Using comment banks in Google Classroom to save time

Google Classroom has been a huge help at times like this and with the built-in comment bank you can save even more time when marking and grading your student’s work. Comment banks are incredibly useful for a number of different reasons, and having reusable comments will help you give feedback faster.

Here are some examples of feedback you can reuse and store in the comment banks.

• Save time leaving short feedback about the general content of the work
• Leave feedback that reminds students of lesson content discussed in class
• Leave links to external resources related to the subject
• Remind students about common mistakes
• Reference a lesson material shared in earlier lessons

It’s all about working smarter and Google Classroom certainly does a great job at allowing us to do so! So where do I find these comments bank you may be asking yourself?

Watch the video at the bottom of this page or continue for a detailed step by step overview.

Create an Assignment in Google Classroom

To start using the comment banks in Google Classroom you first have to assign work to your students. Click the Classwork page at the top and assign your students work as you would otherwise.

After assigning the work, you can see all submitted tasks by clicking on the assignment in the classwork page. Open the document you want to give feedback on by clicking on the file. See who has handed in the work, who has been assigned work, and has returned work.

Once you’re on this page you can select a student’s work and open this by clicking on it.

Start giving feedback in Google Classroom

This will open up an extra side panel where you can leave comments and grade work.

Select the second icon which will bring up the comment window. This is where you can start adding comments to your comment bank and re-use these on all other assignments to give feedback.

Adding comments to the Comment bank

If you already have comments left on the document, you can add these to your comment bank by clicking on the three dots and selecting ‘Add to comment bank’.

Once you’ve added comments to your comment bank, it’s very easy to start using these in your future assignments. You can either select them from the bank on the right hand side and copy them in, or select the part of the text you’d like to comment on.

Now, instead of manually typing out the comment type ‘#’. This will bring up the different comments already in your comment bank and speed up your workflow of adding comments into your document.

Watch the video here

To save even more time when marking and grading work. Try using a rubric. Rubrics are great to give your students a scaffolding for the lesson, overview of how they will be graded, and you as a teachers get to select the criteria and save time marking their work.