How to Use Classroom and Other Google Tools for Remote Learning

The first great, wonderful surprise is that my daughter’s school is using G Suite for Education, so every student has an email address on the school’s domain, and teachers interact with students through Classroom. Classroom is a simplified, easy-to-use tool that lets teachers manage course activities at every level. Teachers can use it to create courses (and therefore lessons), assign homework and grades, send feedback and keep everything under control in a single application. This period of isolation has forced teachers and students to use it intensively, alongside other Google services such as Calendar, Meet and documents via Drive. Asynchronous communication worked effectively right from the start, with teachers creating a dedicated space for their subject and using the “Stream” section to provide all the information students need.

The first problem I noticed, likely shared by other schools, is how hard it is to use Google’s tools for live teaching, since the training needed to build an effective methodology is missing for both students and teachers. Right now communication tends to be disorganized because we were all caught off guard, teachers included, and students are now informed through a patchwork mix of emails, WhatsApp messages, Classroom Stream posts, Google Meet calls and Google Calendar events that are poorly planned and almost never recurring. So how do we bring order to the chaos?

First of all, it’s worth understanding which tools Google offers for remote learning.

1. Google Classroom: a virtual space for sharing announcements, lesson materials, assignments, files, videos, images and links. Teachers can grade work and control students’ permissions to comment or post.
2. Google Classroom Stream: essentially a chatroom where students can post comments and ask the teacher questions.
3. Google Suite (formerly Google Docs): a powerful cloud suite for creating text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, not unlike Microsoft’s Office package.

1. Google Meet (formerly Hangout): an online chat where you can talk with or without video, an equivalent of Microsoft’s Skype.

If the school has so many powerful tools suited to remote learning, what was getting stuck? At Cantiere Creativo we’ve worked remotely for a long time, with heavy use of asynchronous communication, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that a tool can’t solve anything without the right approach. With a good method and a shared routine, it’s easy to organize all live teaching without too many hiccups, and that is ultimately the cornerstone of the learning path. Using the tools shown above, a teacher could plan live teaching and lesson scheduling in an intuitive and, above all, easily repeatable way. With G Suite, teachers can:

1. create the class through Contacts management;
2. schedule all the week’s lessons as recurring events in Calendar;
3. create a calendar event with the lesson date and time, class and video link (Meet by Google) and automatically send a reminder 5 minutes before each lesson;
4. optionally attach some teaching materials to the event or, even better, refer to the Classroom Stream;
5. teach the live lesson on Meet and get feedback from students through its built-in chat;
6. schedule reviews of the work done with students in private sessions, for all students and especially for those with learning difficulties.

The first thing to explain to students is how to properly manage video, microphone and the built-in chat: simple, clear rules that help avoid confusion. For example, it’s important that students turn off their cameras in Google Meet and avoid using the microphone unless the teacher explicitly asks. For questions, the classic “raised hand” can be replaced by the built-in chat, a handy place to ask for clarification on the lesson in progress. Another good idea is to create a dedicated folder in Classroom for managing homework. On this point, it’s worth pausing for a moment to talk about permission management in Drive, perhaps the only part of the process that isn’t exactly intuitive.

After logging in to the Classroom web app, you’ll see all the class subjects on the dashboard.

Say we need to study French: we click on the subject card and land in its dedicated stream, where the teacher posts the assignments to complete.

Once we’ve completed our assignment, we need to share this folder with the teacher: Classwork. 

To do this, open the Class Drive folder.

From here we can share with the teacher the folder where we’ll upload our work. Just open the drop-down menu and select Share.

In the sharing panel, we can invite the teacher using their email address and click the Send button. Once the teacher is invited, an icon with two people will appear next to the folder.

At this point, all that’s left is to upload the work using the New button in the top left.

Then, from the drop-down menu, select File upload and choose the file with the assignment to hand in.

Once the file has finished uploading, a preview will appear on the dashboard.

Besides G Suite, there are many other remote learning solutions that help maintain continuity even with schools closed. With a little study of the method and a few days of natural difficulties, it’s possible to get back to something very close to normal as far as studies go. And we all need that.