Automating Google Classroom: 8 features that save teachers hours each week

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

The truth is, if you’re still using Google Classroom just to share PDFs for your students to read, you’re leaving a ton of instructional power and time-saving automation on the table.

While there is nothing wrong with using the platform as a substitute for printing information sheets, that’s no longer all it’s capable of. It is no longer just a digital filing cabinet; it’s a dynamic platform designed to streamline feedback, differentiate assignments, and foster genuine student engagement.

As educators, we’re always looking for ways to cut down on the admin so that we can focus on teaching and helping our pupils. This guide is your action plan to move from being a basic user to a Google Classroom Power User, focusing on the latest and greatest – the most impactful features that you need to know about right now.

Time-saving Genie: Feedback & Marking

Nothing drains teacher time like managing a thousand individual feedback documents. This year, we’ve opted for KS3 students completing extended writing on separate pink sheets that they can write on, we collect in and mark, and then pupils stick into their books – but even that can be time-consuming.

Classroom, on the other hand, has built-in tools that make providing high-quality, targeted feedback, faster than ever before.

1. Markbook and Rubric

Stop manually typing the same feedback across multiple essays! Classroom’s integration with Rubric is, arguably, its greatest time-saver.

When you’re creating an assignment:

  • Select the Rubric option and choose Create Rubric or Reuse Rubric.
  • Define your criteria and scoring levels. Crucially, you can import rubrics from any other assignment you’ve ever created, cutting down on even more time spent behind a computer screen.
  • When grading, the rubric appears alongside the student’s work. Instead of typing, you simply click the corresponding level for each criterion. The total points calculate instantly, and the criteria description automatically attaches to the student’s grade.

Pro tip: Use the Comments Bank while marking. If you find yourself typing a common piece of feedback – like ‘Good use of evidence – now you need to develop the explanation of your own knowledge’ – save it to the Comments Bank. The next time you need it, simply start typing the first few letters, and the full comment appears, ready to be dropped into the document.

Back during Lockdown, when I was teaching from home, if I’d known about this then it would have cut my marking load – instantly.

Getting to grips with Rubrics won’t be instant – you’ll have to experiment to ensure that students are still getting high-quality, bespoke feedback, but isn’t that what teaching is? Experimenting with new ideas until you find something effective – and doing it again and again to improve outcomes.

2. Originality Reports

For essays, reports, or any longer writing tasks, try using Originality Reports.

When you activate this feature on an assignment, Google checks the student’s work against billions of webpages and against student submissions within your school’s private domain. This is key for identifying copied text – which is really important in this new age of AI illiteracy.

Its real power, though, is in teaching citation skills. Students can run preliminary reports themselves (usually three times per assignment) to identify passages that need to be paraphrased or cited differently to avoid plagiarism. I’ll be presenting my A Level students with this option this year, and you may want to do the same, especially for anyone applying to University and in need of a skills upgrade in referencing.

Dynamic assignment delivery: Differentiation & Scheduling

Effective teaching means meeting every student where they are. Classroom makes it much more seamless to customise who gets what assignment.

3. Assigning to individuals or groups

When creating any assignment, quiz, or question, look at the Students dropdown menu.

You can now easily select specific students or groups of students to receive that assignment. This is perfect for:

  • Differentiation: Assigning extension work only to students who are ready to move on, or targeted review materials to students who need extra support. For example, if a new student has just joined your class halfway through the year and is missing some core content.
  • Catch-up: Assigning missed work only to students who were absent without clogging up the To-Do list of the rest of the class.

It’s important to keep your Classroom streams tight and to the point to ensure that students don’t suffer from an overwhelmed cognitive load. Using individuals and groups for these extra assignments will ensure that it remains streamlined for the vast majority of your learners.

4. Drafting & Scheduling

Forget that late-night scramble to post materials. Instead it’s time to use these methods instead:

  • Save draft: If you start to put together an assignment but need to stop and come back later, select ‘Save Draft’. The assignment will remain visible only to you in the Classwork tab, ready for you to edit and post when the time is right.
  • Schedule: Choose the exact future date and time for the assignment to automatically appear in a student’s feed. You could use this to prep an entire week’s worth of work in one sitting.

While I don’t often use the save draft feature, scheduling is a life-saver. I schedule all of the assignments due to post on the next day for 8am, and for homework tasks to post at around 3pm – to ensure that they’re not distracting notifications for learners while they work in other lessons.

Organising for clarity

The biggest change in recent years in the emphasis on the Classwork tab. If your Stream is a chaotic mess, you need this feature in your life.

5. Using topics to structure your course

Treat the Classwork tab like the table of contents for your course. Use the + Create button and choose Topic.

Topics should follow this kind of naming convention for smoothness:

  • Units of Study: Conflict & Tension; America – Opportunity & Inequality, etc.
  • Essential Resources: Key Reference Material; Homework; Revision Resources, and so on

Every assignment, material or quiz should go under a relevant Topic. This keeps the Stream, where posts will appear chronologically, free of clutter and only for announcements or discussion.

6. Integrating Interactive Content

You can link to a wealth of Google tools in the Classwork tab:

  • Google Forms: for self-grading quizzes and exit tickets that auto populate into your Sheets markbook. For more on how to use Sheets for teaching, click here.
  • Youtube: Embed videos as Materials under a Topic for viewing without the distraction of ads or suggested videos

Have fun experimenting with what else can empower your students’ learning by using this feature.

Powering up Parental and Admin Communication

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about being a Head of History, it’s that you need quick data access to empower your decisions.

7. Guardian Summaries

Ensure that your students’ parents or guardians are connected to your Classroom. This will automatically send Guardian Summaries to their inboxes, which is a newsletter that informs them of missing work, upcoming deadlines, and recent activity.

In theory, this will save you hours that would otherwise be spent calling or emailing individual parents about missing work. In reality, I’ve heard from parents that this feature is a little undercooked, and doesn’t yet provide them with enough detail about the specific types of work that their children have missed or been assigned.

8. Exporting your markbook

While an online markbook is great, you might need to export the data. Classroom will let you:

  • Export all grades to a single Google Sheet.
  • Export all assignment grades to a CSV file.

We still use physical markbook at my school, so this makes it easy to transfer and monitor data alongside other, non-digital work you may have marked. Equally, popping everything into a Google Sheets file is massive for tracking averages across your classes or the whole cohort.

Work smarter, not harder

What I find quite incredible about Classroom is how quickly it’s being updated. In this post, I’ve given you an in-depth review of its core features – the ones that I’ve found most useful in my 5 years of full-time teaching.

But it’s not even touched on all of the powerful new AI features that have been slowly rolled out, so expect an update to this article once I’ve got a better understanding of how to use this myself. In the meantime, it’s essential that you get to grips with Classroom’s core features to automate what would otherwise be respective tasks – like grading, communicating missing work, and organising files.

That way, you’ll be able to spend more time doing what matters most: planning engaging lessons, providing meaningful feedback, and leading your students to success.

How do you use Classroom in your day-to-day life? Let me know in the comments below.

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