Friday, August 8, 2014

New School Year, New Technology

After a nice long summer break working at an alternative education school, with zero technology, I'm nice and refreshed, ready for the school year to start. Better yet, there are many new tools or updates to old tools to try with students. At the top of my list sits Classroom for Google. Having early access to the tool, allowed me to play with some features, and begin to set up some classes for this coming school year. The tool has a very simplistic interface, much like a Google + community, and offers flexibility with adding documents/files from Google Drive.

Some fantastic features of this tool are; once you make a classroom, the tool auto-creates a folder in your Google drive called Classroom, with a secondary folder nestled inside with that class name associated. This makes it very easy to store documents and files for that one class.
When you make an assignment, a new folder with the name of the assignment is created and nestled in the class folder. (confused yet? Look at the pictures below.)
When a student submits an assignment on their end, they do not have to change any sharing settings in the document, all they need to do is find the right file in their drive, and submit it. The file will magically move to your assignment folder.

I can almost see the piles of student papers on my desk, disappearing, and I can see the clutter of my drive becoming organized.

That is only skimming the surface of the tool. I will add more tips and features as I dust off my technology and start playing again. For now, enjoy the screen shots, from my new Google Open Gallery Page all about Classroom for Google.




Click the "i" icon at the bottom right for an image description. 

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