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

Vector Graphics using Google Drawings

I’ve been experimenting with Google Drawings over the past few weeks to see what is possible in the app. I’ve been impressed with the range of features this simple application has and, while it won’t replace Illustrator any time soon as your one-stop vector graphic package, it is fantastic for introducing students to the idea of vector graphics, layering objects and editing points on a path.

I’ve included two YouTube videos I created for my classes for reference. In the first the students are shown how to create a vector super hero (and then challenged to create their own). In the latest video students are shown how to create a complex vector shape using the polyline tool. The shape is then used to create their own interpretation of a stylish book cover that only uses a small number of colours and shapes.

Any comments on either video much appreciated. Do you teach vector graphics to your students? Do you jump straight to the industry standard packages or keep it simple? I’d love to hear from you in the comments…