Getting Familiar with Google Classroom

At-home learning poses a lot of challenges. But with Google Classroom, you'll find a great way to stay in touch with your students. Whether it's creating a "Stream" for you and students to keep in touch with each other, or pushing assignments to your students through "Classwork," once you have your class set up, you will find it is a great tool.

This post has lots of embedded links in the blue text. Clicking on them should help you become familiar and comfortable with Google Classroom. However, USD teachers can contact one of the Instructional or STEAM ToSAs for further help.

Get started by creating a Class. Once your class is created, there are two ways to have students join your class. 

Lucky for us, USD has been a Google for Education District for years and our students have accounts from early primary grades and generally know their username and password. If not, you will have to email it to their families for them to join. Once they are signed into their account, all USD students can access Google Classroom through their school's Symbaloo page. You might like to share this doc with families and students to help them sign into Google Classroom for the first time.

Once your class is set up and students are invited, you may like to "Share something with your class..." in the Stream tab. You might like to invite students to share by posting in the Stream. Both you and they will be able to Google Drive files, links, files or YouTube videos. If you would like to reserve the Stream for communications from you, you can turn off student access by clicking on the gear in
the upper right-hand corner of your class and scroll down to "General." There you can set parameters.

You can also delete a post or mute a student by using the three dots that appear on the right of a post. When muted, a student will still be able to submit work.


Of course, posting and assigning classwork is the primary reason teachers use Google Classroom. Teachers create assignments, a quiz, ask a question, or add material. At USD, second through fifth grades teachers will copy each day of the first two weeks of lessons and add them to your Google Classroom. Heather Koleszar created screencasts which walk you through posting both the Reading and Writing (Step 4) and Math (Step 5) assignments. If you are a co-teacher in a class, you can "re-use a post" from their class, a great way to share the work load with your grade level colleagues.

Once work is assigned, you'll be able to see, comment on and grade your students' work. One way to access it is through the Classwork tab. Another is through the Classroom folder created in Google Drive.

Hopefully, this will get you started. If you have questions, here is a resource that might help. And, of course, your USD ToSAs are here to help.