Multiple Teachers in Google Classroom

A useful feature in Google Classroom is that you can have more than one teacher in a class. This could be great in situations. For example, a specials teacher may have a class in Classroom and is collaborating with the homeroom teacher. 

Or a grade level team decides to create a class for one subject since they work on the same projects and each teacher is added as a teacher in order to contribute and monitor student work/discussions, etc. In this situation, the entire grade level of students could join this class and collaborate and communicate using the discussion feature. 

Start with one teacher creating a class, and adding others as teachers. Learn how here!

Communicating and Collaborating in Google Docs: Suggested Edits

You may already be familiar with the comments feature in Google Docs that allows teachers and students to communicate and collaborate about the document without typing within the document. Did you know that Docs has a feature that allows for suggesting changes or additions? This feature inserts the suggestion in green rather than just making the changes for someone else. This allows teachers and students to peer edit and collaborate on a document. You or the student can also respond to the suggestion by typing in a comment below it.

Click here to read how to suggest edits.

Digital communication and collaboration made easy in a tool many of our students already use!

Text to Speech on Macbook Airs

You may not know this quick trick for text to speech that your MacBook can do. Simply highlight text you'd like read to you, and right click (or control + click.) Choose "Read the selected text."

How might this be helpful?

• In a whole group setting, students get to hear a different voice reading text to them on your teacher screen and it will catch their attention.
• Students using Macs can use this feature to have unknown words read to them when selected one at a time, or sentences that aren't making sense to them.
• Students struggling to read a text at grade level can use this to remove the difficulty of decoding, vocabulary, etc. and focus on comprehension.

You can also change the settings to allow for this with the press of one or two keys, as long as you are still on the Mavericks operating system, anyway.

Do you have other ways this might be useful in the classroom?