As you gear up for the new school year, try the newest features in Google Classroom for more ways to save time, engage your students and keep everyone organised.
1. Collaborate with colleagues
Use Docs to collaborate with your colleagues on joint lesson plans or training materials in real-time, and to create shared calendars for cross-classroom activities.
2. Keep a running record of staff meeting notes
Take meeting notes in a Google Doc and share the notes with your fellow staff. Staff members can access the notes from any device at any time, as well as add comments or suggestions to the notes.
3. Improve your students’ writing skills
For group assignments, you can have students work collaboratively on a writing project, and give them ongoing and simultaneous feedback. Need visibility into which student did what? Use revision history to hold students accountable for their work.
4. Set up a peer review system
Give students responsibility for providing feedback on another student’s work by “Suggesting” changes and leaving comments in Docs. Students can also easily tag each other in comments to notify peers, or use the chat feature to communicate with other people who are viewing the same document in real time.
5. Share or publish student work
Multiple sharing settings allow you to publish student work by sharing it within your class, within your school or district, or by making it public on the web. You can even share a student’s work with their parents to showcase their accomplishments.
6. Translate letters home to parents
For convenience, you can use docs to translate letters, permission slips, and newsletters home to parents and guardians. Access Google Translate right from Docs and make translating a breeze.
7. Gift your students easy reference tools
Teach your students how to easily utilise reference tools with Google Docs’ built-in access to a dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia.
8. Liven up your assignments with visuals and graphics
You can search Google Images, Time Magazine, and stock photos directly from within Docs to add images and gifs to your assignments.
As an added bonus, you can make the text in images and PDFs editable by simply opening them within Google Docs.
9. Work with any file type
We know that sometimes your students and colleagues use Office files, but don’t worry because Google Docs is compatible with other document software, making it easy to work with any file type regardless of which is used.
10. Work on the go or offline
Work on the go: Download and use the Google Docs mobile app to make last minute tweaks when away from your desktop or laptop.
Work offline: Google Docs offers offline creation and editing, too. Enable offline syncing in order to download files to your device and edit them offline. When an internet connection is reestablished, Docs will automatically sync and update your files to the cloud.