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How to automatically create Google Classrooms for an entire school using RosterSync and Capita SIMS

In this guide, I'll look at how to automatically provision all your Google Classrooms for your school based on data held in SIMS (the most common UK MIS).

To carry out the following you need to be a super admin on your Google Apps domain. The end result will be the creation of a Google Classroom for each class in the school, pre-populated with a lead teacher and students.

Step 1 - Create a SIMS report to pull off all students and the classes they take.

You will need a report that contains the student forename, surname, Google Apps email and all the classes they take. So a pre-requisite is to have all your Google usernames on SIMS. The fields I use are shown below:
Upload the resulting spreadsheet and convert to a Google Sheet. 

Step 2 - Create a SIMS report to pull off all teachers and the classes they teach.

You will need a report that contains work email, full name, class name and subject of the class. See my report below:
In excel - use the 'remove duplicate' option in the data section to remove duplicate rows.
Again - upload the resulting spreadsheet and convert to a Google Sheet.

Step 3 - setup Rostersync

Create a new Google Sheet. Add the sheet add-on 'Rostersync'. It will prompt you to define some data sources - the two spreadsheets you have just made. 
Set the student spreadsheet as the 'Enrollment' data source.
Set the teachers spreadsheet as a 'joined source'. When you do this you need to define the connection between the two data sources - in this case the 'Class name' - 
You then need to tell RosterSync which headings in the two spreadsheets should be used to populate various fields. So it should end up looking something like:
The black bars are just where I've blacked out actual names it pulls from my spreadsheets.

Step 4 - the easy bit!

Simply follow the instructions that RosterSync provides - really just clicking the blue button to move onto the next stage. The last stage, where it actually creates the Classes, can take a few minutes depending on how many classes you have - but it does get there eventually. Once  complete, teachers have an option of accepting the class - a button appears that they click on. Once they click the button - the class is live. 

This will only put one teacher into a class. Whoever gets put as the lead teacher needs to add secondary teachers.

So after all that you get:


These are some of my auto generated classes. You can keep class lists up to data by rerunning the student report. 




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