Access Google Classroom as a Teacher.

In almost ever Google App, you will find this.
Click on the 3 by 3 dots and choose Classroom, often found at the bottom of the list.
You can also just go to https://classroom.google.com.
A little thing to be careful about.
If you have more than one Google Account, it is easy to NOT find the Classroom you need.
You can see here that I have several Google Accounts. Most people only have a gmail.com Google Account, I have one of those as well plus the three you see here.
When I want to go to Classroom, I want to do it as tonyarcus@uofnkona.edu, I click on the Google Class room icon, and always end up in Classroom as tony@ai.net.nz.
Oops, then I have to switch accounts as you see here, click on tonyarcus@uofnkona.edu, and I get the right Classroom with the classes I belong to.
This happens as a bit of an error in Chrome, I am logged in on multiple accounts, my tony@ai.net.nz is the primary account and it always flicks me into Google Classroom for that account, even when I am coming fromtonyarcus@uofnkona.edu.
The quick check is to see which Icon is on your screen, that I why I have such different people Icons, a Penguin, Me & Groot.
Google Classroom as the Right User.
I am the correct user, and I can see the classrooms I expect to see.
Let’s go into FIE September 2020.
There are three main areas you are interested in:
- Stream, the chronological order of activities in the Classroom, students and teachers can chat with each other, events can be planned, links to a Google Meet can be placed here, generally anything but Classwork.
- Classwork, as a teacher you will put your assignments for grading, quizzes, questions, and course material in here. We have split this up in topics, one topic for each week.
- People, as a teacher you get to see all the other teachers and students, NOTE, there is a limit on having 20 teachers and 250 students.
- Finally, you have Grades, which is really only of interest for the course leader.
Assignments
You are going to be interested in creating Assignments.
The idea is to first get all the material you will be used together in one place, best if this is in Google Drive.
In this area, you can click on “Class Drive Folder“.
This opens up Google Drive, in your Account inside of this Classroom workspace.
When I am working with a School I go ahead and make the folders 0.communication, 0.grading, 0.resources, 0.templates.
The other two folders you see were created by Google Classroom when the teacher made an assignment called “Journal week 1”, and “Templates – DO NO EDIT”.
- 0.communication is created so teachers have a place they can put things to communicate with other teachers.
- 0.grading is for the course leader to have a place to managing grading outputs from Google Classroom.
- 0.resources is a place for teachers to put any resources they want to share with the students. I then share this folder, as read-only, with all students so they can at any time look and review what teachers place there, like power points, videos, pdfs.
- 0.templates is where teachers will put the actual working material that will be inserted into assignments. This could be MLA templates, Book Review templates, BRI templates.
Before you create an assignment for students, get your resources together, and put a copy of them in 0.resources, this could include rubrics. If you have a particulate template you want the students to do their work in, but that in 0.templates.
Now we can create a new Assignment.
Under Classwork, click on Create and choose the first option, Assignment.
Give your Assignment a Title and Instructions.

You can add a Rubric, or a file, or even a YouTube video by clicking on add.
If you add a Google Drive item, you want to go to the 0.templates we talked about previously to get it so it is available for other teacher to interact with it if needed.
Once you have the Google Drive item up and in the assignment you then have an option on how the studtens can interact with it.
When you add a Google Doc to an Assignment, it can be added as:
- Students can only view the file.
- Students can edit the file. Very rare that you would want a single file that all students can edit.
- Make a copy of each student. This is the most common form I have found teachers us. In the assignment there might be a template called “Book report”, now each student gets a copy of this called, “Student Name – Book Report”. When they are in Google Classroom, the can go in to the assignment, click on the file, open the book report, create their book report, it is automatically saved by Google, come back another day and finish. When finished, they can “hand in” the assignment, you will see it in grading, can open their file, and read their book report.
Hope this helps.
Let me know if you have any questions.
tonyarcus@uofnkona.edu