Mastering Google Certified Educator Levels 1 and 2
Advanced Classroom Management
Beyond the Basics
You've already mastered the fundamentals of Google Classroom: creating classes, posting assignments, and communicating with students. Now, it's time to elevate your classroom from a digital filing cabinet to a dynamic, differentiated learning hub. We'll start by moving beyond whole-class assignments and exploring how to tailor instruction to individual student needs.
The key is to use Classroom's ability to assign work to specific students or groups. When you create an assignment, announcement, or question, look for the “For” dropdown menu. By default, it's set to “All students.” But you can uncheck that box and select individuals. This is perfect for providing enrichment activities for advanced learners or targeted support for those who need extra help.
For group projects, create a single Google Doc or Slide deck. In the assignment settings, choose “Students can edit file.” Then, assign that file only to the students in that specific group. Repeat the process for each group, ensuring each has its own collaborative document.
Streamline Communication and Resources
Keeping parents and guardians informed is crucial, but it can be time-consuming. Google Classroom automates this with Guardian Email Summaries. Once enabled by your school's administrator, you can invite guardians to receive daily or weekly emails that recap their student's missing work, upcoming assignments, and recent class announcements. You don't write these emails; Classroom generates and sends them for you. It's a powerful, low-effort way to maintain a strong home-school connection.
While the Classwork page is great for assignments, it can become cluttered with permanent resources like syllabi, reference charts, or links to essential websites. A better solution is to create a dedicated class resource portal using Google Sites and link it prominently in your Classroom's stream or header. A simple site can house all your static resources, organized by unit or topic, giving students a single, stable place to find what they need without scrolling through endless Classwork posts.
Standardize Feedback and Boost Efficiency
Providing consistent, high-quality feedback is one of the most impactful teaching practices, but it's also incredibly demanding. Classroom's built-in rubric feature can be a game-changer. When creating an assignment, you can attach a rubric with specific criteria and performance levels. As you grade, you simply click the corresponding level for each criterion, and Classroom calculates the score for you. You can still add personalized comments, but the rubric provides a clear, standardized foundation for your feedback. This not only saves you time but also makes your grading more transparent and objective for students.
Teachers can use Google Classroom to share learning materials, assignments, and feedback with their students.
If you teach multiple sections of the same course, you know the pain of posting the same announcement or assignment over and over. Use the multi-class posting feature. From the “For” dropdown menu in any assignment or announcement, you can select multiple classes at once. Even better, you can reuse posts from previous years or other classes. On the Classwork page, click “Create” and then “Reuse post.” This allows you to pull in an entire assignment, including its title, instructions, attachments, and rubric, from any class you teach or have taught. It's a massive time-saver, especially at the start of a new semester.
Ready to test your knowledge?
How can a teacher in Google Classroom provide a specific assignment only to a small group of students who need extra support?
When using the rubric feature in Google Classroom, you can click on the performance levels for each criterion to score an assignment, but you lose the ability to add personalized comments.
By mastering these features, you can create a more organized, efficient, and personalized learning environment for every student.