End-of-Year Google Classroom Housekeeping. Best Ideas for Admins & Teachers

As the school year draws to a close, students would rather enjoy the sunshine outside than be in closed classrooms, and teachers think about summer plans instead of pending classes… All the signs are that the school activities will end soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, admins and teachers, it’s time to start the long-awaited end-of-year Google Classroom cleanup!

How Do I End the School Year in Google Classroom?

As a school admin, you know that the last day of school isn’t necessarily the beginning of two or three months of relaxation for you. It’s time to clean up your e-learning resources and systems. Besides physically reviewing the devices, add auditing your Google Workspace for Education domain to your task list.

You may wonder what you need to do with Google Classroom at the end of the year. Here are some tips to help you sum up the school year successfully.

Google Classroom Cleanup for Admins

1. Extend Your Domain View with Google Classroom Insights

At the beginning of the Google Classroom cleanup, let’s examine what happened in your domain last school year. 

You have certainly tracked actions and users in Google Workspace for Education over the past few months. Still, nothing beats a deep dive into Google Classroom yearly insights and reports on all classrooms and their performance.

The GAT+ audit tool empowers school admins with easy access to granular Google Classroom Insights. They can come in handy for optimizing learning and teaching experiences in the coming year. In the Insights section, you can identify all existing Classrooms across your domain and their status (such as active or archived). 

You can also instantly see detailed information on the number of students, teachers, and assignments for the class. Additionally, GAT+ provides class data on people, classwork, grades, and browsing activity of the users in the Classroom.

For an overview of AI usage in student assignments across the year, check out Taskmaster‘s insights. They point out all cases where students didn’t work independently on their homework, giving room to improve the AI usage policy in your school.

If you are looking for more Google Classroom insights throughout the year, that’s no problem—just read this blog post for inspiration.

8 Google Classroom Insights that’ll Give You Superpowers

We just laid a well-prepared foundation for the thorough end-of-year housekeeping.

2. School Admin End-of-Year Google Classroom Cases

Here are some common school admin tasks to complete by the end of the school year or during the summer, along with solutions to help you do them quickly and efficiently.

How can I transfer all my students to their new grades in Google Classroom?

You can achieve this in the Google Admin Console. Add all students to the same grade level in an Organizational Unit called their high school graduation year, e.g., Grad2027. With all student accounts organized this way, the only thing you need to do every year is move the entire grade-year OU from the elementary sub-OU to middle or high school, as needed.

What should I do with classrooms abandoned by leaving teachers?

First, find the active classrooms for which the leaving teachers were responsible or which they used. GAT+ helps you identify them instantly. Then, select the Google Classroom you want to amend. You can quickly change its ownership in the same tool dashboard.

Save time when modifying a group of classes. In the case of a teacher giving many different classes, the school admin can set up an automatic workflow to change all the classrooms he owned in bulk. This time-saving option is available in GAT Flow.

How to get ready for a new after-class activity online that requires a new group and classrooms next school year?

How to get ready for a new after-class online activity that requires a new group and classrooms next school year?

If you already have a list of students who will attend this class and teachers who will give this activity, you can create virtual classrooms for them in advance. All you need is their email addresses. With Teacher Assist, you can automatically create a virtual classroom from scratch and import their accounts.

How to transfer all classrooms of a leaving teacher to another teacher next year?

This is when you will entirely fall in love with GAT Flow’s automated workflow (if you haven’t done it yet). Using this tool, you improve the process of assigning a co-teacher to an existing classroom so that the new educator can access all resources and information related to this classroom.

This also allows you to simultaneously add multiple teachers to many existing classrooms in one workflow, saving you loads of time and energy.

What should I do if the school curriculum will change and some subjects will no longer be taught?

To keep your domain tidy for the next year, archive all classrooms that will no longer be used. How do you do this with just a few clicks? Simply go to the Classroom module in GAT Flow and search for the relevant classroom. You can archive it by changing its state in the general settings.

If you’re unsure which classes are still active and which have been archived, review their state in GAT+.

How to remove members from existing classrooms to make room for the next grade?

You only need to create a bulk workflow that removes students or teachers from existing Google Classrooms. The workflow can delete users individually or collectively. This action will remove users from all classrooms by default, but you can set it up for only specific classrooms.

What to do if a teacher leaves school at the end of the year and wants to take his classroom resources with him?

Transferring all Google Classroom data from the school domain to a personal account is impossible. However, the leaving user can share all desired files and folders outside the school domain on his personal Drive.

As a Google admin, you can continuously monitor all files shared outside your school domain and take action, such as removing permissions, at any moment.

Tips for Teachers to Clean up the Digital Classroom

Every teacher can perform a few tasks to help admins wrap up the school year in Google Classroom and facilitate summer preparations for the coming year. 

The IT team may ask teachers using their Classrooms and devices, including Chromebooks, for the following general recommendations:

1. Ensure the Backup Copy: Create a backup of necessary educational materials, files, and folders to your Google Drive. During the summer, the IT team will probably delete everything in the “Downloads” folder and on your school device’s desktop.

2. Disconnect Your Devices: Leave all Chromebooks and other devices unplugged in the classroom you are in charge of. If you don’t use your school device during the summer, leave it unplugged and secured there. Don’t cover them with anything.

3. Clean up Your Desk: Remove all external drives, pen drives, CDs, wireless mouse adapters, chargers, etc. The desktop or other computer pieces may be replaced, and you won’t recover the items you left.

You can email teachers with these best practices so they won’t overlook any point.

Closing Thoughts

Before the new year begins, take your time to clean up, audit, and adapt to your school’s user accounts and classrooms in the Google domain.

Auditing tools like GAT+ and GAT Flow streamline Google Classroom management, saving you hours of work and avoiding unnecessary mess.

Reach out to us to discover the limitless possibilities of GAT Suite for Education and see how it can reshape your Google Classroom now.