Do your students struggle to find materials and assignments in Google Classroom? Are you new to Google Classroom and have no idea how you want to organize all your information? Trust me! You are not alone!! I am going to give you my five tips for how to organize your Google Classroom.
As a first year teacher, I was told I needed to use Google Classroom for all my high school classes. This was even before the pandemic and hybrid/virtual teaching was a thing. I had never used Google Classroom before so I really had no clue what I was doing. I did some Google searching to try to find some tips, but everyone had different ideas of what was best for organizing their classrooms.
After a few years of trying to figure it all out myself, plus a year and a half of virtual learning, I have come up with 5 really amazing tips that I think will help get any Google Classroom organized. Students and colleagues have praised my organization and I am hoping this blog post will help you!
Tip #1: Hide Classwork From the Stream
The stream is the home tab in a Google Classroom that serves as a place to post announcements and notifications. However, when new items (assignments or materials) are added to the classroom, a notification is posted to the stream. When a student opens your classroom, it will open on the stream first. They are more likely to just click on the assignment there. But issues arise when you post multiple items a day and students need to find one specific piece of material.
To circumvent this issue of students finding their assignments, I remove all notifications from the stream. They are then forced to the “Classwork” tab to look for work.
To shut off the stream notifications:
- Go to the Google Classroom home page.
- Open one of your classes.
- Click on settings gear ⚙️ icon in the top right toolbar.
- Scroll down to “General” section and find topic that saw “Classwork on stream”.
- Change the dropdown for “Classwork on stream” to “Hide notifications”.
Tip #2: Create a “Today’s Materials” topic for classwork tab
When I first started using Google Classroom I would organize my posts just by date. But student’s would still find it difficult to find the work they needed for just today’s class. I post 2-3 items a day per class. Some things may be needed for class or they may just be materials/resources to review a topic.
To help students identify the materials they will need to use for just today’s class, I keep a topic at the top of each of my Google Classroom classwork tabs called “Today’s Materials”. This topic heading will always live at the very top of the classwork tab. I will post any notes, activities, or materials that students will need to complete that specific class. When students log into classroom, they quickly and easily find everything they need for the day.
When class is over, I then move those materials into their appropriate topic. This makes room for the next day’s materials. You can easily move items on Google Classroom by clicking on the name and dragging it to a different topic.
To create the topic:
- Click on the Create button at the top of the classwork tab
- Select Topic
- Type in topic name – I call it Today’s Materials but you can use whatever name you want
- Click Add
- It will add the new topic to the top automatically. If you need to move it, just click on it and drag it to the correct location on the page.
Tip #3: Create an “Upcoming Assignments Due” topic
Just like we created a topic for all the materials needed for the day, I find it is best to then create a topic specifically for all graded work that has a due date associated with it. For the students, the graded work is most important because it involves them actually completing something. I keep this topic near the top, right under the “Today’s Materials”. This is so students can quickly and easily find all the work that is due.
I know Google Classroom gives each student a “To-do” list for the class but I have found many students are not even aware it exists or do not bother to look at it. Because students will be grabbing materials from the Today’s Materials section, it is easy for them to view all the upcoming assignments.
Tip #4: Organize topics by unit
For the rest of the topics in Google Classroom, I think it is best to organize by unit. I have tried to organize by day, week, lesson, etc. but I felt like I was adding so many unnecessary topics. I think it was only adding to the confusion for the students.
For a while, I was using organizing my topics by week on the classwork page. I thought this made the most sense because students could find a week and see what we did that week. But then one day I thought to myself “do students really care what week we covered lesson?”. If they are going back in time to find a material, Google Classroom already timestamps posts so I thought it was a bit redundant to organize the topics by day or week.
For this school year, I am organizing my topics by unit and it is so much easier for students and myself to find a material. I keep the material within that unit in order by date as well. I put the oldest materials at the bottom of that topic and then more recent materials are posted near the top of the topic.
When I am done with a material that was originally posted under Today’s Materials, I will move it to the corresponding unit. You can move a material by simply clicking on its name and then while clicking, drag it to the appropriate topic.
Tip #5: Use emojis to visually organize classwork
I LOVE emojis 😍 and I think they are super helpful when trying to organize digital files. Most people are visual and when they recognize an emoji, they can quickly determine/categorize what that material is all about.
In my Google Classroom I have some regular emojis that I use to indicate what kind of material is being posted. I presented the following key at the beginning of the year and posted it to my syllabus for students and parents to become familiar with.
- ⏰ Assignments that have a due date
- 📓 Notes
- 📘 Practice/formative work
- ✅ Test/quiz reminder
How I use these emojis in Google Classroom
I chose the alarm clock ⏰ emoji for assignments to visually remind students that these assignments have a due date associated with them. Most of the time these assignments live in the Upcoming Assignments Due topic but once the due date has passed, students can still easily recognize that these assignments need to be turned in.
The notebook 📓 emoji is used for any of my Google Slides that I share with the students that they should have taken notes on. When students miss a class, they often ask “what notes did I miss?” and my response is to look on Google Classroom for anything with the notebook emoji.
I do not grade every single assignment in my class. I reserve grades on assignments that are meant to assess student’s knowledge/understanding on a topic. Therefore, many of the daily classwork assignments are formative or practice work. Because I do not grade these, I do not want to use the ⏰ . Instead I use the colored book emoji 📘. I use different colored books in my different classes. I use blue for environmental science and green for biology. Students also are aware that although I am not grading these assignments (especially because we go over them before students leave class), I expect that they save the assignment in their Google Drive folder for the class to review/study before a quiz or test.
After having a year of hybrid learning, I began giving some assessments digitally. I sometimes use Google Forms or GoFormative to make quizzes or tests. When I post links to these assignments I use the ✅ emoji to indicate that this assignment is a check for their understanding. If I am not posting a link to a test or quiz, I will also use this emoji to post a material on the classwork tab as a reminder of an upcoming test.
I hope you find these tips helpful! Happy organizing!!
