PPS Instructional Technology

It is one of Google's goals to constantly be working to make their products better.  Their philosophy is to "Launch and Iterate". In the spirit of constant improvement, Google Classroom is getting a new look and some great new features for the New Year.  Some of these features include... New look—Fresh new design and 78 new themes. Drag-and-drop classwork—Quickly organize entire topics or individual posts on the Classwork page. Quickly see and share a class code—Class codes now at the top of the Stream page for each class. So if you and/or your students open your Google Classroom over the next couple days, don't be surprised with the new look.  Google is just working on making the product better. To read about the new features, or see a short video (about 1 min), check out the Google blog post at: https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/new-year-new-classroom/ Enjoy!

Google has made several changes to Classroom that will affect teachers' workflow. These changes are welcome but do cause us to take pause as we learn the best ways in which to navigate its use. Here, I will list out and briefly explain those changes while also providing a few resources that you can use as you dig in. Major Updates New Classwork Page Assignments and Questions are now created and posted here. By making this change work is now separated from communication . The Stream is now strictly for announcements and responding to student posts. As you post assignments on the Classwork page, an announcement of that post is made in the Stream. Topics, Classwork Page Additionally, topics reside on the Classwork page, too. Topics have been around for a little while, but the beauty now is that assignments and questions can be organized within Topics. Alice Keeler has a lot to say on this in her blog post,  Google Classroom: Topics as Dates . I HIGHLY recommend you ...

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 ...

Need to print this tip?  Click here for a printable version . Although the need to print student documents has significantly decreased, there are still times when you want to print multiple student docs at one time.  For example, maybe you assigned a writing assignment in Google Classroom that you want to print for their writing folders.  You could go into each document individually and print it, but this can be a time consuming process.  Instead try using the app PDF Mergy to combine the documents into one PDF.  Then you only need to print one document.  WARNING: Just because you can print lots of docs at once, doesn't mean you should!  Please use this tip with caution and save paper whenever possible! To get started, you will need to go to the Chrome Web Store and add the app PDF Mergy . Once you have the app added to chrome, you are ready to go. Find the documents you want to print.   Here are some tips to finding the documents....

Hey, teachers! You and your students might be feeling a little Google Classroom Overload with all those pesky, old classes just hanging around. Well, no fear! There's a way to clean those up! I have a couple of classes from the 2016-2017 that have A LOT of really useful information in them. I don't want to delete them (Oh, the horror!), but I do want to get them out of the way as I am using my Google Classroom every day. So... what do I do? I ARCHIVE them! Here's how... Locate the Google Classroom Tiles that you would like to archive Click on the menu (verticle dots) at the upper-right of a tile (1) Click Archive (2) Confirm that you would like to archive this class. (Once archived students will no longer see that class either. Whew!) (Optional) Delete Old Classrooms (Or just to access archived classrooms) Deleting old classrooms has some benefit, but you must also be careful. When you archive a Class, you can still access that...

Over the summer Google Classroom greatly increased your options to customize notifications inside Google Classroom.  This is great since you may want to receive notifications when someone mentions you in a comment or post, but you don't want one when someone resubmits an assignment or a similar function.   Thankfully Matt Miller, from Ditch the Text Book, has just posted an excellent article on how to manage all those Google Classroom Notifications.  Check it out here:  How to manage Google Classroom like a boss with notifications . To learn more about setting up filters in Gmail, check out this blog post .

The beauty and the burden of Google is that they are always making changes and improvements.  The latest updates to Google Classroom will definitely fall into the beauty category.  Yesterday, Google announced the ability in Google classroom to assign work to individual students instead of just the whole class.  WOW!  We've been waiting for that feature.  Now when you are doing small group work, you can assign the post to just the students in that small group.  Have a student who needs extra, targeted practice?  No problem, post an assignment and assign it to just that student.  I can't wait to start using this feature.  To learn more, check out this post from Google's Keyword Blog .

Thank you everyone for your patience! We know that getting Google Classroom up and running is a big deal for many of you. Hopefully the wait has been worth it... Google Classrooms are now being AUTOMATICALLY created based on the courses in Skyward. If you are the teacher for a course in Skyward, then you will have access as the teacher for that Google Classroom. As students are added to, or leave your class, they will automatically be added or removed from your Google Classroom as well. Here are a few other details... The sync with Skyward runs once a day. Therefore if a student is added to your class in Skyward on a Monday, they will show up in your Google Classroom on Tuesday morning. Teachers will have to Accept their classes before they can be used. To do this, go to classroom.google.com . Click the blue Accept button for your course. Google Classroom class names cannot be changed. This helps with continuity for teachers and students. Course names all follow the ...

March is a hard time to try something new in your classroom.  You already have your routines set, your expenctations are crystal clear, and your curriculum is rolling along at a steady pace.  Breaking that flow and trying something new can not only be challenging, but also intimidating.  Our next guest blogger, Kitty Broderick - Third Grade teacher at Woodland Elementary in Portage Public Schools, shows us all why it's okay to make the leap in March and try something new... your students will thank you! "This year at MACUL I was ready to take something back and implement it right away!  That was my goal.  No longer would I say, "Oh that's a great website.  I'll plan on starting it next school year.  I don't think I have time for it in my schedule at this point in the school year." Starting something new in March is hard (for teachers).  We already have a set routine, students know the expectations for each part of the day, and teachers are bu...

Are you using Google Classroom? Are you finding difficulty managing your email from assignments and posts from Classroom? Then check out below this simple, yet highly effective strategy! Disclaimer: I cannot even pretend to take credit for this one. The original post is from Alice Keeler: Teacher Tech , but I heard about it from our own  Malena Schrauben  through this incredible Professional Development tool called  Twitter . The idea here is to use a hashtag in the title of each of your assignments. Then in gmail, filter messages out of your inbox based on that hashtag. Genius! Examples... Math Class: #alg1 #extsn Exponents Power Rule Social Studies: #SS7th #discuss Civil War Causes Science: #sci8th #insectcollect Pinning a Butterfly Notice that I tried to create examples that could group email by class, grade level, assignment type, or project.  Hopefully, these examples will get you thinking. I am certain you will develop better uses on your own. Als...

Are you a user of Google Classroom ? Do you work with your students' data in Google Sheets? Have you ever thought "I wish there was a way to grab my roster from Classroom and put it into a Spreadsheet. Ugh." Well, now there is a way! Meet... rosterSync ! From the site... rosterSync - Teacher Edition  allows teachers to sync a Google Classroom course roster -- including student email addresses -- directly with Google Sheets for handy use with Add-ons like Doctopus, formMule, autoCrat, formRanger, and others. Installing this Tool... I installed the Sheets Add-on, which can be found here I clicked the blue "FREE" button An "Untitled Spreadsheet" opened up and the Add-on was installed Easy!  Using rosterSync... After titling my Sheet (as any good Google Drive user does), I clicked "Add-ons" in the menu bar I choose "rosterSync - Teacher Edition" A few seconds later, I had this convenient sidebar at the rig...

It is no surprise that I love Google Classroom and Google Forms.  These are two of my favorite tools thanks to all they wonderful educational uses. Google forms are a great way to collect information from students.  Whether I need them to respond to a survey, take a quiz, or collect data, this is usually my go-to tool.  Traditionally if I needed my students to use a form I would share it with them via an email to their school account, or I would give them a shortened URL to type into their address bar.  Last year, when I began to use Google Classroom, it became even easier to have my students use google forms for quick formative assessments or to collect responses about their learning.  I could insert the link to the form right in an assignment in Google Classroom.  Once they took the survey/quiz, I would then have them go back into classroom and mark it as "done."  This was a bit cumbersome,  but it helped me to quickly see who was done and w...

This summer the big buzz at Tech Camp wasn't the Skyward gradebook or online assessments...it was GOOGLE CLASSROOM !  Google Classroom is a document management system from Google that really helps teachers organize and manage their classes.  It allows you to easily handout and have students turn back in assignments in a logical and organized manner.  This product launched just over a year ago and since that time it has taken the classrooms around the country by storm.  Learn more about Google Classroom in this blog post . Now since Google never leaves well enough alone when it comes to any of their products, it is no surprise that they have recently made some substantial feature adds to Google Classroom just in time for the start of a new school year.  These new features include some of the most requested items we heard from our PPS teachers who were piloting Google Classroom last year.  Here is what Google had to say about the new features they have adde...

Google made some major updates to Google Classroom yesterday! Teachers can now: Invite students using Groups Control permissions on the Classroom Stream Sort students by first or last name Export Grades Students can now: Mark assignments as "done" Great updates!  To learn more check out this post from Google for Education .

For those of you who have used Google Docs with your students you know that it is a great tool for communication and collaboration.  Students can work on projects together, teachers can view documents in real time and comment and offer support, and everything saves automatically!  SO many great pluses, but getting students to share and "turn in" documents was a big head ache. Enter Google Classroom! Google Classroom is Google's new learner managements system (LMS) which makes handing out, turning in, and grading assignments a dream. To learn more about Google Classroom and get started setting up your first class, check out this Blog post from Instructional Tech Talk:  http://instructionaltechtalk.com/getting-started-google-classroom/ PPS Teachers, have questions or want some help getting started, set up time with Jessica ( calendly.com/jwinstanley ) or Paul ( calendly.com/pmurray ).