Ten Time-savers for G Suite for Education Users

Do you have a New Year’s resolution to exercise more, read more, or just spend more time doing something fun? If you’re a G Suite for Education user, you might make more time for your New Year’s resolution by handling routine tasks more efficiently. To that end, here are some of my favorite time-saving tips for G Suite for Education users.

Use a Comment Bank in Google Classroom
If you use Google Classroom to give Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets assignments to your students, create and use a comment bank to speed up the process of giving feedback to your students. Watch my video below to learn how to do this.

Use Google Keep to Add Comments to Students’ Work

Google Classroom is great for giving feedback on final drafts of students’ work. But if you don’t use Google Classroom or you want to give students feedback on early drafts of their work, then the following method of using Google Keep to add comments to your students’ Docs, Slides, and Sheets can be a time-saver.

Self-grading Quizzes
If you give multiple choice, true/false, or short-answer quizzes use automatic grading options that are available to you in Google Forms. In the following video I demonstrate how to create a self-grading quiz in Google Forms.

Set Default Point Values and Requirements in Google Forms
Almost everyone who has made created a Google Form has at one time or another forgotten to set a point value for a quiz question or forgot to require a response to a survey question. You can avoid doing that and having to go back and fix the error by creating default point values and a default question requirement for all of your Google Forms. Watch my video below to learn how to do that.

Copy and Reuse Questions from One Google Form to Another

If you find yourself trying to make a few different versions of a quiz, importing questions from one quiz to another can be a bit of time-saver over manually rewriting entire questions and answer choices.

Gmail Features for More Efficient Handling of Your Inbox

If opening your inbox feels like the world’s longest game of whack-a-mole, Gmail has some features that can help you win at that game. Those things include creating canned responses, scheduling messages, enabling smart replies, and creating message filters. Those time-saving Gmail features are demonstrated in the video below. The video also shows you how to use confidential mode in Gmail.

Schedule Assignments in Google Classroom

I generally create all of the assignments for my classes at the start of the week. I don’t give all of the assignments at once because I use the scheduling feature in Google Classroom. That way my assignments roll-out to students throughout the week to correspond to the lessons of the day. I do it this way because then I don’t have to remember to post assignments at the beginning of each day. I also do it this way because I tend to work more efficiently when I focus on one task for a block of time once a week as opposed to small chunks throughout the week. (By the way, I write blog posts in similar manner).

Ten Time-savers for G Suite for Education Users

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