Finally! Sync Google Classroom Grades to Aspen!

I am being cautiously optimistic with this post. The technology has existed for over a year for Google Classroom grades to sync with Aspen Gradebook, but unfortunately, it just hasn't worked for us here in Londonderry. After doing a few tests with teachers, I think I can say that it now works!

The good news is that through all our testing, NOTHING has broken Google Classroom or Aspen. The worst thing that happened was that it would create the assignment in Aspen and not post the grades. Nothing ever got overwritten or deleted. Things only sync after you return them to students AND click the button to send them to Aspen. You can also work in both places - maybe you have some assignments that aren't submitted through Google Classroom. For those, you can just enter them directly in Aspen. Essentially, there is no downside to setting this up and using it as needed.

If you're ready to give it a go, there are just a few things you will want to ensure are set up correctly in Google Classroom:

Class Settings

Open up your first class and click the Settings gear on the right side:

Scroll down to the "SIS Integration" section and if you haven't already linked your class with a section in Aspen, click the blue "Link" button. Then you will have a dropdown list with all of your Aspen course numbers. It is VERY important that you ensure it is the EXACT course number that is shown in Aspen. So triple check it before selecting to make sure you have the correct course, semester, and period.

Once you've linked the class, scroll on down to the Grade Calculation section. For "Overall grade calculation", select "Weighted by category". IMPORTANT: Make sure that "Show overall grade to students" is OFF! We do not want there to be discrepancies between the overall grade shown in Classroom and Aspen. Aspen is the official grade report.

Finally, under "Grade Categories", you are going to click the "Import from SIS" button. This should import your two categories - Formative Assessments and Summative Assessments (or however you have them named). It does not pull in the percentages, so please make sure to add them so Formatives are 30% and Summatives are 70%.

Make sure to hit the blue "Save" button in the top right corner to save all of your settings. Then follow the same steps for each of your other classes.

Creating Assignments

The only caveat to making this work is that you need to make sure your assignments are set up correctly in Google Classroom:

1. They must have an assigned date AND a due date that falls within our Aspen grade window. For example, it did NOT work when I posted an assignment the day before school started even though the due date was for a school day.

2. They must have a grade category selected (either Formative or Summative).

Syncing Grades

Once everything is set up, the next step is actually sending your grades to Aspen! It is totally fine if you've already posted other grades to Aspen manually. Those grades won't be affected. But make sure the assignment you are syncing is NOT in Aspen yet. If the assignment is in Aspen, but you haven't posted grades yet, you could always delete it out of Aspen first or else just wait until your next assignment.

Head over to the Student Work page of any assignment in your Google Classroom. This is where you can see all the students and their work and you can enter grades:

From here, you will want to make sure all the grades are accurate, and that you have "Returned" the work to the students. If there are students who have not submitted, that's totally fine - you can sync without them or you can add 0 as a grade and click return anyway. The only grades that will sync are the ones that have been returned.

Once you've done that, you can click the blue "Export to SIS" button. If all goes well, it should just take a minute or so and then you should get a notification in the bottom left corner of your screen telling you it was (hopefully) completed:

Then you can go check Aspen to ensure that the assignment and grades synced (if you already had your gradebook open, you may need to refresh the page). If you need to change the grades later or if missing students submit late, you can always sync the grades again and the updated ones will replace the old ones.

Hopefully this process will save you a significant amount of time so you don't need to create assignments and enter grades in two places!