One of the things I have really enjoyed about the new school I am working at is that it is a BYOD school – Bring Your Own Device. All students are expected to have, and bring, their own device to all of their classes.

I’m a pretty tech-savvy person and I like to think that this skill flows into my classroom. I have really enjoyed using tools with my classes that I have not been able to make sufficient use of in the past due to lack of access. One such tool is Google Classrooms. I have used this with Year 13 Statistics classes at my previous school but always needed constant access to the hard-to-obtain-access-to computer labs. Right now I am using Google Classrooms with my Year 13 Statistics class and my advanced Year 11 Mathematics classes.

I love how organised Google Classrooms is – it syncs right with Google Drive and all student work is named. It is really easy to assign work to an entire class and keep track of how each student is progressing. Students can also access the documents from any computer so can continue working when class is over.

What I particularly enjoy about Google Classrooms is the ability to readily give feedback to students through Google Docs. This particular student decided to be silly and alter the questions to make the question about a student’s parents being fascist dictators because they made him do homework… but at least they read and completed the questions!

Once a student hands in an assignment, the teacher owns the document so that students cannot alter it until it is handed back. I can do this through my account on any computer or even through the Google Classrooms App on my iPhone.

Assessments can even be done through Google Classrooms and kept secure. Last year, I trialled running Year 13 Statistics internal assessments through Google Classrooms and it worked really well. The students loved it and it actually ended up making my workload easier! (The only “issue” with last year was that we had to basically live in the computer labs because it was not a BYOD school so there were some hiccups there at some times.)

I’m looking forward to finding out what other exciting ways I can use Google Classrooms with my students in the future. It has been successful so far. How do you use Google Classrooms with your classes?