top of page

THIS WEEK IN DIGITAL LEARNING

Writer's pictureMelissa Brayall

Google Classroom Summer Updates

As a new school year begins, along with it comes all sorts of new updates to various digital tools. This year, we saw some major visual updates to Canva and WeVideo as well as some usage updates to all of the Google tools. This week, I will focus on the newest features you will find in Google Classroom!


Student Groups

When you assign work in Google Classroom, you will notice a new view in the top right:

Before, you had the ability to assign work to all students or selected students. Now they have added the ability to create groups of students and assign work based on those groups. Once you create a group, it is saved to the Class, so you can quickly and easily assign work to those groups later too! You can create groups right from the assignment creation area:

Or if you want to build groups in advance or need to edit groups, you can do so from the Student section of the People tab of your Class:


Guardian Previews

Before now, the only information parents would receive from Google Classroom was a Guardian Summary, which just provided titles and due dates of assignments:


Now they have added a full preview of the Google Classroom including links to any attached documents! For parents, this is now what they will see:


This feature is DISABLED by default, so you will need to turn it on. To do that, go to the Settings of any of your classes and scroll to the Guardian Access section. Toggle the switch to enable it. You are able to enable it for all of your classes at once or you can opt to enable it for individual classes.


You may also want to take a look at your Student tab to see if there are any students who don't have guardians listed - feel free to look up the primary contact email address in Aspen and invite them!


Default Grade for Missing Work

Last year, Classroom added a lot of features related to grading (learn about them here!) and they have now added the ability to customize what grade appears if student work is missing. The default grade is 0, but you can now change it to anything you want! To access this feature, go to the Settings of the class (same place you found the Guardian Access above) and scroll down near the bottom until you find "Draft grade for missing assignments."



5 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page