 Hi, this is Ebony and in this tutorial, I will share some tips and best practices for utilizing Google Classroom for making student assignments during distance learning. Making and organizing assignments in Google Classroom is essential for ensuring that students are able to access their assignments and files quickly and easily. So to begin creating assignments, we're going to tap on the Classwork page. This is where any work assigned to students will be housed. So before creating assignments, think about and plan out how you want to organize the assignments so that it supports students as they work independently. So we begin by adding assignments and you do that by tapping on the Create button. In this little drop down, you're going to see all the different options within Classwork that we can choose from. And this allows for a variety in the types of activities you can assign the students to support learning goals. So we have assignment first, but we're going to go through some of these others really quickly. You have quizzes. So when you go to a quiz, it will give you a blank ready to edit quiz in Google Forms and then you can assign it to students and you have some other options like lock the mold on Chromebooks and then some grade importing. The next one is question. Question allows you to give students either a short answer or a multiple choice question and then you have some options for responding to each other or if you choose to enable it and for editing. This is going to be great for class discussions, check-ins, and exit slips. And your next one is going to be materials. Now materials is one of those that anytime you're going to give or attach some resources for an assignment to students like maybe a schedule or some norms or any other resources of reading a text that students may need some access to, that's what materials are for. So something that kids actually need to do is something they need to reference. And then the final one, you can reuse posts and also topics. And topics is my favorite when it comes to assignments and on the classroom page because this is how we can organize work. So you'll see here to the left here I have several different topics that I've already created and basically these are like tags. So anytime I create an assignment, I will have a category or a tag that I will attach to that assignment and then it will populate that assignment underneath that topic. So think here, like you can see here on my, I've got my, these are headings of my topics and they can be organized by units, you can choose it by week, subject, you can do it by skill or even by an actual topic or concept. So think about the fact that students are going to be accessing these assignments independent of you. So how you organize or work for students is a top priority. So when you create a topic, you just tap topic and then create. So I'm just going to create one called today. So if you have something that's super important that you really want kids to look at, you might want to create a topic called today that automatically draws their attention to that topic without assignment. All right, so we're going to actually go in and create an assignment now. So when you create an assignment during distance learning, you really want to consider using a consistent name and convention for your assignments. And I'm going to use a number and system. So you actually do your assignments. You may want to use the concept that your students are studying, but it's also helpful to number assignments so that when you are referring to them, you can be very specific by the number and the title. Then you want to pop in your instructions. And so you can see here, you really want to be explicit with that, even more so than with face-to-face learning. It's important to really think through that assignment that you're going to have kids to complete and address any possible questions that they could have. If you find a task to be more complex than you originally thought, just kind of break it down into steps. So we've got our learning goals. You might want that in the ICANN statement detail those really detailed instructions. You might even want to give them a suggested time that it will take them to complete it. Attach a rubric if needed, the due date, and telling students exactly how you want it to turn, how you want that to be turned in. Next, we can add any resources that we need, that students will need to complete the assignment. We can go directly to Drive. You can add in any links from the web, upload files from our computer, and also any YouTube videos. And this really comes in handy if you have any screencasts that you want students to access, pop those in there that will give them support doing that activity. One of the things that I said earlier about naming conventions, when you are creating that assignment, you want to make sure that your naming conventions, the naming conventions that you used for the assignment, you also use that on any resources that you add to that assignment. It'll make it easier for you when you're talking to students about missing work and the assignment that goes along with the instructions. Once you add and upload a document, depending on how you want students to access it, if you want them to just view that, you can choose Students Can View. If you want everyone to be on it at one time and editing it, that will be Students Can Edit. But if you want everyone to have their own copy, you want to make a copy for each student. All right, so next we want to assign to a class or several. So here's the class. I can either choose the one class, and if I have other classes, I can tag as many classes as I'd like to give that assignment to. So if you have several of the same class, that might be an option for you. When it comes to differentiation, you can choose All Students, or if it's an assignment you only want to give certain students, then you can uncheck or check the specific students that you want to give that assignment to. A quick tip, though, is if you choose more than one class to assign work to, it will not allow you to differentiate. So if you want to make differentiation a part of your assignment, then you're going to want to only choose one class at a time. The next thing you want to think about is the due dates. And so I know that we really want to be flexible with student assignments, but consider using due dates because it kind of helps students with their time management and awareness of missing work. So I'm going to go ahead and make this a week. Do a week from now. We can also go back to our points. You can have it graded or ungraded. Depending on your purpose for the assignment, you can make that choice there. Then again, we want to make sure we put it under our topic. And I'm going to put it under my this week topic so I can organize it for my students. And then if you need to add a group rate, you can create one here by tapping on that plus sign and going through creating one, reusing one that you can use in the past or importing one from Sheets. And then you have also the option for checking for plagiarism using originality. Now once I've got all my things set up over here and I feel good about my assignment, I'm going to go over to my assigning options. I can assign immediately. I can schedule it for later, for a later date. Or I can save it in draft because I'm not really finished with it and I need to add more things. Or of course discard. So we're going to go ahead and assign. Now one of the things I want to do is give you a quick view of an assignment. So here is an assignment is completed. As you can see, we've discussed the naming conventions of the assignment and the title of there. Have our learning goal clear and explicit directions. A rubric that's attached for students so they can kind of see the criteria for success as well as a due date and the links that they would need to complete the assignment. So when writing your directions, refer to the name of your documents that they're going to use within those, within the directions and it makes it easier for kids to navigate the assignment, especially when you have several resources attached to it. Alright, now we're going to go down to our assignment. Once the assignment is created and it's populated on the topic, you can make any edits to it by tapping on these three dots. You can copy the link if you need to. You can move it up or down depending on assignments because as you post assignments you may want to arrange them in a different order and that is when this comes in really handy and also may need to rename it. When it comes to editing your assignment, if you have to make any edits, it's really good to use your class comments to give students a quick reply or response about the edits that you made. And also in trying to encourage your students to use this to ask questions about assignments that they might feel would be beneficial to others. So you can answer several questions within the class comments that everyone can refer to that would be helpful. And those are some tips and best practices for using Google Classroom when making student assignments. Thanks for watching this tutorial. Be sure to subscribe to our channel and enable notifications so that you don't miss out on the next episode.