Where is your child’s work and grades?

It wasn’t so long ago that parents could open their child’s homework folder and find corrected language arts work coming home on a regular basis.  These reading and writing exercises had teacher comments and a grade, and parents could see what their child was working on in school.  This year, those same opportunities exist, but it’s all online now.  When we met for December parent-teacher conferences, I discussed Google Classroom with many families.  With our next round of conferences coming later this month, I thought this would be a good time to remind you of this wonderful resource.

Google Classroom is a core part of Google Apps for Education.  Think of it as a learning management system that allows me to share resources, distribute files, assign tasks, and allows students students to complete and submit tasks, receive feedback, discuss ideas with peers, and more.  (The short video above, while slightly out of date, does a great job of showing what Google Classroom can do.)

Nearly ALL of your child’s written work is completed on a Chromebook, within Google Classroom.  Parents of PGS fourth graders should ALWAYS be able to access their child’s Google Classroom account (using their child’s username and password, which should always be shared with parents).  To login, visit classroom.google.com and log in with your child’s username and password. There, you’ll find a lot of your forth grader’s work, along with my feedback and grades.  Sometimes grades may be posted in the Google Classroom assignment section, but I often put grades within the student’s document itself.  I encourage you to check Google Classroom on a periodic basis, although the one thing I ask is that you NOT make revisions to your child’s work without checking with me.  A lot of what you’ll find is a work-in-progress, and it’s important that students have the opportunity to learn by working through a process, rather than having corrections made by an adult at home.  (Remember, you’re logging in as your fourth grader, not under some separate parent account.  So there’s no way for me to distinguish work your child does from revisions you may make.)

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss