Google Classroom: is there a way to forcibly add students to a custom classroom?

[Starbug1]

We use Wonde to sync classes, but is there a way for a teacher to create a custom Google Classroom, e.g. for an entire yeargroup, or for students who attend a particular club/activity, to forcibly add students to their own custom group?

 

At present, they can only add students in a way that the student doesn't have to accept the invitation, but they want the students to be forcibly added, without the student having to accept (or being able to decline) the invitation.

 

I found this https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-join-a-Google-classroom-without-the-code post which suggested that "Schools using Google Workspace for Education can auto-enroll students via their roster", but I can't find that option; am I right in thinking this may require "Google Workspace for Eduction Plus" or "Standard", which is the paid version, and not the "Fundamentals" option, which is the free one we have.

 

I understand this could be done with GAM, but we're reluctant to go down that road.

Many thanks in advance if anyone can help answer this.

[TCheesemanDET]

Hi Starbut1,

 

Please correct me if I am wrong but I believe the rooster import you mentioned is more designed at American MIS, they basically do the same that Wonde does for you.

 

If you are the administrator of your Google Tenant then there are a couple of ways I would action this.

 

First way is to use a free tool like https://educ.io/classes/. You'll need to give it permission to access and action items on your behalf. As a super admin you will be able to search across all your tenant classrooms, or filter by teachers to find their classrooms (same for students). You can then remove the class you don't want to action anything on from the list. You can then go t add (force) the students to be members of the class or invite the students by pasting their emails in, you can bulk paste too.

 

Second way is GAM. At first GAM seems... overwhelming but once you really start to use it, you'll wonder why you didn't use it in the first place. You just need to find the classroom ID, then your code would be something like

 

 gam course (the id) add student [email protected]

 

I would then put this into a spread sheet, concatenate the students emails, copy all the lines of code, dump into GAM and watch the magic happen.

 

The final way is to leveage your admin account with Classroom. You should be able to go to Classroom, use the Admin Tools to find the class, and temporarily gain access to the new classroom. You will still be inviting the students but then all they have to do is accept.

 

I understand the reluctance to use, however I regret not using it earlier in my Google Management. https://sites.google.com/view/gam--commands/home is fantastic source for getting codes.

 

I hope this helps.

 

-Tom

 

 

[synaesthesia]

Colour me intrigued - that's the first time educ.io has been mentioned here yet looks extremely useful. Naturally I'm very wary though - has anyone else looked into this?

[jd_educ]

Hi,

 

I write / maintain those tools - and can assure you that everything is handled within your browser. There is no server-side component to the website, so everything you do is just your browser talking directly to the Google APIs. It's 'private' by default - and all the code is on Github if you would like to have a look! Always very happy to answer specific questions though!

 

Tom (replied earlier) also uses (at DET) a spreadsheet tool that we have that does all the creation and maintenance of our classrooms from our MIS data (it currently works with Arbor and iSAMS / Ed:Gen) - but we use the web tool for any ad-hoc changes as required!

 

Yours,

 

JD

[edmokeski]

Have to second the utility of GAM.  Not something you want to put into teachers' hands, but as Google Admin it is such an amazing tool.  This would be pretty easy to achieve if you have the ID of the class, as Tom said, by just feeding a CSV of student e-mails in and GAM will sign them up to the class whether they like it or not.  I use it for exceptional, ad hoc changes that don't mesh w/ our sync, or for tweaking courses that sit entirely outside of the sync.

New Visions Cloud Lab used to have a tool that would sync groups from a spreadsheet, too, but I think it's long deprecated, now.

[synaesthesia]

I use GAM - out of necessisity of course, in an ideal world it really shouldn't be because it's frankly a ludicrous way of managing anything. It's 2026 and why we are being strongarmed into sticking to the 80s unix method of getting things done when everything else is made to look so pretty and intuitive is absolutely beyond me. Yes it's easier now with "AI" supposedly helping, but even Google's own AI can't work GAM without help - that speaks volumes.

And I also say this after having used Edusync from Wonde before to manage this, but the cost soon adds up. I've certainly pondered using the APIs to knock something up that Just Works, but I lack the time, patience and knowledge!

If it was any other week I'd probably be digging into that code from github - thank you, I did see all that, but it mostly surprised me as it appears to have been around a while but literally zero mentions pretty much anywhere. If anyone does have the time, please feed back because this could potentially be a massive help for many schools forced to use GAM (or more specifically if anything like me, partial memory & own documentation, trying to piece together the right syntax from the gatekeeping muppets who make their documentation, trying to figure out if Gemini is confusing GCDS with a Hasbro Optimus Prime toy from 1985 or, as is usually the case, some human has had the same problem and provided the exact syntax on this very forum

I suspect the majority of difficulty is on larger tenants and certainly when you have multiple domains - most of the commands are generally OK, but the trouble comes with filtering it down. Exacerbated by Google's own wayward design choices such as classrooms being tenant level, groups could be just about anywhere, users depending on your own OU, shared drives likewise could be anywhere...

 

Edited July 13 by synaesthesia

[jthompson]

16 hours ago, synaesthesia said:

It's 2026 and why we are being strongarmed into sticking to the 80s unix method of getting things done when everything else is made to look so pretty and intuitive is absolutely beyond me.

 

I would love for Google to have made a first-party CLI tool along the lines of GAM. Preferably in PowerShell. Hopefully some nice Googler somewhere will spend their 20% time doing just that and then baking it into Cloud Shell by default.

 

Google Classroom should be lauded for being (and remaining) so education-focused, but there are some glaring omissions in its UI that really make me wonder exactly how Google think a school operates.

[synaesthesia]

5 minutes ago, jthompson said:

 

I would love for Google to have made a first-party CLI tool along the lines of GAM. Preferably in PowerShell. Hopefully some nice Googler somewhere will spend their 20% time doing just that and then baking it into Cloud Shell by default.

 

Google Classroom should be lauded for being (and remaining) so education-focused, but there are some glaring omissions in its UI that really make me wonder exactly how Google think a school operates.

Is it more focussed towards the US market? I'm rather in the dark about how it works over there but the wording on some parts makes me think it's probably more "k-12" then primary & secondary and doesn't always translate perfectly. 

Worth getting any ideas together and putting them to the UK edu specialists though, they are surprisingly receptive in that area (Fiona Law I think is the main contact for us)

[mavhc]

They did have a new one, and fired the guy who wrote it https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justin-poehnelt_two-months-ago-i-was-fired-by-google-for-share-7475248041252368385-gnOe/

 

Apparently there's an official new one coming soon

[synaesthesia]

Oh wow. I've little doubt there's more to it, but it's always horrible when something so positive turns into a political mud slinging match, leaving us the poor users in the dark ages.

[jthompson]

1 hour ago, mavhc said:

They did have a new one, and fired the guy who wrote it https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justin-poehnelt_two-months-ago-i-was-fired-by-google-for-share-7475248041252368385-gnOe/

 

Apparently there's an official new one coming soon

This is fascinating. That thread includes a link to an amazing blog post that they wrote about adapting a CLI to cater for use AI agents - https://justin.poehnelt.com/posts/rewrite-your-cli-for-ai-agents/?trk=public_post_comment-text

I suspect that's the direction Google want to take and so that's one way for my job to evaporate. 😐

 

Off-topic, sorry.

[fiza]

Just wanted to say that we have worked with @jd_educ for a number of years now and I can confirm that the tools he has created are amazing.  We use his Spreadsheet tool for the creation and maintenance of all our Google classrooms.