Posting and Grading Questions (Discussions) on Google Classroom

When I took online classes in college, the backbone of each course was a series of discussion boards that were meant to replicate the feeling of having whole-class discussions in an in-person class.

I won't lie, oftentimes those discussion posts were the bane of my existence-- BUT now that I'm a teacher, I can see the value in featuring discussion posts in my Google Classroom.

I'm sure we're all ready for in-person discussions again, but we have to work with what we've got. 

Luckily, Google Classroom makes it very easy to feature a discussion post (and to grade said discussion post).

If you want to set up a discussion for your students to collaborate on, you have to start by posting a "question" assignment.

How to post a question

You can find this menu when you click on the "create" button at the top of your Google Classroom page.

Once you've created a question, you'll see a menu that looks like this:

1. This is where you assign how many points you want the assignment to be worth.
2. This is where you put your due date (I always mark the later due date as the Google Classroom official due date).
3. I always check that students can reply to each other and
4. I always check that students can edit answers. Checking these boxes keeps the discussion possible while also preventing students from having to repost if they submit too early
5. You can see on my instructions for my students that I've given them two due dates-- I fully copied this format from the online classes I took in college. 
6. This is where you click to post (or save edits if you've already posted) your question.

Once you post your question and it's time to grade, you follow similar steps to grading a typical assignment.

Grading a Google Classroom Question

Student Work Screen

There are two screens to understand when you're grading a Google Classroom Question. The first one is the "Student Work" page where you can see every reply in one space.

1. You can input numerical grades here.
2. You can sort the student work that shows up by clicking on "All." You'll get the option to sort by "turned in," "assigned," and "graded." 
3. This is what a student's reply looks like on the student work page.
4. Clicking "reply" will let you add a class comment (meaning everyone in the class can see it). Additionally, if students have replied to their classmates, you can read the replies here. 
5. Google Classroom will let you know if someone has turned in a response late.
6. Once you've graded your discussion posts, you can click "return" to send students the feedback/grades you've given them.

Sorry if you can't read my handwriting, but on the image you can see a rectangle around a blurred out student name. What I've written there says, "click on student name to see just their post." 

Individual Student Work Screen

Clicking on a student's name will take us to the second screen I mentioned earlier-- the INDIVIDUAL student work screen.

1. I've blurred it out, but this is the individual student's name for the response I'm looking at.
2. This shows the history a student has had with a post. Meaning it's possible to see when they have edited out a typo (if only they edited out typos). 
3. Here you can reply (publicly as a class comment) to the student's post
4. If you want to add a comment that will NOT be seen by the entire class, you click down here to make a private comment.
5. You can add numerical grades here. 

Wrapping up

The main thing to remember once you've left feedback/given grades is to return the work to the students so that they can see what you've given them. If you never click the "return" button, then they will never know how they did and they can't improve before the next time you assign a discussion post.

Hope this helped!

Until next time,

K. Hanlin