Education Solutions [Go to GAT Labs for Enterprise solutions here]

How to Improve your Google Classroom Onboarding & Offboarding?

Table of Contents

Sally and Tom are starting a new school year along with 120 other students. They are very excited – they expect many new friends and a lot of interesting after-class activities in high school. In short, it will be a real life-changing time. Of course, they don’t realize what tasks their arrival at school means for you, K12 Admin. Hello, massive Google Classroom onboarding & offboarding!

So, Admins, this may be an overwhelming time. You need to add each student’s account to the relevant classrooms and give them the necessary access… What if I tell you that a powerful tool will help you do it in bulk and automatically?

Keep reading and follow our student onboarding checklist. 

 

1. Planning Student Onboarding in Google Classroom

Do you already have the data lists of all students in each grade? Well done, the first step behind us! We can see that Sally and Tom, besides their core subjects, have chosen different elective classes – Sally would like to learn journalism and Tom is interested in computer programming.

Now, you need to get the following information to automate your students’ onboarding to their respective classes.

  • Organizational unit (OU)

Which OU (the entire school unit & core curriculum classrooms) do students need to join? This will allow them to access to determined features and services.

  • Google Classroom

Which classrooms (for core and elective subjects) do students need to join?

  • Google Drive

What shared Drives, folders, files and other resources do students need to have access to? Perhaps a specific file needs to be copied to a student because of their particular situation.

  • Google Calendar

What shared Calendars (e.g., calendars of teachers, school events or extra-curricular activities) do students need to have access to?

  • Google Groups

What school groups (ie. charity, sport, school council groups) do students need to have access to? After adding the students to the group, they will be able to access all files, emails and calendars that the group has.

 

2. Automate Student Onboarding in Google Classroom

And now the best news for you – you can onboard your students in Google Classroom in bulk using pre-configured workflows and action sets.

Imagine that a few days after starting the new year, it turned out that only 6 students sign up for the journalism classes. That’s not enough, so the school cancels the class, and Sally and the other students have to change elective subjects. 

K12 Admin can pull all the students from one classroom and add them to multiple newly created classrooms using just one workflow!

  • Workflow

With GAT Flow, as a Google Workspace admin, you can take bulk actions on users in your domain, such as adding them to a specific Classroom or generating their passwords.

The tool has a special option for User Onboarding. The only steps that you need to follow are:

  1. Create a user or import the users’ data which you want to run the workflow on
  2. Add actions to run during the onboarding process
  3. Send an approval request to the Security Officer

For detailed instructions on how to create a workflow using GAT Flow, see our Knowledge Base.

  • Action Set

You will automate the student onboarding process by creating the workflow and saving it as an action set (see the picture below). In this way, you will be able to use it in the future. 

Creating the workflow and saving it as an action set

When scheduling the next onboarding process, you can select the saved Action set instead of a single action. Sounds complicated? Check out this tutorial for creating an Action Set for user onboarding in GAT Flow. 

And here is the icing on the cake – the workflow templates module. It will make your student onboarding experience even faster and more automatic. The template contains suggested action sets, helpful to onboard new students or teachers:

  • Send email
  • Create email filter
  • Folder, Shared Drive permission change
  • Add user to calendar
  • Share user primary calendar
  • Add user(s) as Co-teacher to existing Google Classrooms
  • Add user to groups
  • Change user Organizational Unit

Automate your Google Classroom tasks & save hours of work with GAT Flow

 

3. Teacher Onboarding & Offboarding

As I mentioned slightly in the previous paragraph, the same automation workflow will work when onboarding and offboarding a new teacher. You are more likely to need to offboard teachers more often than students.

Let’s say, Mr Jones, an English teacher, decided to change the job, or Mrs Collins, a chemistry teacher, is expecting a baby and will take her maternity leave soon.

Don’t worry – the offboarding process will be just as easy to automate as the onboarding one. You can easily automate removing access for previous teachers and co-teachers and adding new ones to Google Classroom with an automated workflow. 

You will also find dedicated onboarding and offboarding workflow templates for teachers in GAT Flow that automate your work, saving plenty of time.

Note: Even if a teacher is leaving, you can still transfer the classrooms that he or she created. 

Actions you can take to offboard a teacher include, among others: migrating emails and calendar events to another teacher, deleting all passwords, removing the teacher from all Google Classrooms and changing their owner to another teacher.

You will find the full list of offboarding actions in this article.

 

Closing Thoughts

Knowing how to automate Google Classroom onboarding and offboarding can really change your daily work, K12 admin. 

We hope that after reading this article you know how to automate the onboarding process and feel encouraged enough to take this important step towards easier Google Classroom onboarding & offboarding.

And at the very end, listen to what one of the K12 Admins told us about managing Google Classroom using GAT tools:

This is brilliant software, the Google Classroom and Drive administrative tool that your school is missing – and is 100x more powerful than just the Google Admin alone. Countless hours have been saved by using this auditing tool, and the suite is fully functional.

 

Interested in learning employee onboarding mistakes to strictly avoid (which also applies to educational environment)? Check out this blog post.

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