We are all in the infancy of online learning and being thrust into a new kind of learning can be stressful but we are all in this together. As teachers, parents and students we need to lead with patience and I hope that I can support you as you navigate the current situation. I hope that during this period you take the time you need to learn new methods of teaching online but also think about how you and your students can later transfer your new skills to “regular” school in the format of partial, flipped or blended learning.

Today, I want to focus on Google Classroom. Google classroom is great but it has limitations on what you can do on the platform. That is why many schools may start with Google Classroom but then graduate to more robust learning management systems. I hope that in this blog post, I can show you the most effective ways to use google classroom with your students.

Organization Makes Sense

Do not assume that the organization makes sense to your students. First you need to decide how to organize your classroom. There are a few ways to do it.

You can actually have different classrooms for each topic (math, ela, science, etc) OR you can have your main classroom and then split each section by topic. That is one of the most important calls because then your students need to know how they would go through your lessons. Your students should know the answers to:

How often to check classroom?

How to navigate classroom when they do check it?

That means you need to decide how you will proceed with online learning and try to keep consistent learning activities so that students know what they need to do.

If you have 1 classroom to represent your entire curriculum, then you can use your topic levels in 2 ways. You can either split them up by week and upload all the classroom work that needs to be done under the topic which is a weeks worth of work. Or you can split it by subject and add the work that needs to be completed under each topic.

I would 100% encourage the use of emoji’s in the topic titles & activity titles to help with navigation or to let the student quickly see which type of activity is which. Just make sure that you think it all through and keep consistent so that students get used to a routine.

Good Luck!

Google classroom is a great way to manage your classes assignments and communicate with your students. Try to encourage communication with your students. Have threads where they can just respond to something funny! Have them check in with you daily with a form. Try to keep classroom dialogue going – ESPECIALLY if you are not holding ANY zoom or google meetings. I hope these 2 tips were helpful!