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THIS WEEK IN DIGITAL LEARNING

Writer's pictureMelissa Brayall

New Ways to Think About Google Classroom

I am currently taking a course that focuses on using Google Classroom. You might be asking yourself...why would you take a Google Classroom course? You aren't a classroom teacher anymore and you're already a Google Certified something-or-other! That's true...but by keeping myself educated, I sometimes get to learn about new/different/creative ways to use the features that we already know and use on a daily basis. Check out these 3 cool ideas on how to make Google Classroom more engaging for your students!


Use Emojis to Make Assignments Stand Out

Personally, I never think about using emojis for anything school related, but they can be so useful!! What if you edited the title of a completed assignment to have a green checkmark emoji at the front? Now students will see something like this:

Visual of Google Classroom showing emojis before assignment names

It's not a major change, but it gives students a quick visual that those assignments are now in the past. You could also consider using emojis to distinguish between formative and summative assessments or to show which competencies are covered in a particular assignment. As long as you let your students know what the emojis signify, you can be creative with how you use them!


If you are interested in using emojis, the best way to access them is through a website like Emojipedia.org. From here, you can search for what you want and then copy and paste the emoji just like you would any other text element. To save you even more time, you could create a document that houses all of your commonly-used emojis and then you can copy and paste from there!


Keep Your Stream Clean

If you've ever looked at your Google Classroom Stream, you may have noticed that it is full of notifications about new assignments that have been posted. The trouble is - these notifications aren't organized as nicely as your Classwork page and they get mixed in with potentially important announcements you might be posting:

Classroom Stream with classwork notifications

What if you took the assignments out of your Stream and saved it for things like announcements or even class conversations?


To turn off assignment notifications in the Stream, go to your Class Settings (gear icon in the top right corner), scroll to the "Stream and classwork" section, and change the "Classwork on the Stream" setting to "Hide notifications" and then Save:

Demonstration of how to hide classwork notifications

Here's what the new and improved clean Stream looks like for the students:

Classroom Stream without classwork notifications

Use the Question Feature to Get Class Feedback

One of the options when you add new Classwork has always been "Question":

Google Classroom Create menu

If you haven't used it before, it gives you the ability to pose a simple one question "form" to your students directly in Google Classroom. It can be either a short answer question or a multiple choice question. This is a great (and super fast) way to get feedback from students. It could also be used as a class discussion forum.


What if you used a Question to see if students understood a topic you just covered? Simply create a new question from the Classwork tab and choose Multiple Choice. Add a question like..."How well do you understand the material covered in class today?" With choices such as "I understand it completely" "I understand some parts" and "I don't understand at all"...OR...your choices could be something like "🙂" "😐" "🙁" and you could combine my first tip with this one! Just like any other assignment, you can set a due date and a topic. You could also make it a grade if you really wanted to. The final options are to allow students to see a summary of responses (for multiple choice questions) or to allow students to reply to each other or change their response (for short answer questions). In my example, I would keep the responses hidden, but you could certainly come up with ways to use this feature to encourage class discussions!

Sample setup of a Question in Google Classroom

As a note - for the short answer question, if you opt to allow students to respond to each other - they will have to type their own response BEFORE they see any other responses.



Have some fun exploring these ideas or coming up with your own creative uses of existing Classroom features!

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