Sync Missing and Late from Google Classroom
3/28/2021
We observed that many teachers manually enter “missing” into TeacherEase when students don’t hand in their work. This seems like a lot of labor, and we thought it was an area of improvement for our system. So we added the ability for TeacherEase to automatically pull in missing and late statuses from Google Classroom. Let’s describe how it works.
When teachers create assignments in Google Classroom, they give it a due date/time. As students hand in their work, Google notifies TeacherEase, and we mark it “handed-in” in TeacherEase. Notice in the screenshot below, 3 students have handed in their assignments, but 2 have not.
We check Google shortly after an assignment’s due date/time to find students who haven’t handed in their work. For any student who has NOT yet handed in work (and the due date/time has passed), we’ll mark the work as “missing.” This is shown as the magnifying glass in TeacherEase. Their score will be blank, and it will not affect their average. In the screenshot below, notice two students who haven’t handed in their work.
If some students eventually hand in missing work after the deadline, we’ll change their status from “missing” to “handed-in.” We’ll also mark it as “late.” In the screenshot below, notice Wanda Bonham handed in missing work.
When teachers grade work in Google Classroom, scores will flow back into TeacherEase, as usual. Notice that all the students who’ve handed in work now have a score (and Wanda's work is still late).
By default, missing work will have a blank score in TeacherEase, which does not affect students’ grades. At some point, teachers may want to give scores to missing work. This could be a zero, or some other score (many districts have minimum score policies to prevent zeros from being overly punitive). TeacherEase has long supported features to “Mass Edit Scores” and “Mark Missing as Zero.” This makes it easy to push scores to a group of students with a few keystrokes.
If you give a zero to missing work, you’ll see the magnifying glass turn red. This clarifies that missing work has been marked as zero. You can see this for Keith Brown below.
If a student with missing work eventually hands it into Google Classroom, TeacherEase will be updated. The “missing” status will be removed, the score will stay, and “late” will be applied.
When students hand in late work, we’ll notify teachers with the TeacherEase Newsfeed. Teachers can choose to also be notified in the TeacherEase mobile app or by email. This can be configured in Notification Settings.
When the teacher enters a score for the work in Google Classroom, the score will flow into TeacherEase and overwrite the zero (or other low score). The end result will be student work with a score that’s marked late.
The process described above is pretty common for teachers, and we hope the majority of our users like it. We do understand that some teachers may use a different process, however. So the new import of missing/late statuses is optional. If the feature doesn’t work for you, no problem, it’s easy to turn off. Just uncheck the checkbox in Google Classroom Setup, and we’ll stop updating missing/late statuses.
We hope you like these new features, and that it’ll save lots of time. Enjoy!
The Common Goal Team
