Holiday Activities via Google Classroom

Happy Thanksgiving week!  The Instructional Technology Team is very thankful for the teachers in AISD that continue to transform their instructional practice and develop authentic ways to engage students using the available technology in the classroom!

Holiday Activities via Google Classroom!

In an effort to demonstrate Google Classroom to teachers and students, The “Holiday Classroom!” class is being shared with all teachers and students in AISD.  Simply joining the class will provide teachers and student access to a few Google Apps activities created for the holiday season. Students will automagically get their own copy of the activities after joining the class.

(*Teachers, see important note below.)

Students and teachers can go into the AISD Cloud and search for Google Classroom. Once open, click the + sign at the top right to select Join.   Join this class using the code, “5adyiv”.  Students can immediately begin working on any activity in this Holiday Classroom! by just clicking on the assignment title and then on the activity. 

The process of joining will create a copy of all activities in a new folder in your Google Drive called “Classroom”. Inside that folder you will see all classes that you have joined, including “Holiday Classroom!”  

*Important: A quick-start guide to using Google Classroom can be found at: http://bit.ly/aisdgclassroom .  Also, it is important that teachers first click the blue “Teacher” button the very first time they access Google Classroom.  They can then +Join a class just like a student.  

One of the activities included is a Thanksgiving-themed "What I Am Thankful For" Google Slide. Simply adding text to this slide completes the activity, but students can explore other tools within Slides as they become more familiar with this creation tool.  Check out the activity at: http://bit.ly/thanksgivingslide .

Leave a comment or feedback on these activities or implementation strategies that you found helpful.  We would love to share your feedback with other teachers. 

Google Classroom Make Google Drive Work For Students

Google Classroom is almost  one-year-old already and it has already made an impact on many classrooms. It is still maturing and being improved, but you may find that it will help you do great things with Google Drive and your students.

We have created a training document that can step a teacher through getting Google Classroom setup to use with students.  You might find it very helpful in getting started on your own:  bit.ly/aisdgclassroom .

Probably the biggest feather in Classroom's hat is that it helps organize documents shared with students.  By sharing documents within assignments, Classroom will place the new document in a folder in the student's folder (created by Classroom) and include the student's name in the document filename.  This standardization will help the teacher to file locations for all students in the class.

Classroom is able to change ownership of student work.  When students Turn In assignments to the teacher, the teacher becomes the owner and can grade/comment on the work. Students can get the paper back to continue editing it, but it again changes the ownership and will be reflected in the Turn In date recorded by Classroom.

There are almost too many ways to share conversations between teacher and student.  Classroom discussions can be shared in the main class stream. Students can comment on the assignment directly to the teacher before turning it in when it is turned in and after it is turned in. 

One of the last updates opened the door to having multiple teachers in one classroom and allows for saving assignments as drafts.  Saving drafts is incredibly valuable since you can pre-create several assignments and publish them when you are ready.

There is much more to Google Classroom.  Check out the training document linked to above or contact Instructional Technology for personalized on-campus training.

Do you have experience with Google Classroom? What worked well for you? What did you have to problem-solve? Share your experience or questions below in the comments.