The "New" Google Classroom

Major Changes for the 2018-19 School Year

Google Classroom has been improving and changing since its introduction in 2014, thanks to comments from teachers around the world who have utilized the “Send Feedback” button. This year the changes are pretty darn big! For the biggest surprise, skip ahead for the important announcement about Forms Quizzes in Classroom. Many parts of the release are already available. You can sign up for the beta version here.

What’s new?

1. You will really need to think about the Stream quite differently now. It is no longer the place where teachers create assignments. Now it’s a running list of announcements and assignments in chronological order. Google’s vision for the Stream is that is is the “conversational hub” of the Classroom.

2. Classwork is a brand new page where the teacher creates and organizes assignments.

3. The People page is the old Students page, except now teachers will see separate lists of students, co-teachers, and guardians on that page. It is the place for teachers to go to manage people and to send email.

4. Finally, Google moved the Settings gear so it is much easier to find than it used to be! You can now change the Settings for your classroom in the upper right near the waffle. Go here to change the name of your class, turn on Guardian notifications, or to find your class code. 

The New Classwork Tab

Using headers for each Topic, the classwork page is better organized than the Stream used to be. Secondary teachers will probably think of “topics” as unit titles, while elementary teachers can use topics to indicate subject matter. This will help keep both students and teachers better organized.

Teachers can still create and schedule posts for a future date, and these scheduled posts will now appear under the topic grouping where the teacher can see them easily. Teachers can still reuse posts from previous years and from other classes. You can physically organize assignments by moving them either up and down on this page with the three dots. 

Quiz Assignment

This one is a real game-changer! Add a quiz to your classroom without going to Drive. And...soon you are going to be able to use “locked mode” when you give a quiz. In locked mode, once the quiz is open, students will not be able to open other tabs until after they complete the quiz and hit Submit. This long-awaited feature will work on all managed Chromebooks! Of course, you can still use Forms in Classroom without using locked mode.