Celebrating 10 Years of Google Classroom

In August, Google Classroom turned 10! It’s hard to believe that one of our favourite Google Workspace for Education tools is already 10 years old. Google Classroom allows students and teachers to easily manage and organise their work, resources and assessments. Classroom supported many schools throughout online learning with its seamless collaboration, feedback and assessment tools and we’ll be forever grateful for that! 

Think back to the first time you used Classroom and what you are doing with it now. We remember first using it to create and manage copies of Docs for students. Now, we’re using it to differentiate our lessons for our students, provide feedback and mark assignments. 

There have been so many amazing updates to Classroom over the past 10 years, let’s look back at some of our favourite Classroom features.

10 Google Classroom features we love!

1. Create Practice Sets
   • Create interactive assignments to save time with the auto-grade tool, identify students who need extra support and shape future lesson plans with performance insights. 
   • You can access Practice Sets by clicking Resources from the Classroom homepage. 
   • This tool has lots of potential to change the way students learn and receive feedback⭐️
   • Learn more about Practice Sets.
     
2. Visit a Class
   • Admin users, such as education leaders and support staff can temporarily visit a class to support teachers and students! When education leaders and support staff visit a class, they can do anything a co-teacher can do, including: Update co-teachers and students, post announcements and view student profiles. 
   • Learn more about Class Visits.
     
3. Simplify lesson planning and make classroom materials more accessible.
   • Share links to high-quality classes and class templates so other educators can preview and import classwork to an existing class or to a new class. 
   • Great for new staff! ⭐️
   • Learn more about Classroom Templates.

4. Originality Reports
   • Use the power of Google Search to help students properly integrate external inspiration into their writing. Compare student work against hundreds of billions of web pages and over 40 million books with a single click.
   • Learn more about Originality Reports.
     
5. Rubrics
   • Create, reuse, and grade with rubrics for individual assignments. You can also export rubrics to share them with other teachers. You can give feedback with scored or unscored rubrics. If a rubric is scored, students see their scores when you return their assignments.
   • Learn more about Rubrics.
     
6. Create comment banks
   • You can create comment banks, add a comment on student work and then start typing to search the bank.
   • This is a game changer for teams to utilise ⭐️
   • Learn more about Feedback and Comment Banks.
     
7. Reuse posts
   • One of our favourite features! Reuse and edit posts from previous years. 
   • This is great for new staff and team collaboration! 
   • Consider how you could use this as a resource bank ⭐️
   • Learn more about Reusing Content.
     
8. Create interactive YouTube video assignments!
   • You can access this new feature by clicking Resources from the Classroom homepage, click new video activity to begin. 
   • This tool allows you to save time with the autograde feature. 
   • Learn more about Interactive Questions.
     
9. Disable submissions after a due date.
   • Teachers can decide whether or not to require a strict due date. By default, the assignments tool will still allow submissions after the due date. 
   • Learn more about Due Dates.
     
10. Create Student Groups!
    • We saved our new favourite tool for last – This one is amazing! ⭐️
    • Create groups of students to make assigning differentiated content easier. You can quickly assign classwork to pre-defined sets of students without having to select individual students. 
    • Learn more about Student Groups.

Check out this fantastic video to see what’s to come for Google Classroom

Deploy Learning will be launching a basics and advanced Google Classroom course soon. The course will cover everything from assignments to practice sets, from rubrics to reusing content, from collaboration to comment banks. Click here to join the course wait list.

Happy 10th Birthday, Google Classroom! ⭐️