Google Classroom settings
Google Classroom settings
This page controls how Realsmart provisions Google Classroom for the school — whether it runs at all, who inherits a class when its owner leaves, and what happens to classes between school years. It's one of the Google Workspace sub-areas (moved here from the old Sync tab).
Before you start
- You must be a school admin with sync settings permission, with the school selected in the switcher.
- Google Classroom sync relies on the Classroom scopes being authorised for your Google connection — see Google Workspace settings.
Steps
Step 1 — Open Google Classroom settings {#step-1}
In the sidebar, open Google Workspace → Classroom.
Step 2 — Turn on Classroom and reporting {#step-2}
Tick the options you want:
- Provision Google Classroom — the master switch for Classroom provisioning on this school.
- Classroom reporting — enables Classroom reporting.
Step 3 — Choose a fallback classroom owner {#step-3}
Google won't let a course be managed if its owner is a suspended or deleted account — the class effectively breaks. To prevent that, when a member of staff who owns classrooms is suspended or deleted, Realsmart hands their classrooms to a fallback owner first.
Pick the fallback owner from the school's active staff, or leave it as the default — the school's realsmartadmin account. The chosen account must be an active member of staff. It's re-checked as live in Google before any transfer; if it isn't live, Realsmart falls back to realsmartadmin, and if that isn't live either, the suspension is held rather than orphan the class.
Step 4 — Set the between-year transition {#step-4}
Between-year transition decides what happens to Google Classrooms when the provisioning window closes for the summer:
- Archive at end of term (standard) — archive classrooms when term ends.
- Leave classrooms alone — don't touch them.
- Archive at the start of next term — defer archiving until next term begins.
Archiving is reversible — classrooms can be unarchived — so the standard option is safe.
Step 5 — Save {#step-5}
Select Save Classroom settings.
Run a Classroom sync now
When Provision Google Classroom is on, this page also offers Run a Classroom sync now — it queues the exact whole-school Classroom sync the nightly schedule runs, just for your school, on demand. It runs in the background, so you can leave the page; the panel shows progress (queued → running → completed/failed) and links to the runs and logs pages. A short cooldown prevents accidental repeat runs. See also Trigger a manual sync.
Reactivate last year's classrooms
A Manage link opens Last year's classrooms, where you can see each active group's previous Google Classroom and its current status, and reactivate (or archive) any number of them at once — applied directly in Google in the background, even while the school is frozen for the summer. This is the quickest way to bring classrooms back to life for the new year after the between-year archive. See Reactivate last year's classrooms.
Orphaned classrooms
A separate Review link handles classrooms that are already orphaned — where the owner has been suspended or deleted and Google won't let the course be managed until it's fixed. Each is explained with a clear fix. Use it to clean up existing problems; the fallback owner above is what prevents new ones.
During a frozen provisioning window, the two fixes behave differently on purpose. Bringing a suspended owner back is a repair of something already broken, so it goes ahead as normal. Clearing a course to be recreated is new provisioning, so it waits until the window reopens — the decision you confirmed is kept and applied then, and the deferral is recorded in the logs rather than silently dropped. If you need last year's courses back for the new term while the school is still frozen, that's Reactivate last year's classrooms, which ignores the freeze by design.
Troubleshooting: a teacher isn't appearing in their Google Classroom
- Check the group's Classroom tab first. It shows who owns the Classroom (the Main Teacher, taken from the MIS) and flags a missing or inactive owner, plus anyone in the group — teacher or learner — whose Google account hasn't joined the Classroom roster yet. See "Classroom ownership and missing users" in Group membership options.
- Confirm Classroom provisioning is actually on for the school — the Provision Google Classroom master switch in Step 2 above. If it's off, Classroom isn't managed at all for this school.
- Check "Don't sync Classroom teachers." If that switch is on (Google Workspace → Settings → Sync), the sync deliberately leaves Classroom teacher membership alone, so a teacher added or changed in ADAdmin won't be reflected in Classroom until it's turned off. See Google Workspace settings.
- Check the teacher's own Google account synced correctly. If their Google Workspace account has a sync error, they won't reach Classroom either — see A user isn't syncing and Understanding and actioning sync errors.