Welcome Back to School!

We're officially 15 full days into the 2017-18 school year. Hopefully, students and teachers alike have had a chance to settle in. Over the summer, Google was busy making significant improvements to Classroom. You can see the full blog page here, but I'll give you some of the highlights.

First, getting students into Classroom has become easier. Teachers can display the class code in full screen right from the class window.

Classroom used to organize classes by the order in which they were created. No more! Teachers can now reorder their classes by dragging and dropping them where they need them.

Another great change is that teachers can now see all work assigned to a particular student. While in Classroom, simply click Students at the top then click a student's name. All of the current statuses of all of the student's assignments will be listed.

Google is making student assessment easier, too, by improving the integration of Forms into Classroom. Now, you can create a quiz in Forms, assign each question a point value (including decimals!), grade each question, and even add question-by-question feedback. Soon, you will be able to import the quiz grades right into Classroom. Click here for more information about creating quizzes with Google Forms.

Stay tuned to this blog for monthly updates on helpful tech tools and resources. You can even receive an email update when a new blog is posted by submitting your address on the top right of this page.

Closing Out Google Classroom

If you've been using Google Classroom you may be wondering what to do with your classes now that the year is coming to an end. This is a great resource for unenrolling students, archiving classes, reusing posts from archived classes, and viewing archived classes.

Great New Updates to Google Classroom and Google Slides!

Google has posted some great new updates to both Classroom and Slides. 

First, teachers can now schedule assignments, questions, or announcements to post at a later date. The post will be automatically published to your class stream at the date & time that you set. See this video for quick and easy directions.

Next, Google Slides now features a Presenter Mode that allows for student Q & A on its own backchannel. It works much like Today's Meet without having to use a separate app. (See Q & A directions here.) A presenter Laser Pointer is also included in this update. Now you can call your students' attention to specific parts of your screen just by using your mouse or touchpad. 

(If you don't see the new options yet, don't worry, they're on the way. NKSD is on Google's Scheduled Release track so sometimes it takes a week or two to get the updates.)