How to Use Google Classrooms

Google Classrooms is an online platform that helps students and teachers communicate with each other easier. It can help you with school so you can manage your projects easier and keep everything organized. Many students and teachers are using Google Classrooms this year to communicate more effectively during the pandemic.

You’ll already have so many syllabi to read this year—Google Classrooms shouldn’t be one of them. That’s why we’re only going to share the information you need to best use Google Classrooms and keep up with your schoolwork.

In order to start using Google Classrooms, you’ll need to sign in or create an account if you don’t have one. Creating an account is easy. All you need is either your G Suite, Gmail, or education email. If you’re not sure what that is, it’s the one that your school typically assigns you for educational purposes and typically looks like you@yourschool.edu.¹  If you’re not sure if you have an account like this, contact your school to ask.

If your school provided specific instructions for how to log in, then it’s best to follow those.

Thankfully, the sign-in process is straightforward. No one likes being confused even before accessing their assignments. Simply go to Classroom.Google.com and select Go to Classroom. Then you’ll sign in with your Google account. You should receive a message that welcomes you to the platform. If you signed in using G Suite, you’ll see the options “I’m a student” and “I’m a teacher.” Students should always select the “I’m a student” option. Unfortunately, pretending to be a teacher isn’t going to help your grades.

When you’re done choosing the correct role, you should see a green Get Started button. Once you click this option, you’re now enrolled in Google Classrooms. Welcome to online learning. Now it’s time to look at some basic tips for using Google Classrooms as a student.

The great thing about Google is how easily you can customize everything. Whether it’s your background, school folders for separate subjects, or your own color-coding system, you can easily personalize Google Classrooms. Some of this customization happens automatically.

For example, whenever you join a class in Google Classrooms, there’s automatically a folder created for it in Google Drive. Keeping things organized and personal is nice and easy.

If you’re looking for your grades, go to Classwork and simply select View. You should then see a dropdown menu that lists options to view grades for various assignments.² You can even see if your teacher left any comments about a project.

If you don’t see a grade in the list for a specific assignment, don’t panic. It might just mean that your teacher hasn’t graded it yet. If you have more questions about how to view grades, try emailing your teacher.

If your teacher has shared specific instructions for what format and file type your assignments should be in, stick with that. However, if you’re looking for the easiest way to share documents in Google Classrooms, stick with Google.

It’s a lot faster to use Google Docs and Google Sheets to submit your assignments than to upload files from Word and Excel. Of course, if your teacher specified how you should turn an assignment in, it’s always best to listen.

Thankfully, it’s not too late to fix an error in one of your assignments even if you’ve already submitted it. In Google Classrooms, there’s an option called Unsubmit where you can remove an assignment you turned in, make changes, then resubmit it. See, there’s no stressful moments of “I just shared my notes from language arts with my math teacher.” 

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