 We're going to use this. Hi, this is Ebony. And in this tutorial, we'll explore how to use the stream in Google Classroom for communicating with students on a regular basis. The stream is where teachers and students can post class announcements, share videos, and reply to one another virtually. When you open Google Classroom, the stream is the first thing that students will see. It's like your digital bulletin board. Any assignments or class comments will be posted on the stream. Since this is the first piece of communication with students in Google Classroom, you really want to make it count. During distance learning, the stream is going to be helpful for building community among students with questions where they can learn about each other and respond with a comment. This is also a place for reminding students of upcoming virtual meetings. To make an announcement, you can tap on Share Something with Your Class. Here's where you can add your ideas and choose the classes that you want to, if there's more than one that you need to share this with and determine whether or not you want to share this with all students or if you want to differentiate or share with certain students that need this particular announcement through communicating on the stream. You can also add resources from Drive. You can add web links. You can upload files and upload videos from YouTube. So I'm going to grab a video from YouTube and add to the post. Now, once you have all your information in there and you have your resources added, then you can post. Before you post, you have a couple of options. You can post directly to the stream. You can schedule it to post later or you can save it as a draft. So I'm going to go ahead and post it to the stream. Now students can respond with a comment, but you have to remember that students can respond with text only. And this is a class comment so everyone can see. So reminding students the difference between class comments and private comments be necessary in this situation. You can also move important posts to the top of the stream. So you can have a lot of information on the stream. So the things that you want to call out for students that are the most important, you can tap on the three dots and tap Move to Top. For any other posts in the stream, you have the option of editing posts if needed, deleting and also copying the link if you need to post it in a different place for students to get access to it quicker. Another thing you may want to think about is before you allow students to make any posts in Google Classroom on the stream that you establish some norms for doing so. It's good to give them some models so that they can see how to use appropriate language, how to have a positive tone when commenting on others' comments and also understanding that everyone can see your comment because it's a class comment. It's a great opportunity for students to apply those digital citizenship skills. You can also go in to the Settings in Google Classroom by tapping this little setting gear here in the top right and you can change the permissions for students on the stream. So here by stream, you see right now students can post and comment, that's enabled. You can tap and see in the dropdown, you have other options. They can only comment or you can have teachers can post or comment. You may want to begin with only teacher posting or comment until you have those conversations but for now I'm going to choose students can only comment. You choose your setting you want and tap Save. Also you'll notice on the stream that there's a lot of notifications of assignments that have been posted on the Classwork page. If you post a lot of assignments at one time, the stream can become cluttered and hard for students to navigate. So to alleviate this issue, you can either remove old posts from the stream, you can delete some by tapping on the three dots or you can go into your settings and customize the notifications on the stream. Right now we have show attachments and details for Classwork on the stream. You can show condensed notifications which will still show those notifications but in a condensed format or high notifications. I'm gonna hide. Now you can see that only the main posts I've made for communicating with my students are not the assignments and notifications or those are on the stream. This makes it really easy for students to get directly to what you need them to see on the stream. So really think about going in and customizing those modifications. What you may wanna also do is kinda set up the expectation for students that when they get ready to look for assignments, they go to the Classwork tab for that because that's where you're gonna have it organized using your topics. Doing this keeps the stream uncluttered and ensures students don't miss important announcements or opportunities to reply to you or their classmates. 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.