Getting Started With Google Classroom

Google recently a new feature to Google Apps For Education - Google Classroom.  Google Classroom is a learning management system that advertises the following features --

• Paperlessly Create, Collect, Grade, and Return assignments.
• Real time activity stream for announcements, questions, and  feedback.
• All assignments on a single page and materials in Google Drive

We took a quick look at creating a simple classroom and adding some content and students.

Creating A Classroom

Creating a classroom is easy.  Log in with your google ID and go to https://classroom.google.com. You will see a plus sign by your login name to create a new class.

You will be asked for the class name and the class name and the class section.  This can be something like "English" and "7th Grade." In our example, we are adding a programming class taught by the technology department.  The name you choose will be used to create Google Drive folders so you want to choose carefully.  You can change the name later, but you'll need to rename the google drive folders that were created.

This creates a simple class with an home page.

As you add more classes, you can get to them from the "hamburger" on the upper left.

Google classroom will automatically create a google drive item to store your content and to receive assignments from students. 

Adding Content To Your Class

Once your class is created, you need to start adding content.  You can add files, items from Google Drive, or YouTube videos.  You can also post links to external content. The front page of the classroom will have stream where you can put data.  In our example classroom, we borrowed content from external sources.  Here is a lesson added from YouTube.

Adding Students To Your Class

Now that you have some content,  you will want to start adding students. An important caveat to know here is that all students will need to have an e-mail address within your Google domain. You have two ways to add them.

1) Manually add them yourselves by inviting them through the Google Classroom web page. I found this method to be rather tedious.
2) Send them the invite code from google classroom and have them enroll themselves.

Once you have some students, you an start trying it out in your class and seeing if it works for you.