Guardian Emails from PowerSchool

If you're looking for an easy way to get guardian emails from PowerSchool to input in to Google Classroom, check out this video!  (Only viewable by York certified staff).

Exciting Updates to Google Classroom

Exciting Google Classroom news today!  Several new updates have been released, including long-awaited parent/guardian access and the ability to add topics to Classroom posts for easy filtering and organizing.  

If you’d like to set up parent access in Google Classroom, we’ve got some tips for you.  In the “Students” tab in your classroom, you will see the option to “Invite Guardians” for each student by typing in their guardian’s email addresses.

Parents will need to accept the invitation by clicking the “Accept” button in the email.

Once they have accepted the invitation, the guardian’s email address will be attached to the student in every Google Classroom in which the student is enrolled.  Teachers are able to email all guardians with one click of a button and turn on summary emails which will automatically update guardians on Classroom activities. Guardians have the option to get summary emails weekly or daily.  The summary emails include:

• Missing work—Work that’s late at the time the email was sent
• Upcoming work—Work that’s due today and tomorrow (for daily emails) or work that’s due in the upcoming week (for weekly emails)
• Class activity—Announcements, assignments, and questions recently posted by teachers

You can see a preview of the guardian summary email here and read more about all the new updates  on Google’s blog.

Google Forms Got a Face-lift This Summer!

Just in time for the start of the school year, Google Forms released a new update.  You can now quickly create self-graded quizzes in Google Forms without ANY add-ons like Flubaroo!

Quizzes in Google Forms doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that Flubaroo has, but it's great for informal formative assessments.  Eric Curtis has a great comparison of Google Forms Quizzes and Flubaroo on his blog.  He also included written directions on how to setup self-grading quizzes in Forms.

If you prefer a video tutorial, Shawn Beard created the tutorial embedded below.