Turn a Google Doc into a lesson

Of everything a teacher keeps, Google Docs are the best raw material. No slide that says only "Causes" with a picture of a cannon, no scan to squint at. Your reading notes, your unit overview, your handout for the week all come out of Docs as clean running text. The wrinkle is that most teacher documents are written for the teacher, and ClassSense has to turn them into something a thirteen-year-old can work through alone.

Getting the file out of Google

There is no link import and no Google sign-in. ClassSense takes PDF, DOCX and PPTX, so the route is:

1. In the Doc, choose File, Download, Microsoft Word (.docx).
2. Open the downloaded file once and scan it. Is anything missing?
3. In ClassSense, open your course, go to Materials, and choose the file.

You can download a PDF instead and it will be accepted, but the Word file keeps something the PDF flattens: your headings.

Real headings, not big bold text

When ClassSense reads a Word file it looks for heading styles to find where one section ends and the next begins. If you made your headings by selecting a line and making it bold and 16 point, the file looks structured to a human and reads as one long block to the software. Fix it in the Doc with the styles menu in the toolbar: set section titles to Heading 1 and sub-parts to Heading 2. It takes a couple of minutes and it improves how the document gets split into skills.

Tables are fine

A lot of teachers keep their plans in a table: a column for the objective, one for the activity, one for the vocabulary. The text in each cell is read, in order, and a cell that spans several columns is read once rather than repeated. So a table-style daily plan is usable, as long as the cells hold actual content and not just labels.

What does not come across

• Text inside drawings and text boxes. Keep important wording in normal paragraphs.
• Pictures and charts. A graph pasted from Sheets is an image. Add a sentence saying what it shows.
• Headers, footers and footnotes. Do not count on them being read.
• Comments and unresolved suggestions. Accept or reject your suggestions before you download, so the file holds the version you mean.
• What a link points to. The link text is read. The video it opens is not.

From teacher voice to student lesson

Your Doc does not have to be written to students. A page of your own notes on the causes of the Dust Bowl, with dates, a couple of names and a line about why students get the Great Plains wrong, is enough. ClassSense identifies the skills in it and builds each pack with an explanation at three depths, worked examples and the named misconceptions, then practice questions with hints. Your wording is source material, not the finished text. Do not expect a paragraph of yours to appear unchanged in a pack, and do read what comes back.

Where it does not fit

If the thing you want is for students to read your Doc as written, share the Doc; that already works. ClassSense is for the practice and tracking around it. Very long documents should be split into parts, one upload each, because one upload becomes at most 10 skill packs. And a Doc full of a single teacher's shorthand ("do the thing from last Tuesday") gives the software nothing to build from. The guide to checking generated lessons is worth keeping open for the first one you publish.

Common questions