Google Classroom: Assign Work to Small Groups of Students

What Can You Do With It?

Brought to you by:
Matt Miller and ditchthattextbook.com

5 Options:

1. Group activities — Assign an activity to an individual group. Then, all the group members are all together in one place. You won’t have to check and double check who is in which group.

2. Providing extra practice — If some students are struggling and could use some extra work — or some suggested sites for practice — assign it just to those students.

3. Leveling activities — Differentiate an activity by creating two, three or four versions of it. A more basic version of the activity has less steps, less detail or less rigor. A more advanced version has more steps, detail or rigor. Add one or two versions in the middle and you have several levels to challenge a variety of students. Assign as needed.

4. Interest-based activities — Have some Harry Potter fans in class? Or a group that loves motocross or sports? If you can identify groups of students that have the same interest, how fun would it be to include those interests in the work they do in class?

5. Rotating activities — If you have stations or a set of activities students will do over a period of days or weeks, keep assignments simple by assigning just the one that group is working on. If students will rotate through four different activities, assign one group just activity #2 until they’re done with it. Then assign them the next one. The “reuse post” feature will make this quick and easy once you’ve assigned all of the activities once.

How-To:

Here’s what it looks like (described with words and images):



1. Open Google Classroom and go to a class. Click the “+” button in the bottom right corner and click, “Create assignment.



2. You’ll notice a drop-down menu that says “All students” next to the name of the class you’re assigning to. That’s where this feature comes in … click it!



3. If you want to assign to all students, just leave it as is. All students are selected by default. But if you want to select a smaller group of students to assign to, uncheck “All students”. Then select the students you want using the check boxes next to their names.



4. Complete your assignment. (Don’t forget to do the instructions part. When students are absent or return back to an assignment later, they’ll be lost without them!) Then click “Assign.” (You can also schedule it or save it as a draft with the drop-down triangle button next to “Assign”.)



5. Your assignment is assigned to that group! When you go to grade the assignment (click on the “Done” or “Not done” area), you’ll see that only the students you assigned it to are displayed.

(Note: Any students you did not assign this assignment to will not see this assignment in Google Classroom.)