many students have completed an assignment throughout the week, use the “To-Do” tab and see a running list of all assignments and all classes.

For a PDF of these instructions: Google Classroom Tips

One thing you can do is schedule posts to be published for a class at a certain time. However, unlike when you publish a post immediate, you can not select it to publish to more than 1 class. So if you want to schedule the same post to go out to each of your classes, you would have to enter it individually for each class. If you post it live, you are able to have that post publish to each class. This is something I’ve been requesting for years. It would be such an easy fix for Google. There DO NOT have a contact email, but you CAN use the request field. One the bottom left corner of your screen click on the question mark.

Click the “Report issue or request feature”. You are welcome to paste the following message:
We want an option to be able to select multiple classes to publish a “scheduled post”.

What tricks have helped you in Google Classroom? Leave us a note in the comments and share your tip with fellow educators who may be novice users with this platform.