Month: May 2023

In the past, I have always recommended that you make a copy of your Google Classroom so that you have a clean copy to use with your students for next year. However, what I have begun to see for those of you that have very material and video heavy Google Classrooms is that the new copy you have created is missing materials or seems to get caught in a loop where your videos never process correctly or attachments are gone. I have done some research on this issue and can’t find a really good solution within Google, so I am suggesting that you take the following steps and create what is considered a “Master Classroom.” This master classroom will contain all of your content, in descending (whatever you assigned last will be at the top) order, but will be a repository that you can use to assign (by using the “reuse assignment” option) into a new Classroom. That way, all of your original content is still there, you can see what order you assigned it, but you don’t have that terrible moment where you and your students discover that the content you thought was in your Classroom really isn’t there.

To create your new “Master Classroom”:

1. Return all student work
2. Remove students from the Google Classroom
3. Rename your Classroom to “Master Classroom” or whatever other moniker helps you remember what you are going to use it for.
4. At the beginning of the next school year, create a “NEW” classroom and use the “Reuse assignment” option to pull the content from your “master classroom” into the new classroom. This way, it will create an assignment or material that you can give a current due date to your students.

Your new master class is going to work as that old fashioned plan book that we used to write every single lesson into! You can now scroll through topics and assignments that you have used in the past and reuse them in your new Google Classroom. The benefit of this is that in your master classroom, all of the assignments, materials and topics are already published because you used them in the past. When you reuse them in your new Classroom, it puts them back into draft form, allows you to edit or add new materials, and assign new due dates to your new students. To reuse a post: 

• Open your new Google Classroom
• Click on Classwork
• Click + Create
• Click Reuse post
• Select your master class from the list
• Find the assignment of material, click on it and click “Reuse” in the bottom right
• DO NOT SELECT “Create new copies of all attachments” because it will make a mess in your Drive
• Your assignment or material is now in draft mode. You can add new directions and materials or remove old content you do not wish to use. You can give a new due date or schedule the assignment. You can add plagiarism checking, assign to individual students, or just leave the assignment/material in draft mode for when you are ready to to use it. 

To see how to use the reuse option, watch this short video (no sound).

As you are wrapping up the school year, there are a few housekeeping items that you should attend to when it comes to your Google Classroom. 

The best procedure to close out your year is to:
1. Return all student work
2. Make a copy of your Classroom if you would like to reuse it next year
3. Archive your current Classroom

If your Google Classroom is not content heavy and you want to be able to use it again next year with your students, you should make a copy of the Classroom so that all materials go back into draft form so your new students will not be confused by materials that you used with previous students. Simply deleting this year’s students from a Google Classroom and reusing it with new students actually creates more work for you in the long run since all materials are already published, are assigned with due dates, and have student work associated with them. When you create a new copy of your current Google Classroom, you are setting up a clean environment that still has your materials, just in draft form that can be published when you are ready. When you archive your old Google Classroom, your previous students will still find all of their assignments and materials in their Google Drives and will still see an archived version of the course if they dig deep into the Classroom menu, but the Classroom will be view only and students will not be able to change or edit anything in the Classroom itself.

When you make a copy of your Google Classroom, all content on the Classwork section of Classroom is automatically put into draft mode. You will then be able to go in and publish each item as you are ready to use it. Even better is that before you publish it for students, you can edit the assignment or material to update it for the current year. It really is a win-win situation. The only problem with making a copy of a current Class is that only the content on the Classwork page is copied. Materials on the Stream will not copy.

Follow the steps below to wrap up your Google Classroom for the year.

Return all work: You want to return all student work so that Google moves it from your drive to their drive. Otherwise, you will be wading through student work in your Drive until the end of time. The fastest way to return student work is to:

• Open a specific Classroom  
• Click on the Grades link from the menu on top
• Click on the three dots to the right of each assignment name
• Select “Return All”
• Click “Return”
• Move to the next assignment and repeat

Make a copy: If you want to reuse the same class for next year (see above to understand why it is better to start with a fresh class rather than delete students from the current class) or you want a copy of your class for reference:

• Go to classroom.google.com
• Click on the three dots on the right of the Class tile that you want to copy
• Select “Copy”

If your Class has a lot of content, it can take some time to make a copy. You will receive an email from Classroom once your copy has been made.

Archive the Class: Clean up your Classroom view by archiving your Class. Don’t worry! You still have access to the archived class and can pull content directly from that class into a new class with just a few clicks of a button. To reuse archived content, 

• Go to classroom.gooogle.com
• Click on the three dots on the right of tile of the class to be archived
• Select “Archive”

Don’t forget that you can always reuse materials from archived Classrooms. Just because they aren’t viewable on your current dashboard doesn’t mean that they are gone forever!

If you have a content heavy Google Classroom, you might discover that making a copy leaves you with missing content and videos. If that is the case, try my suggestion for making a “Master Google Classroom” from this post.