Google Classroom gives you the ability to create and assign work for your students, all without having to print anything. Questions, essays, worksheets, and readings can all be distributed online and made easily available to your class. If you haven't created a class already, check out our Getting Started with Google Classroom lesson.
Watch the video below to learn more about creating assignments and materials in Google Classroom.
Whenever you want to create new assignments, questions, or material, you'll need to navigate to the Classwork tab.
In this tab, you can create assignments and view all current and past assignments. To create an assignment, click the Create button, then select Assignment. You can also select Question if you'd like to pose a single question to your students, or Material if you simply want to post a reading, visual, or other supplementary material.
This will bring up the Assignment form. Google Classroom offers considerable flexibility and options when creating assignments.
Click the buttons in the interactive below to become familiar with the Assignment form.
edit hotspots
This is where you'll type the title of the assignment you're creating.
If you'd like to include instructions with your assignment, you can type them here.
Here, you can decide how many points an assignment is worth by typing the number in the form. You can also click the drop-down arrow to select Ungraded if you don't want to grade an assignment.
You can select a due date for an assignment by clicking this arrow and selecting a date from the calendar that appears. Students will have until then to submit their work.
In Google Classroom, you can sort your assignments and materials into topics. This menu allows you to select an existing topic or create a new one to place an assignment under.
You can attach files from your computer, files from Google Drive, URLs, and YouTube videos to your assignments.
Google Classroom gives you the option of sending assignments to all students or a select number.
Once you're happy with the assignment you've created, click Assign. The drop-down menu also gives you the option to Schedule an assignment if you'd like it to post it at a later date.
You can attach a rubric to help students know your expectations for the assignment and to give them feedback.
Once you've completed the form and clicked Assign, your students will receive an email notification letting them know about the assignment.
Google Classroom takes all of your assignments and automatically adds them to your Google Calendar. From the Classwork tab, you can click Google Calendar to pull this up and get a better overall view of the timeline for your assignments' due dates.
When creating an assignment, there may often be times when you want to attach a document from Google Docs. These can be helpful when providing lengthy instructions, study guides, and other material.
When attaching these types of files, you'll want to make sure to choose the correct setting for how your students can interact with it. After attaching one to an assignment, you'll find a drop-down menu with three options.
Let's take a look at when you might want to use each of these:
On the Classwork tab, you can use topics to sort and group your assignments and material. To create a topic, click the Create button, then select Topic.
Topics can be helpful for organizing your content into the various units you teach throughout the year. You could also use it to separate your content by type, splitting it into homework, classwork, readings, and other topic areas.
In our next lesson, we'll explore how to create quizzes and worksheets with Google Forms, further expanding how you can use Google Classroom with your students.
