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Cleaning Up Classrooms, Archiving Past Classes, Tech Tip

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I’m here to tell you… you do not have to live in a mess! Break free! Find joy in cleaning out the clutter that is Google Classroom.

If you have spent more than a year or two using Google Classroom you may have noticed your Classes beginning to pile up. Tripping over those classroom tiles is no fun. So, this tech tip is focused on clearing your Classroom home screen and managing your active classes.

Let’s focus on two important ways to clean things up…
  • Organizing Classrooms
  • Archiving Classrooms
And one optional way to help things run faster...
  • Delete, if Not Using (Optional, of course)
First, when teaching multiple classes, if you’re like me, they had better be listed in order and in the same place every time I want to get into one, any other way just won’t do. Good news, you can MOVE Classroom Tiles? Yep, drag-n-drop. Woot!

Here’s a tip on how to Rearrange Class Tiles from one of my favorite bloggers, Alice Keeler. (If you don’t already follow her, here’s your chance to correct your error on Twitter.)



Second, let’s talk about Archiving Classrooms. Archiving a Class helps in two ways, 1) it will clean up your tiles and 2) it will clean up tiles for your students.

Why would we archive a class? 

Archiving a class allows you to preserve the important work accomplished in that class while removing its tile from your home screen. (Yay! You mean I get to keep and reuse all my work without losing anything? Basically, I'm moving a class from active to inactive? Yep!) 

Note that all archived classes can be restored to active at any time.

So, for a teacher, that means fewer tiles to organize or move around. For a student, when a teacher archives a class, that class is also removed from his/her home screen. Whew! Less clutter! Students can still access the materials and any past work, but cannot change anything, just like a teacher.

How to archive a class? Easy.
  1. Choose the class to archive and click on the menu (three vertical dots)
  2. Choose Archive


Note from Google: You and your students won't be able to make changes once you archive the class. You can view this class in "Archived Classes" in the Classroom menu. All class files will remain in your Google Drive.

How do I access my archived classes and/or restore a class?
  1. At the upper-left, choose the menu (three horizontal lines)
  2. Scroll to the bottom, select Archived Classes


To restore or delete a class…
  • Choose the class, click on the menu
  • Select Restore or Delete

Why delete a class?

Deleting Classrooms allows for our Skyward sync to run faster by causing less strain on our systems. If you believe you will never need a Classroom again, please delete it. Thanks!

Hope this tip helps save your sanity… a little. :)







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