Google Classroom
Automatic Class Creation and Roster Sync
Middle- and Upper-School teachers who use Google Classroom for collecting student work or posting digital resources now have the option to have classes automatically created. Any class for which you are assigned as the teacher in MyDE can be added to your Google Classroom automatically and students on your MyDE Roster will automatically be added to that class. If you would like this, make you request via the Computer Services support request form here or email help@d-e.org. (Google Classroom classes for fourth- and fifth-grade are already scheduled to be created.)
For more information, click the header above to expand this section.After your request is received, Computer Services will enable automatic class creation for Google Classroom and nightly roster updating for all classes and advisories where you are listed as a teacher in MyDE. By the following morning, you should see all of your MyDE classes appear on the Home screen of Google Classroom. You will need to to choose Accept for each class that you want to use in Classroom.
For each class you Accept, if students are added to or removed from your class in MyDE, your Google Classroom rosters will also be updated overnight You can start adding and editing content in Google Classroom at any time. However, students will not show up on your Classroom rosters until the first day of school for students.
More details about the roster synchronization (provided by Clever) are here.
Details for CS staff on the process required to enable this are here under Clever.
Parent Access to Google Classroom
When you look at your student roster under People in Google Classroom, you may see some students have their guardians "invited" to the Google Classroom. This does NOT mean parents have access to your Google Classroom class. Please do not remove the invitations. (Click here for more details.)
Even if guardians have been "invited" to Classroom, guardians never have the ability to log into your classroom and browse your content. There is no feature from Google to allow guardians to login to your Google Classroom class (unless, of course, they use their childs username and password).
Any teacher can "invite" guardians to link them to child in Google Classroom. However, when they do that, the link appears on the roster of all classes in which the student is enrolled. This seems to carry over from year to year. If you see guardians linked to some of your students, and you didn't invite them, they were probably invited by a colleague or from the student's previous teacher.
When parents have been linked to their students, they can be emailed Guardian Summaries from Google Classroom only if you enable that.
Guardian Summaries are OFF by default for classes in Google Classroom. They can be turned on for individual classrooms in the settings for that classroom.
If you see that there are guardians that have been invited to your class, PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE THEM. They do not have any access to anything you post in Classroom unless you turn on Guardian Summaries.
If you remove the guardian, it will generate an email to the parent telling them that they have been removed from their child's classroom account, and the message is a little off-putting.
Tips for Teachers
You can use an iPad to draw or write on digital student work to provide feedback
See this Google support article for details.
Post a reoccurring assignment on MyDE to make it easier for students to track work across all courses (US teachers)
For Upper School teachers, if you use Google Classroom to post assignment details, you can post a reoccurring daily homework assignment in MyDE that references Google Classroom rather than just directing students at the beginning of the year or semester to look on Google Classroom. This provides the ability for students to use the assignment tracking features in MyDE to see and update completion status for all of their assignments across all courses in one place. See this Blackboard support article What are the assignment instance settings when adding an assignment? for details on how to create a reoccuring assignment in MyDE.
Additional Information and Help
Getting Started with Google Classroom (videos) by Google for Education