Google Classroom - Review 2022 - Gagliano Thise1989

What if a learning management system (or LMS) were less concerned with the management aspect of online learning and more focused on integrating tools instructors already employ? This is the idea behind Google Classroom, which collects some of the company's most popular web services into a stripped-down LMS that educators can use on the fly to deliver some traditional didactics outside the classroom.

To classify Google Classroom as an LMS stretches the definition of the term. Google Classroom doesn't accept a grade volume, well-defined roles, or advanced reporting. Nor does it back up Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), through which administrators might connect Classroom to their existing LMS or Student Data Systems (SIS). Rather, Google Classroom leverages the ubiquity of K Suite for Didactics to offer a simple, online complement to in-person classes. Students and educators already share and annotate Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, present work using Google Slides, and meet remotely via Google Hangouts. A growing number of students, peculiarly at a K-12 level, work from chromebooks, and some rely on Android tablets and smartphones. Google Classroom provides an piece of cake style for educators who are already invested in the Google ecosystem to experiment with online learning.

If your schoolhouse already subscribes to G Suite for Instruction, Google Classroom requires no additional payment—it comes bundled with the Suite. Educators tin fifty-fifty configure Google Classroom using personal G Suite accounts. Google Classroom aligns with the complimentary offerings of Schoology and Edmodo, both of which can be used by individual instructors or scaled up by administrators to support unabridged school districts. While Google Classroom is remarkably like shooting fish in a barrel to utilize, it does have limitations. For example, Google Classroom lacks Schoology'south interoperability (namely the aforementioned LTI support) and Edmodo's educational marketplace.

Google Classroom Basics

While Google Classroom is designed to piece of work with K Suite for Teaching, if you have a @gmail.com address, you can sign up for Google Classroom, provided you intend to just invite other users with @gmail.com addresses. When it comes to Grand Suite for Education, administrators can cull whether to restrict access to Google Apps to those inside their own domain.

Google offers an API to support tertiary-party integrations with Classroom. For example, developers accept created several tools (such as rosterSync) through which educators and administrators may sync class rosters using a CSV file. While a manual sync doesn't lucifer the seamless interoperation of a more avant-garde LMS, I don't regard this omission as a deal breaker.

Google Classroom serves a different niche. If your institution supports Blackboard Learn, you're probably already using Blackboard. Educators who opt into Google Classroom practice so because of its simplicity, which is cardinal to its appeal. You don't need an It department to use it, and you only have to employ information technology to the extent that it improves your in-person classes.

This raises a key indicate about Google Classroom. It's a platform designed to back up, not supercede, in-person classes. When yous sign into Classroom, you get in in the class stream, which echoes the dashboards and activity feeds of other LMSes. From the stream, you tin admission assignments and posts or add a class declaration, a question, or an assignment. That's about it.

The aforementioned minimal approach applies to customization. Whereas a traditional LMS allows you to add together and rearrange the course page, Google Classroom only permits educators to customize the theme (or upload a photo) and to add relevant grade details, such as the meeting infinite, a syllabus, and a short description. Otherwise, design and layout is prescriptive. You tin't do much to change it. This lack of flexibility may frustrate some instructors, merely it may well entice others who may find oppressive the corporeality of customization possible (and often required) in setting up a form in a more traditional LMS.

Thanks to the platform'southward responsive design, students and educators can access Google Classroom on any device—desktops, smartphones, tablets, or chromebooks—using the same credentials they utilise for G Suite for Eduction. Google also offers iOS apps and Android apps for the service.

Getting Started

Using Google Classroom requires about five minutes of work up front end. Instructors tin can use the Most pane to customize the course clarification or add form materials, such every bit links and syllabi. Calculation students is as piece of cake as typing names or e-mail addresses in the Students pane. Google auto-populates details using contacts; withal, those contacts will need email addresses from the same domain if you've chosen to restrict registration in this fashion.

Instructors can control the level of student participation, simply merely to a degree. For example, if I want to utilise Google Classroom to communicate class updates and post assignments, I might stipulate that only teachers can mail and comment, whereas if I want students to annotate and discuss materials, I might let them mail and comment. The hitch is that although Google Classroom allows me to invite co-teachers to a class, the platform doesn't support alternative roles for, say, teaching assistants or grade mentors. I would welcome finer-grain permissions (more on this below).

Once you've customized your class clarification, uploaded a syllabus, and invited students, your grade is effectively online. From the stream, you can mouse over a Plus (+) icon to admission the platform'south core features: Reuse Post, Create Question, Create Assignment, and Create Declaration. The order here seems counterintuitive, however. I wouldn't reuse a post until I created one, and chances are I would begin with some kind of welcome announcement rather than a question.

Announcements, Assignments, and Questions

Information technology's all-time to think of Announcements as glorified tweets. There'southward no rich-text formatting, so you lot'll want to keep them brief. That said, y'all can attach links, YouTube clips, or documents from a desktop or a Google Bulldoze account. For instance, while I uploaded my syllabus in the About pane, I besides attached information technology to my kickoff Declaration—in case students didn't read beyond the class stream.

Instructors can as well tag Announcements with Topics. I correlated my Topics with the units from my syllabus. Assignments, meanwhile, include a field for a question, besides as a second field for instructions. The key difference is that you lot can add a due appointment to Assignments.

The Questions feature is a peachy mode to encourage students to appoint with class material before they come to class. In fact, you can assign a question to the course or a specific (perhaps struggling) student. By default, Google Classroom supports two types of questions: short answer and multiple selection. This is adequately limited for an LMS. For example, Blackboard offers almost two dozen question types, including hot spots, matching, ordering, either/or, and fill in the blanks. Google Classroom's argent bullet is its ability to interoperate with Google Forms to support formative assessments. In fact, many educators have used Forms to create self-grading, multiple-choice assessments, as described in this mail service.

Any Proclamation, Assignment, or Question can be posted immediately, saved as a draft, or scheduled for later posting. This means that y'all could, theoretically, work ahead once you formalize your syllabus. Moreover, any detail you create tin can exist repurposed in other classes or sections of a course.

Process and Grades

It'southward helpful to pause here and imagine ii concrete utilise cases that might entice a prospective Google Classroom teacher. Commencement, imagine that I desire students to employ some logical strategies they learned in class. In the past, I've distributed an anonymous essay and asked students to identify logical fallacies and to rewrite sentences. Previously, I used Google Docs, though it tin become a project management nightmare one time dozens of students begin submitting rewrites. With Google Classroom, I can share the aforementioned Google Md and allow students to identify logical fallacies (via Comments) and adhere revised Google documents without leaving the Assignment. If I want, I can likewise configure the assignment to allow students to upload whatever doc from their own Google Drive.

Alternatively, perhaps I want students to watch some media and write a response that identifies its logical fallacies. With Questions, I can create a short-reply response with a link directly to the media (on YouTube), and I tin can ask students to identify at least one fallacy that a peer hasn't yet identified. This exercise compels students to not just critically engage media, simply also to read one another'due south responses. Students aren't only preparing for class by applying what they've learned. They're likewise situating their claims in the context of a learning community.

At some point, you will need to grade that piece of work, and when that time comes, Google Classroom simplifies the process—perchance to a fault. Instructors can access work that needs to be graded from multiple entry points. They can access anything with a due date from the course calendar or click on items marked "Done" in the form stream. Why Google marks items "Washed" as opposed to "Submitted" I cannot say. Given that students can resubmit work—ideal for multipart editing assignments—"Done" seems like a misnomer.

While Google Classroom lacks a course book, it does permit instructors to share qualitative and quantitative feedback with students. Instructors tin can view a Discussion document or a PowerPoint presentation, comment on a Google Dr., Sheet, or Slide, attach a numerical score, and add together a private comment to the student. All graded materials can be exported as CSVs or Google Sheets, which the instructor can manually load into an LMS or SIS.

G Suite for Didactics

Given that I don't run across Google Classroom as an LMS replacement, I don't expect it to duplicate all the feature of an LMS. Google Classroom's value is its relationship to G Suite for Teaching, which is already ubiquitous in both K-12 and higher education. While Classroom makes excellent employ of the company's productivity apps, it would benefit from tighter integration with its communication tools.

Imagine, for instance, that a student botches an consignment, and, rather than declining them, I want to take a conversation well-nigh where they went incorrect. While Google Classroom allows me to e-mail the student from the grading pane, imagine if I could initiate a Google Hangout to work through questions. While Google Calendar appointment slots let educators to schedule web meetings using Google Hangouts, I would beloved to meet Hangouts foregrounded throughout Classroom. This would make it easier for me to strategize with co-teachers or answer logistical questions from students. Chat integration would require controls, which is all the same another argument for more extensive roles with effectively-grain permissions.

The Takeaway

Google Classroom is no Blackboard-killer, nor does it aspire to be one. While educators can utilise it to share materials, make announcements, and simplify the collection and evaluation of pupil work, Google Classroom lacks the customizability of Moodle, the analytics of D2L Brightspace, the ecommerce of Instructure Canvass, and the third-party resource of Blackboard.

Realistically, Classroom competes more directly with social-learning upstarts like Edmodo and Editors' Choice Schoology, though even those platforms boast granular roles (Schoology) and educational app stores (Edmodo).

Google Classroom is, rather, a front-stop interface for G Suite for Didactics. It's a platform that enables instructors to motion some of their traditional classroom work to the internet, rather than moving unabridged classes online. That may exist plenty for many educators, especially those who work at schools wary of technological adventurism (or perhaps unable to support it). For those educators, Google Classroom lowers the technical, economic, and institutional barriers to experimenting with online teaching.