Google Workspace for Education - Adding Teacher to Classroom

[talksr]

Hi,

Does anyone know how I can add a teacher to a classroom ion Google Classrooms?

 

I am assuming the classroom she needs adding to has all staff off with Covid so there is nobody who can do this for her. When she tries to 'join class' it is asking for a class code which she doesn't have.

I can find no way in the console area to add her. Does anyone have any ideas?

[paulkerton]

Either an existing teacher who is in the class needs to add her as a teacher, or you need to be using GAM. Class codes are for students, not staff.

https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM

 

Once you have GAM set up you can manage Classroom by command line, including adding and removing staff and students

https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM/wiki/Managing-Google-Classroom

[howartp]

This doesn't help you for now, but with Salamander we have a classroom admin added to every classroom when it syncs, so we can get in and add teachers by logging into that admin user.

 

(One user per year group, per academic year, as there's a limit on how many classrooms each user can be in)

[TMBS]

The teacher who owns the Classroom has to add them from the People tab in their Google Classroom and then Invite Teachers. Unfortunately you can't add them from the Admin Console, which would be useful with the number of staff off atm!

 

I always tell my teachers to add their HOD as a co-teacher. Then if they're off the HOD can add whoever covers. Hopefully, both are never off at once!

[RLR]

Either an existing teacher who is in the class needs to add her as a teacher, or you need to be using GAM. Class codes are for students, not staff.

https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM

 

Once you have GAM set up you can manage Classroom by command line, including adding and removing staff and students

https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM/wiki/Managing-Google-Classroom

This. You should start using GAM or GAM-Advanced 3 just to get familiar with it. The google admin console lacks a lot of stuff that the API can help with. Especially Google Classroom.

[paulkerton]

Also, whichever one you use, its a really good idea to set GAM up in Cloud Shell. That way, its accessible wherever you can log in with a Google account, and it's much more secure than having it on a local machine. Obviously as an admin you should have 2 Step Verification on also.

Video here showing you what to do:

[DGardiner]

Also, whichever one you use, its a really good idea to set GAM up in Cloud Shell. That way, its accessible wherever you can log in with a Google account, and it's much more secure than having it on a local machine. Obviously as an admin you should have 2 Step Verification on also.

Video here showing you what to do:

 

Whats the expected costs of running gam in gcp?

 

IM not overly familiar so sorry if its a dumb question

[paulkerton]

Whats the expected costs of running gam in gcp?

 

IM not overly familiar so sorry if its a dumb question

 

Zero. The free tier gives you 50 hours runtime a week, and as most people will nip in and out to run commands and only work 40 hours a week, you'll never ever touch the edge.

[DGardiner]

Zero. The free tier gives you 50 hours runtime a week, and as most people will nip in and out to run commands and only work 40 hours a week, you'll never ever touch the edge.

 

Well that was the best 10 minutes ive spent this year.

[paulkerton]

Well that was the best 10 minutes ive spent this year.

Worth it eh?

[DGardiner]

Worth it eh?

 

means i dont need to run back to my laptop to use it anymore, shame it cant be used to run cron jobs but ill take what i can get

[paulkerton]

means i dont need to run back to my laptop to use it anymore, shame it cant be used to run cron jobs but ill take what i can get

Yes, Cloud Scheduler isn't part of the free tier unfortunately!

[jthompson]

A little off topic but just to underline the point about security with GAM or GAM-ADV, be very careful about the oauth2 and secrets files that you generate for them. Don't leave them sitting around anywhere as they're basically the keys to the kingdom! A bad actor getting hold of those can trash your entire Google tenancy. That's probably the main reason for installing GAM on Google Cloud Shell, so that those key files aren't sitting on a Windows network. The fact that it's very convenient is a nice bonus.

 

If you do want to store those key files somewhere else, do it in a password manager or something.

[DGardiner]

A little off topic but just to underline the point about security with GAM or GAM-ADV, be very careful about the oauth2 and secrets files that you generate for them. Don't leave them sitting around anywhere as they're basically the keys to the kingdom! A bad actor getting hold of those can trash your entire Google tenancy. That's probably the main reason for installing GAM on Google Cloud Shell, so that those key files aren't sitting on a Windows network. The fact that it's very convenient is a nice bonus.

 

If you do want to store those key files somewhere else, do it in a password manager or something.

 

Yeah i chucked my secrets into GCS so once ive made sure my scripts work ill probably remove gam from my laptop

[the_quick]

If you have bit of money, Wizkids (https://www.wizkids.co.uk/) have a product called classroom manager. Web based , allows add users to a different classes - both teachers and students.

As well it will show you classes by users. Really useful tool, I think I'm paying £500 pa for it.

 

/I'm not being paid or rewarded by Wizkids - just like their product

[talksr]

Thanks everyone. I had never even heard of GAM, I am a Google newbie!

 

I have followed the links and downloaded the GAM Windows msi to my system.

I have followed through the instructions, but I am getting stuck...

 

I enter in my admin Workspace Admin username, I copy and paste the link into my browser, sign in to my Google account and then paste back the verification code, but then I get the following error saying The terms of service 'appsadmin' for service(s) 'admin.googleapis.com, admin.googleapis.com' must be accepted.

 

 

 

I copy and paste the link to go to the Developers Console to accept the ToS but I get this screen:

 

 

Any ideas on what the issue might be? I have tried running it a couple of times, but I am getting the same result each time.

[jthompson]

I'd strongly recommend looking at using Google Cloud Shell for this, rather than setting it up on a PC.

 

In this other thread, @paulkerton linked to a great set of instructions for doing exactly that.

 

https://basuta.com/posts/installing-google-apps-manager-gam-on-google-cloud-shell/

 

These instructions are excellent.

 

Not sure what's happened with the Terms of Service thing in your screenshots, but give the Cloud Shell setup a whirl. It could be a proxy or filtering issue in your environment that's tripping it up (dunno).

Edited January 14, 2022 by jthompson

[paulkerton]

There were four reasons I ended up setting up Cloud Shell for GAM.

 

1. Security. Safer in the cloud behind logins and 2SV

2. Speed. Processing speeds are quicker in the cloud than on your desktop (especially if like me you use a Chromebook in your day job)

3. Updates. Updating via Github in a Linux container on a Chromebook was a filtering nightmare. No issue if it's running in the cloud (quicker to download and process the updates too!)

4. Accessibility. Can access it on any browser I can log in on.

[talksr]

Thank you, I will look into this - makes sense, particularly if it is more secure.

[howartp]

I've just set up GAM on Cloud Shell.

 

Can we share the one instance or does each of my team have to setup their own GAM project, instance, API keys etc per that video above?

[paulkerton]

You technically can share one instance but it isn't very secure. You'd be better off with each setting their own up, long term.

[jthompson]

I've just set up GAM on Cloud Shell.

 

Can we share the one instance or does each of my team have to setup their own GAM project, instance, API keys etc per that video above?

 

You can have each team member set up their own instance, but all be using copies of the same API key files. That way they can each launch Cloud Shell and use GAM from their respective Google accounts, but you only need to set up a GAM project the once.

 

Store the API key files securely in a password manager (or encrypted-at-rest in some other way) so that you can add them to future instances of GAM as needed.

[simpsonj]

Thanks for the help getting this setup, one of the many wonders of edugeek!

 

However, could one of you wonderful people help me just a little bit further? I'm really only ever going to use GAM to add additional teachers to Google Classrooms, could someone let me know the syntax for doing this? Command line really isn't my preferred method of working!

[RLR]

Thanks for the help getting this setup, one of the many wonders of edugeek!

 

However, could one of you wonderful people help me just a little bit further? I'm really only ever going to use GAM to add additional teachers to Google Classrooms, could someone let me know the syntax for doing this? Command line really isn't my preferred method of working!

 

You will need to know the course ID to add staff/students to a course.

 

gam course 12345657 add teacher [email protected]

 

or

 

gam course 12345567 add student [email protected]

 

Change the numbers to the course ID. If you're unsure of the course ID which I don't think you can get from the admin console you can run another gam command to find them:

 

gam print courses > C:\gam\CSV\classes.csv

or

gam print courses todrive

 

This will list all courses in your google domain.

 

If you know a teacher that is already part of the classroom you want to update you can just print their courses:

gam print courses teacher [email protected] > C:\gam\CSV\classes.csv

or

gam print courses teacher [email protected] todrive

Edited March 18, 2022 by RLR

[F_admin]

Thanks for the help getting this setup, one of the many wonders of edugeek!

 

However, could one of you wonderful people help me just a little bit further? I'm really only ever going to use GAM to add additional teachers to Google Classrooms, could someone let me know the syntax for doing this? Command line really isn't my preferred method of working!

 

Would recommend bookmarking this site - there's probably better places out there for GAM Syntax but I like it.

 

https://sites.google.com/jis.edu.bn/gam-commands/services/classroom

Edited March 18, 2022 by F_admin