Last week I published a post in which I explained that you can use read receipts in your G Suite for Education email to make sure that students have at least seen your messages even if they don't reply to your messages. I do that when I email students to remind them that they have new assignments posted in Google Classroom. That way even if they have ignored the notification in the Google Classroom app or in the automated Google Classroom notification email, I can be sure of whether or not they know they have a new assignment. In the following video I demonstrate the method that I use to make sure students know they have new Google Classroom assignments.
This method isn't entirely foolproof because if a student opens his or her email, I won't get a read receipt. That said, I think it's worth the extra minute it takes me to do this to make sure that more of my students recognize when a new assignment or announcement is posted in Google Classroom.
On a related note, you can speed up this process by using contact groups.
A lot of us are hosting online office hours for our students these days. Based on what I've seen from my colleagues as well as folks posting on social media, a lot of people are scheduling an hour of time and just hanging out in a Google Meet or Zoom meeting waiting for students to drop-in to ask questions. There's nothing inherently wrong with doing that unless you have students who want to ask questions that shouldn't be discussed in front of other students. You may also find that when you schedule students for specific, individual meetings they are more likely to appear. That's been the case for me with two of my students.
One way to schedule individual online meetings with students is to use a combination of Google Calendar, Google Classroom, and Zoom. In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate how that works. In short, you create recurring meetings in Zoom then insert the links to those meetings into the details for appointment slots in Google Calendar. Then when students sign-up for a meeting through your Google Calendar appointment page they will have the link and the meeting time available in their own Google Calendars.
