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.

Uploading Your Files and Folders to Google Drive

As the school year winds down, you may find yourself organizing everything you've worked on this year. This is the digital equivalent of clearing off your desk before leaving for the summer. If you have documents on your desktop (in either Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel or Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc.) that you would like to access during vacation but don't want to have to drag yourself back to school to do so, read on! Here are some quick and easy directions for uploading your materials to Google Drive. Once they're in Drive, you can access them from any Chromebook or device with a Chrome browser!

(Click here for a printable version.)

How to Upload Files & Folders from a Desktop/Laptop to Google Drive

1. Login to the school network using your desktop/laptop computer.
2. Open the Chrome browser.
3. Either click on the Apps waffle or go to drive.google.com to open Drive.
4. From your Drive, click the red New button.
5. Choose either File upload or Folder upload.
6. This will bring up a window that shows the files/folders stored on your computer. This view will be slightly different, depending upon your machine (Mac or PC).
7. You can Drag & Drop the files into your Drive, or follow these steps:
8. Highlight the File(s) or Folder(s) you wish to upload. Use Shift + Click to highlight a series of documents right in a row, or Ctrl + Click for multiple documents that are not located next to each other. Then click Choose, Open, or Upload (depending on your machine).
9. A box with a black banner will pop up near the bottom of your screen. This will show the progress of the file/folder upload. Once the upload is complete, you may share the file/folder, minimize the window, or close the window. The file/folder is now located in your Drive.
10. Occasionally, Microsoft Office documents with heavy formatting (graphics, text boxes, etc.) may not open “the right way”. If this happens, while the document is open, click File > Save as Google Docs (or Sheets or Slides). It will convert Microsoft Office materials into the Google equivalent by making a copy (your original will still be there). 

You can also use a USB flash drive or external hard drive to transfer files to your Chromebook. 

Load the files from your desktop/laptop to the flash drive or hard drive.

Connect the external device to your Chromebook, then click on the apps list button and select Files to open the file manager. 

You can drag and drop the files from there.

For additional help, please see this support.google.com page.

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.)