Yesterday I received the email! Welcome to Classroom by Google!
These comments will probably not all be valid for long as I think that a lot of what is here will change or be added to before the main release. I will say that to anyone that has used my service I wrote called homeworky.com this pretty much replaces it!
So the first thing to do when you login is create a class.
Class name is self explanatory but section seems to really mean sub-heading or description (it appears below the class name)
If I enter “Physics” as the Class name and “Science” as the Section your class will display as follows.
At this point in your Google Drive you will now have a “Classroom” folder and within it a “Physics” folder.
Now we can look at the Class page.
You can change the cover photo to one of Googles pre-defined ones (I guess in the future you will be able to upload your own)
Now for a tour of the page.
Having set an assignment you will see this on your class stream.
If you click on the Assignment you get an overview of who has submitted the completed assigments.
Ok so now if we switch to a students view of this.
I have manually added a student to my course but you can also share the class code with anyone who you would like to join your course. When they login to classroom they will see the course as below.
They can then click on the assignment they need to “Turn In”
So if for this assignment the student needs to hand in a Document they can either add one they have already made or create a new one.
Clicking on this Document will then open up Google Docs and let you write your document. This document is store in Google Drive in the appropriate class folder.
Once you have finished editing the Document the “Turn In” button can be clicked.
Students can then add a message to go with it, if they like.
So now switch back to a teacher. You can see one assignment has been “Turned In”
You can then have a view the Document, comment on it, edit it or whatever you like within Google Docs. You can also have a conversation about it from within Classroom instead of in the document. You can then grade the assignment (must be a numeric grade, hopefully this may change)
And as with everything if you look in your Google Drive the assignments are all there in the appropriate folder structure.
Well that was a quick whistle stop tour of Classroom as it is today. I will have a longer play with it and update this post as the product evolves.