One of the most powerful elements of Google Classroom is the private comments feature, which works with assignments only.

Comments become conversations with students, allowing for more back and forth discussion than can happen with verbal feedback. Every student can have a voice and communicate their ideas or struggles with a task.

To use private comments, open an assignment in Classroom, and there you will find a space for private comments. Any comments left here will be seen only by you and the individual student.

 

One of the challenges to using private comments is knowing who the comments belong to. Here’s a workaround from Alice Keeler:

• Students start all comments to you with your last name
• You start all comments to students with your initials

 

 

This helps in filtering those comments in Gmail, or searching. It also lets you quickly see who responded last in the roster:

 

You can also use links in private comments to give students more information, share links to other assignments, etc. The trick here is to be sure and use the full URL, including the http:// or https:// part.

 

Using private comments allows us to have a true student-centered classroom, with an awesome method to hear from students!