North Idaho EdTech

I've often been asked about an easy way to share out documents that students have worked on in Google Classroom to a whole class for peer reviews, product showcases, virtual gallery walks, etc. without having students share directly with each other or the teacher having to manually share them out student by student. So, here's a way to do this en masse for an entire class worth of documents/files. Start with an assignment that students have already completed in Google Classroom. It won't matter if they've turned them in or not (or if you've returned them or not). Create a new assignment that will share out all of the documents to the entire class. Select all of the documents at one time from the Google Drive attachment icon by holding down the Ctrl button (Command on a Mac) while you select each document to share. Be sure to give specific instructions on what  the students are to do with each other's work once it is shared out. It should be clear how...

It's been a while since I posted, especially about Google Classroom updates. The team at Google Classroom has been busy and super responsive to feedback from its user community. Since the last time I wrote about it, they've made a bunch of changes. I just wanted to highlight the ones that I think make the most impact on teachers in my district, I've created the list below: Mobile app updates: Add/Edit assignments - This is big for users who want to be able to manage their Classroom pages from anywhere. Grade student work - This is also great for teachers who like to work via mobile devices or in our 1:1 iPad classrooms. Take a photo to post to the stream or on assignments - This also great for our mobile teachers who want to share products from other students, class notes, or anything else out to the class right from their mobile device. Add other teachers as co-teachers. Not only has the Classroom team worked on making it more mobile friendly, but they've d...

Google has responded to may of our user feedback submissions and has updated Classroom with some very handy options. While I'm sure there are still many things that we'd all like to see, it's nice to see some response to many of our requests. Here is my explanation of the changes: Teachers can now control what students are able to do on the Stream. Teachers can allow full access, comment only access or make it so students cannot post at all on the Stream. This is available in the Student section for the teacher. Teachers can also "mute" individual students who may need to be restricted from making comments for one reason or another. This can be done in the Stream on a specific student's comment or from the Actions menu in the Student section. Also in the Student section in Classroom, teachers can now sort the class names by last name or first name. In the Assignments section, teachers can now download grades by each assignment or downloa...

As the school year begins this year, there is much buzz about the new classroom management suite from Google called Classroom. I know I'm as excited about it as anyone could be! Being able to manage student work and your own teacher workflow without knowledge of scripts and Add-ons makes my life as an instructional technology specialist much easier. One of the really great features in Google docs, and how Google Classroom integrates that as part of the assignment work/submission process, is the "Suggesting" mode in docs. While a student is completing an assignment, the teacher has the ability to open student documents and make suggestions. This is very handy during editing and revising periods, before a paper would be turned in. When a teacher makes a suggestion, the student will see the suggestion and the parts that have been changed will show up with a strike-through (see screenshot above). Students can then compare their text with the suggestion and make a d...