Waffle Bytes

Organization is huge for Google Classroom - both for you and your students.  The use of Topics not only helps you organize course material, but gives you the power to share any section directly with students.   Teachers will need to decide HOW they want to use Topics as there are multiple ways they can be used.  A couple examples:  1. Using topics to organize by week -  2. Using topics to organize by content (eg. a unit or project) - Notice in the week example, the current week is on top.  This is because you can re-order your topics at any time - either by drag & drop or by clicking on the More menu (3 stacked dots) to to right of the topic name and selecting Move up or Move down -  There are 2 ways to create topics.  1. by choosing Topic under the Create button 2. by creating a Topic when assigning it to an Assignment, Quiz, Question or Material  A very cool thing about Topics: each topical area has its own unique URL.  This m...

Sometimes you want to move a topic to the top of the Classwork section to highlight it for students that need that focus.  Or maybe you accidentally assigned an item to the wrong topic, and need to re-assign it.  It is easy to reorganize items within your Classroom as long as they are within your Classwork section (this does not work for items in the stream). To organize your Classwork: When in the Classroom click on Classwork- To make modifications to a topic, you can click on the More menu (3 stacked dots)- You will get several options - 1 - Rename: will bring up the window below to change the name 2 - Delete: will delete the topic (but not the posts assigned to it) 3 - Copy link: will copy link you can use with students to direct them to the specific topic 4 - Move up/down: will let you reorder the topics You can also move topics by dragging & dropping - Additionally, you can reorder items OR add them to a topic by dragging and dropping -...

What if you need to change the name of a course?  or what can you do with your courses from last year? Can you put your courses in a different order when looking at them?  Can you copy a course that you have all set up how you like? It can be important to know the answers to questions such as these.  Below, we will walk through the "More menu" for a course, which is how to organizing, edit, copy and archive your courses. You can access the More Menu by clicking the upper right corner of a course (it is 3 stacked dots) - This gives you several options for the course -  1st - Move -  Selecting Move brings up a window that lets you choose where to move the course in relation to your other courses.  Easily move it to the beginning (1) or the end (3) of your list - Another way to move courses is by drag & dropping -  2nd - Edit  Selecting Edit will bring up the same window as when you created the course so you can change ...

Google has finally integrated its "Tasks" into Calendar in a more useable way that previous iterations.  There are multiple ways to add tasks, and you can even add items from the calendar now.  You have the ability to have open tasks with no due dates, or set due dates for tasks (or even sub-tasks) - so no matter your organizational style, this may work for you. Today we are going to explore how to utilize the tasks list to organize and manage your projects.  This will give you a basic understanding of how the task feature works.  Tomorrow we will show how to add a task directly on the calendar. (Here is a video on how to utilize the task lists if you prefer.) First, you need to make sure your Tasks calendar is enabled & viewable.  Check this in the left side - Next, to access tasks, click on the little blue circle icon on the right side of your calendar - You will see a menu appear on the side.  Once items are added to your tasks, yo...

A menu change happened for me this morning in Google Slides (on just my work account, not on my personal account yet).  The addition of both turning on/off a ruler, and adding guides onto the slide to help with placement if you are varying from the pre-built theme layouts. Here is the menu change showing the additional options - RULER The ruler works as you would expect it to.  When you select it from the View menu, it displays a horizontal and vertical ruler at the top and left of the side - When you are moving an object on the slide, you will see blue lines marking the location of the ends and middle of the object on both toolbars - GUIDES When you select to view the guides, you see the midpoint guides on the slides -  Guides do have some more flexibility as you can add additional guides on the slide, and drag them to the location of your choice - There is also the option to "Edit guides" and enter them in a window, as well -