Google Classroom Hack #5: Help Students Succeed in REAL Time

You can use Google Classroom to assist your students in real time! There's a function that allows you to check on the assignments your students are completed in Google Classroom, and you can send them messages, help them with their assignments, and more.

I’m wrapping up the school year with Google Classroom hacks. The entire point of these hacks is to simplify your life while holding the students accountable up to the bitter end. The last six weeks are always the hardest. The weather is beautiful, the students are checked out, and we’re all exhausted. The last thing any of us want to do is focus.

Last week, I talked about color-coding to simplify the grading process in Classroom. This week, I want to show you how to use your Google Drive to monitor your students as they are working.

Google Classroom Hack #5: Help Students Succeed in REAL Time

I call it “monitoring.” My students call it “stalking.” Either way, it holds them accountable and allows me to check for understanding before they submit an assignment.

The other day, as my world history class was working on a vocabulary assignment, I sat at one of the tables in my room, opened the “classroom” folder in my Drive, and “stalked” the students’ assignments.

A few minutes into the assignment, I noticed one boy had zero work done. I left a comment on his slides for him—“get to work.” He saw it pop up on his assignment and immediately realized I wasn’t going to let him slack.

A girl was dragging and dropping vocabulary words into a cloze reading passage. I noticed that three of them were wrong, so I dragged the words off from the blanks and put them back in the word bank. She got confused and dragged them back. I moved them again and messaged her by leaving a comment.

She messaged me back that she was confused (a lot of the words in our current unit deal with imperialism and can be annoyingly similar), so I moved five of the words off to the side to narrow her choices. She felt less overwhelmed and was able to complete the assignment meaningfully by really looking at the definitions of those five words and figuring out where they belonged within the context of the passage.

Here’s How It Works:

You can use Google Classroom to assist your students in real time! There's a function that allows you to check on the assignments your students are completed in Google Classroom, and you can send them messages, help them with their assignments, and more.

You can use Google Classroom to assist your students in real time! There's a function that allows you to check on the assignments your students are completed in Google Classroom, and you can send them messages, help them with their assignments, and more.

You can use Google Classroom to assist your students in real time! There's a function that allows you to check on the assignments your students are completed in Google Classroom, and you can send them messages, help them with their assignments, and more.

You can use Google Classroom to assist your students in real time! There's a function that allows you to check on the assignments your students are completed in Google Classroom, and you can send them messages, help them with their assignments, and more.

There are other implications for this besides understanding check and keeping students on task. Imagine having a particular time each week for tutoring. I used to do it on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for students who needed extra assistance, but it seemed that the students who needed it the most couldn’t get a ride.

Most of my students have some type of device (phone, tablet, computer…) that they can work on at home. We can schedule a time for me to give them extra help remotely. I obviously want my family time to be for my family, but if a student needs help and can’t stay after or come early, this is an ideal solution—kind of like virtual office hours, and I can control the times I make myself available.

Do you have a Google Classroom Hack to share or maybe just a question about this one? If so, leave it in the comments below, and I’ll see you again next week for Google Classroom Hack #4!

Read the next hack in this series–CLICK HERE.

Read more about: Classroom Technology

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