Organising class materials - Alfred Deakin High School's classbooks

Keeping class materials can be very difficult if you’re teaching different subjects to multiple students. Google Classroom makes it easy to assign work to students, but if there’s material they need to be able to find quickly, or refer to when needed, it can sometimes get lost in the Classroom stream.

Teachers at Alfred Deakin High School have been using the ‘About’ tab in their Google Classrooms to organise, share and maintain content for their class. The 'About' tab gives teachers a static space to leave information that doesn't change. This leaves the Classroom 'Stream' free for more dynamic content, such as student discussions, assignments and resources for a specific lesson.

The 'About' tab can help teachers keep their content organised.

In combination with a ‘Classbook’, they are making it easy for students to stay organised and keep up.

Classbooks provide information for students about what's happening. 

As teachers prepare a basic outline of the term’s work, they create a Classbook using Google Doc. in the Classbook, the teachers provide a basic outline of the term’s work for their students. This might include topics and key questions for each week, the main assessment items, extension activities and anything else that might be relevant.

Classbook content ranges from text to dynamic links.

This has a couple of benefits: the students know what is coming up, and they know what to look for and what to do if they are away or out of class. In a high school situation, where students are often out on various excursions or they’re away sick, this can come in handy.

Students can check the classbook to catch up with work they've missed. 

The other thing the teacher does to keep the class organised is save class materials under the ‘about’ tab in the class’s Google Classroom. There are a few things they include:

• The course outline.
• Links to relevant documents: this includes links to the classbook, Mathletics, YouTube and any other regularly used websites.
• Embedded videos and documents that the students need to refer to throughout the unit.
• Links to reference information, such as subject-specific classbooks, online texts.
• Assignment templates and rubrics.

Classbooks based around a specific topic can help students from a range of classes. 

Using the Google tools in this way has made it easy to keep kids on track. Students at Alfred Deakin High School respond well to the Classbook, and they’re now in the routine of using it every day to stay organised.