Organising Google Classrooms Effectively #GoogleET

There was some discussion on the Google Educator Facebook groups last week about how to best organise a large collection of Google Classrooms.

You may already know that you can drag and drop the various icons in the main “Classes” page to put your most commonly used classes to the top of the list.

But with a large number of frequently used classrooms this doesn’t really help. I’ve tried organising by year group, colour coding and had resorted at one point to using Chrome’s “find in page” tool to jump to the class quickly. It made starting each lesson a little laborious.

So I created a Google Drawing of my timetable and hyperlinked the shape used for each class to the URL of the relevant Google Classroom. I then added this drawing to a single page Google Site and published it.

Now this is on my bookmarks bar so I can quickly jump to the Google Classroom that I need. Feel free to view the example page here: https://sites.google.com/view/mr-simpsons-classroom/home

Thinking about how I can improve further on this I realised that I sometimes need to check the classrooms of other teachers in my faculty. Again this needs me to check against their timetable (usually on paper) before finding the correct Google Classroom. So I’m going to create a hyperlinked Google Drawing for each of the teachers and share on the same page. This can act as a digital faculty timetable as well!

Do you organise your Google Classrooms in another way? Please share it in the comments and keep the discussion going or Tweet me @familysimpson

Updated – Google Certified Educator (Level 2)

“Students Computer Young Boy” by CherylT23 (Pixabay Licence)

I’ve long been a fan of Google Suite for Education and first became a Google Certified Educator in October 2015. I don’t know why but I’ve never really tried to take this certification any further despite running regular training events in school since 2012, bar last school session.

I deliberately took the decision to not focus on technology working groups last session. It was a bit of a digital strategy detox and I wanted to experience another area of whole school strategy. As a result I opted to focus on Mental Health and Wellbeing and became a Mental Health First Aider. This was extremely valuable and supported my classroom practice, behaviour management and lesson planning. There were so many moments in the last school session when I was thankful for the training and discussion opportunities being part of the Mental Health and Wellbeing group enabled.

Tomorrow a new school year begins and I’m most likely heading back into digital strategy. I’m looking forward to contributing to an inclusive policy for my school whilst remaining mindful of anxiety and access issues digital opportunities can bring to students, staff and parents. I began preparation for this session by updating my GCE certification. Not only will this allow me to apply to become a Google Certified Trainer this year but I wanted to see if there were any new elements in the course relating to health and wellbeing. Unfortunately not but this has given me a focus for my GCT sessions in the next few months.

If you are a Google Certified Educator or Trainer what are your plans for the coming school session? I’d love to hear from you @familysimpson or in the comments below.