Google Shares 8 Tips on Using Its Classroom Platform
- By Kate Lucariello
- 05/02/24
In a recent Google for Education's "The Keyword" blog post, the company shared "8 Google Classroom Tips Every Teacher Should Know." Three of the tips (4, 7, and 8) were announced in January 2024 at the BETT ed tech conference in London. All of the tips include practical suggestions for teachers and students, as well as instructions on how to access and use them.
These eight tips "empower educators to create personalized and engaging learning experiences for their students," Google said. They are:
- Tailor lessons to student preferences, levels, and abilities: Use videos for some, articles for others, "meeting students where they are" to help them learn, the post noted. This will be simplified in the near future, so educators can create specific groups of students, Google said;
- Use rubrics with feedback loops: Make, reuse, or import rubrics to help students understand their grades, and have conversations with teachers. They can also see the rubrics before turning in work. Rubrics can also be shared with other teachers;
- Use Classroom Analytics to see how individual students and the class as a whole are doing: Data shows grades, assignment completion rates, missing assignments, and Classroom platform access data. Google said more analytics capabilities will be forthcoming;
- Use practice sets to support students: The platform can send them resources and hints for each problem, let them show their work in progress, and see in real time if their answers are correct. An insights dashboard shows how students performed on each assignment;
- Use interactive questions in YouTube videos: Add questions at any timestamp that students can answer and receive real-time feedback on. They can also rewatch segments. An insights dashboard is included with this tool also. Coming soon is the ability to test AI-suggested questions;
- Use provided links to import and share current or past practice sets, videos, or classwork pages with other teachers in the organization. They can import or copy the material for use in their own classes;
- Allow or deny submissions of late assignments using the dashboard. Assignments can also be marked "excused" to prevent them from being added to the grade average; and
- Use Screencast, if using Classroom on a Chromebook, to record your screen with your own embedded video. An automatic transcript and editing tools are also provided. The video can then be uploaded as unlisted on YouTube and assigned as interactive questions in Classroom. Pausing allows class discussion.
Tips 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are available with Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning Upgrade).
Visit the Google Classroom page to learn more about its resources.
About the Author
Kate Lucariello is a former newspaper editor, EAST Lab high school teacher and college English teacher.