Lesson 2: Creating Assignments and Materials

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Creating assignments and materials

Google Classroom gives you the ability to create and assign work for your students, all without having to print anything. Questions, essays, worksheets, and readings can all be distributed online and made easily available to your class. If you haven't created a class already, check out our Getting Started with Google Classroom lesson.

Watch the video below to learn more about creating assignments and materials in Google Classroom.


Creating an assignment

Whenever you want to create new assignments, questions, or material, you'll need to navigate to the Classwork tab.

clicking the Classwork tab

In this tab, you can create assignments and view all current and past assignments. To create an assignment, click the Create button, then select Assignment. You can also select Question if you'd like to pose a single question to your students, or Material if you simply want to post a reading, visual, or other supplementary material.

clicking the Assignment option in the Create menu

This will bring up the Assignment form. Google Classroom offers considerable flexibility and options when creating assignments.

Click the buttons in the interactive below to become familiar with the Assignment form.

edit hotspotsassignment form interactive

Once you've completed the form and clicked Assign, your students will receive an email notification letting them know about the assignment.

Google Classroom takes all of your assignments and automatically adds them to your Google Calendar. From the Classwork tab, you can click Google Calendar to pull this up and get a better overall view of the timeline for your assignments' due dates.

clicking Google Calendar

Using Google Docs with assignments

When creating an assignment, there may often be times when you want to attach a document from Google Docs. These can be helpful when providing lengthy instructions, study guides, and other material.

When attaching these types of files, you'll want to make sure to choose the correct setting for how your students can interact with it. After attaching one to an assignment, you'll find a drop-down menu with three options.

selecting the Students Can View File option

Let's take a look at when you might want to use each of these:

  • Students can view file: Use this option if the file is simply something you want your students to view but not make any changes to.
  • Students can edit file: This option can be helpful if you're providing a document you want your students to collaborate on or fill out collectively.
  • Make a copy for each student: If you're creating a worksheet or document that you want each student to complete individually, this option will create a separate copy of the same document for every student.

Using topics

On the Classwork tab, you can use topics to sort and group your assignments and material. To create a topic, click the Create button, then select Topic.

clicking the Topic option in the Create menu

Topics can be helpful for organizing your content into the various units you teach throughout the year. You could also use it to separate your content by type, splitting it into homework, classwork, readings, and other topic areas.

showing a class with three topics

In our next lesson, we'll explore how to create quizzes and worksheets with Google Forms, further expanding how you can use Google Classroom with your students.

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