Every summer, Google implements a variety of updates to Google Classroom to add functionality or make things easier for teachers. This year, there are a lot of great new tools to explore and use.
Visit a Class
You might start to see some email notifications telling you that people are "visiting" your Google Classroom. This is primarily an administrative feature, but it saves teachers from needing to add administrators as co-teachers. Instead, those administrators can go to Google Classroom and choose "Visit a Class":
They are then required to provide a reason for the visit, which is emailed to the primary teacher. It essentially makes them a co-teacher for the moment and takes those privileges away as soon as they leave the page. This saves administrators from being in hundreds of Google Classrooms and it allows teachers to know when someone is reviewing their work.
Not Accepting Late Work
One of the most requested features from teachers has always been the ability to "turn off" the ability for students to submit work late. This year, when you create a new assignment and add a due date, you will see a checkbox to close submissions after the due date. You can change this option later by editing the assignment.
When you grade student work, you will also see a note if you closed submissions. Clicking on the pencil takes you to the assignment editing page where you can open the submissions back up if necessary.
Grading
Over the last year or so, Google Classroom has incorporated more options for grading. You can access the options by opening one of your classes and selecting the settings gear in the top right. Scroll down to the grading section to see the options:
Grading Periods:
If you want to set your Classroom gradebook up similarly to Aspen, you can add in grading periods. You can call them whatever you want and set start and end dates. You can also copy the grading periods to other classes so you don't have to repeat this process multiple times.
Grading Scale:
You can now add a custom grading scale to your class. This does not change the number/percentage grade, but it does change what that number/percentage means. You can add a letter-based grade scale that matches that of the school, you can use proficiency terms, or you can create your own custom definitions for each percentage. Why would you want to do this? If you have your assignments worth more or less than 100 points, it might be difficult for a student (or you) to quickly understand how they did. By attaching terminology (letters, numbers, or words), it becomes much easier:
Grading Calculation:
You can have Google Classroom calculate the overall grade in one of two ways - the first is by Total Points. That basically adds up all of the possible points from all the assignments and calculates an average score for each student. This does not take into account any differences in weighting you might have between formative and summative assessments.
The second way is Weighted by Category. This allows you to set categories in the same way you do in Aspen and assign percentages to them. Google Classroom then calculates the average for each category and then uses the category weighting to calculate the final grade.
If you're confused by the math - look at the scores above. There are 250 available points and the student scored 219. The actual average would calculate to an 87.6% However, since I use the categories of Formative (worth 20%) and Summative (worth 80%), the score becomes 85.87%
Formative: 134/150 = 89.33%
Summative: 85/100 = 85%
Formative: 89.33%*20% = 17.87%
Summative: 85%*80% = 68%
Total Grade: 68%+17.87% = 85.87%
(Didn't think you were going to get a math lesson from me, did you?)
Finally, you are welcome to hide the calculated grade from the students if you would prefer that they use Aspen to see their final grades - this may be a good choice until you can be sure that the calculations you see in Google Classroom are the same as what you see in Aspen.
None of these new features are required to use, but all are welcome to explore and see if they help to improve teacher and student understanding and productivity!
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