WAIT! Don't delete that Classroom! Archive it! UPDATED: May 2019

UPDATED: May 2019! New screenshots and updated information!

The end of the school is almost here! But before you leave your classroom to enjoy the summer fun, there are few things you need to do. One of them is to clean up your Google Classroom dashboard. But, WAIT! Don't do it! Don't you even think about deleting those Classrooms! There's a better way! Follow these 3 steps to clean up your Classrooms and your dashboard before summer begins!

Deleting your Classrooms at the end of the year is not the answer to cleaning out your Google Classroom dashboard. No, no, no, my friend. The solution is to ARCHIVE! One of the most convenient and efficient tools in Classroom when teaching from year-to-year or semester-to-semester is the REUSE POST feature. You can learn more about reuse post here. But basically it allows the teacher to use any post (announcement, assignment, etc.) used in previous Classrooms over and over again. It creates a copy of a previous post, along with title, instructions, and attachments. All you have to do is add a due date/time, attach a topic, and maybe adjust the attachment permission settings and you're all set!

However, the only way to access previous posts from other Classrooms is if you keep those Classrooms in tact. Which means you shouldn't delete them! But you probably don't want those old Classrooms cluttering up your dashboard. So the best way to clean it up while also keeping those old Classrooms is to archive them!

Follow these 3 steps to clean up your Classrooms and your dashboard before summer begins!

1. RENAME YOUR CLASSROOM

You may not have thought about this at the beginning of the school year, but it's important to name your classrooms with the quarter, semester, or year that it belongs to. You'll want to do this so that next year when you start using the Reuse Post feature, it will be easier to tell which Classroom you want to reuse posts from. And as you continue to do this from year to year, it keeps things a lot more organized! You can either include this information in the Class name or the Section. To rename your Classroom click on the "3 dots" and choose Edit. This will allow you to change the class name, section, subject, and room.

2. REMOVE STUDENTS FROM YOUR CLASSROOM

This is optional, but most teachers that I work with like the idea of removing their students from the Classroom at the end of the year because it prevents them from accessing class content, assignments, and resources next year and it prevents them from potentially sharing it with incoming students as well. Only remove your students once you've finished all assignments and you've collected and/or exported all the grades. When you remove your students you will lose their comments and grades inside the Classroom. However, you and the students will still have access to their files in Google Drive.

To remove students from your Classroom, go to the PEOPLE tab, click the very top checkbox in the Students section to select all of your students at once. Then click on the ACTIONS button and choose Remove. You can also follow the help guide here.

 3. ARCHIVE THE CLASSROOM

The last step is to archive your finished Classrooms. Choosing Archive will do two things:

1. Archiving will move the Classroom to an Archived Classes section. You can find this in the side menu on the web version of Google Classroom (this is still not currently available in the mobile apps).
2. Archived Classrooms will essentially be "deactivated" meaning that no changes can be made to it. It basically becomes a view only Classroom.

You can archive a Classroom by clicking the "3 dots" in the dashboard and choosing Archive. You can learn more about Archive in this help article.

The major benefit of archiving your Classrooms is that when you're ready to start the new school year, you'll have access to all of the posts you created from the previous year and this will become a huge time saver for you!

Have a great summer!