When designing a Google Classroom for elementary students I began to create one classroom with various topics.
As the topic list grew, I began to wonder if students would want one Google classroom for a 5th grade class or would they prefer separate classrooms by subject with a secret agent hub (homeroom for things not content related). I reached out to two MassCUE peers, who both had differing opinions with great reasons. One friend said to create one classroom for consistency, ease of use, and less notifications to families. A second friend suggested multiple classrooms to be used as pods with a homeroom classroom. She also gave the idea of color coding each individual classroom created. After listening and thinking I decided the best way to decide was to ask former 5th grade students.
I met with a small focus group of former students and showed them what I had created. They saw the classroom set up and most of them immediately said I should do one classroom. When I asked them why they felt having one place to go to with a Google Meet link would be helpful. They would have less email notifications for them and parents, and fewer classes to manage. They liked the idea of everything in once place. One student offered that I should create multiple classrooms to able to add more for the content areas than what he was seeing. When I politely explained I would add more as the year went on in one classroom and that what he was seeing was just the start of the year he quickly changed his thinking.
I was excited to build an online community for our future agents. The first thing I did was remove notifications from the stream.
This helps keep the stream less cluttered. I designed a classroom banner in Google Draw to add some personal flair to our online home. I challenged myself to think about best practices and decided to include emojis and fonts to support visual learners. Thanks to Holly Clark's suggestion, I created an emoji guide for students too, so they would know what the images meant. I learned how to do this through a YouTube video posted below.
I thought about a human centered approach, focusing first on relationship building activities. I know the content pieces will come, but I was easily able to start adapting activities done in a physical space for an online space. I strongly recommend educators start with the good work they are already doing when contemplating where to start in building a Google Classroom for remote and hybrid learning.
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