As someone who struggles to programme a Casio watch, I didn’t expect to survive, let alone thrive, in the online teaching environment. Schools have been closed here since March 2020 and we are now nine months into providing our curriculum online. We reduced provision at KS3 slightly, but otherwise have been offering a full timetable with at least half our lessons live. Initially this was exhausting, but like anything it has gotten easier with familiarity. I’m still really enjoying teaching remotely and have been amazed by how much progress my students have made online, so I want to share some of our experiences.

We’ve been using Google platforms, so in this post I want to cover my top five tools within Google classroom and share ways we’ve found to get the most out of them. I’ve included some short tutorial videos I made for our staff in the hope they might be useful to UK colleagues too.

This deceptively simple feature of Google classroom can be used in a variety of ways. During a live lesson, it’s a great starter to begin to collect ideas for discussion, enabling you to select students to expand on their answers and giving you an idea of potential misconceptions. You can easy add multiple choice or open questions. You can also use it to quickly collect student ideas on new content.

An example of the question feature used to set an extended task for Year 11.

If you are setting some lessons independently, it can also be used as a simple register task. Rather than requiring students just to answer that they are present, a quick retrieval task shows they are in the lesson and gets them thinking about content straight away. I like a multiple choice question for this to ensure that none are put off by not knowing the answer. 

Simple multiple choice question used as a register task for an independent lesson.
Quick video tutorial on the question feature I made for staff at the beginning of the year.

Something that is crucial if you are using Google classroom for long periods of time is organising by topics. Each time you create a post, assign a topic to make it easier for students to find later on.

Each time you create a post, assign a topic to make it easier for students to find later on.

Rather than creating a random topic each time, think carefully about how best to organise them. For my classes, I have one topic for each unit.

As with anything online, it’s not enough just to set up topics and expect students to use them. Students need to be shown how to use this feature too. I did a quick treasure hunt with Year 11 asking them to find a resource from the previous term to ensure that they knew how to select topics. 

You can also move topics up and down on the classwork stream so that the most recent/relevant topic appears first.

Ok, so this is technically two things, but I couldn’t pick just 5 features. For months, I avoided using the Markbook because it just seemed too complicated. When I finally invested the time, I realised how much time had been wasted in not using it.

It’s worth playing around with the mark book until you get it working for you and your students. It is very much designed for US-style percentage grading, but I love having a really clear overview of who has submitted what and how they’re doing overall. This Youtube video gives a clear overview of how to set up the markbook.

A helpful youtube guide to the markbook in Google classroom.

The comment bank is also an absolute lifesaver for me as an English teacher and our teachers in other essay subjects feel the same. Once students have submitted work on classroom, click into their assignments and use the comment feature to mark work. When you begin to type, any similar comments you have saved to your comment bank will appear for selection. You can add lots of comments to the bank at once or just add one each time you notice that you’re repeating yourself.

A quick guide to the comment bank that I made for our staff.

Though a Google forms quiz might not have the most inspiring appearance, it does the job well without the extraneous distractions of music and animations that some online quiz platforms include.

A simple starter for retrieval practice.

If you set up a quiz assignment in classroom you can automatically import scores into the mark book too, reducing the need for marking and keeping all your assessment in one place. I also like that I can make copies of previous quizzes and questions easily to ensure spaced practice over time.  

Though my top feature is perhaps the most simple of the lot, it’s the most effective too. I think that most classroom users will already be aware of it, but if you’re not, it’s a game changer.

When setting assignments for students, create a document you want them to work in and then select ‘make a copy for every student’ in the drop down. This effectively turns the doc into a worksheet for each student.

The best thing about it is that you don’t  need to wait for students to submit work in order to see what they’re doing. You can digitally look over their shoulders as they work independently and be ready to draw attention to misconceptions or great work when you bring them back together. 

A video I made for staff earlier in the year on creating worksheets in classroom. (During a time when I was forcing myself not to retake imperfect recordings!)

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