No More Scheduling Headaches

Did you know that, using Google Calendar, you can set aside a block of time for people to sign themselves up on your calendar?  You can, if you have a work or school Google Calendar (which we do here at 86)!  They're "Appointment Slots" and a great idea for parent conferences...

Thanks to Jeffery Bradbury on YouTube from Teacher Cast

Another possible use would be for device signups.  To track stats in terms of what's happening, we could simply put a word or two in one of the fields that displays on the calendar owner's calendar when an appointment slot is taken.  Look for that next school year!

Google Classroom Updates for January 2017

This January, Google Classroom had four improvements, two of which will be helpful to teachers!  The others are more for the "geek" side of Classroom.

1)  Google Classroom has been updated to allow teachers to give assignments to individual students (instead of the entire class).  Look for the "All Students" drop-down menu at the top of the assignment creation window.  Details:

By default, an assignment is posted to all students in the class. However, you can choose to post an assignment only to individual students. You can’t post to more than 100 individual students at a time.

1. Next to All students, click Down .
2. Click All students to deselect it.
3. To select students, check each student’s name.
4. Note: When you post an assignment to individual students, you’ll see the number of students assigned the work in the class stream. To view the students’ names, click [number] students on the assignment.

2) Teachers can now  receive email and mobile notifications when a student submits late work or resubmits work.  To set up your notifications:

1. Log into Classroom.
2. At the top, click Menu .
3. Click Settings (you might need to scroll down)
4. Check or uncheck the Send email notifications box.

3) Google for Education Admins can now see usage statistics for Classroom.

4) Third party developers can now programmatically create questions,  modify coursework, and add materials to coursework.