Google Classroom is not an Learning Management System, a Student Information System, or a gradebook. Classroom is a centralized place for teachers and students to communicate, work on assignments and have discussions.
Although Google Classroom is scheduled for release in September 2014, teachers can request early access. Last week I received an invite to the BETA version of Google Classroom and have been testing it as well as learning as much as I can from other teachers who have been using it. I am excited about the opportunities that Google Classroom might provide for teachers and students. Below is a summary of what I have learned so far.
Features
Announcements
- Simple Announcement feature that allows teachers to leave notes and reminders to all students in the class
- Students can reply to the announcement
- Messaging tool can include links, attachments, and videos.
- Students can respond and also communicate with each other
- If you have students who are very shy in class, Classroom enables them to speak their mind and voice out their questions online
Assignments
- The purpose of classroom is to make distributing assignments to students easier
- Can include due date and time
- Link, video, or attachment
- Dashboard shows pending assignments
- Students receive email notifications for all announcements and assignments
- Teachers can send assignment as view only, edit, or make a copy for each student
- It automatically creates a Drive folder for each assignment and students
- Students can see what's due on their assignments page.
Grades
- Can add comment and feedback through Classroom
- After grading, teacher can Return Assignment for student review or revision
- Students can ask questions and respond to teacher feedback
- Can download CSV of grades
- Can add comments and feedback within the document or through Classroom
Adding Students
Can add students via email or
Students can add join the class with a code teachers give them
Strengths
- Helps teachers become more efficient in their workflows
- Helps students become more organized with their assignments and projects
- Students can easily keep track of their deadlines and submit their work easily
- Helps teachers effectively manage document sharing and providing feedback to students
- Integrates Gmail, Google Docs and Drive, communication and organization becomes very easy.
- Helps teachers communicate with students
- Streamline the sharing of documents to your students
- Streamline the receipt of work from your students
- Helps teachers provide personal, timely feedback to individual students
- Teacher can also see who have completed the assignment and who hasn’t within the Classroom
- All feedbacks can be seen in a single view, allowing teachers to easily gauge the learning of the student in return makes grading faster.
- Classroom is also free of ads
- Google won't use your content or student data for advertising purposes.
- Students can switch easily between classes
- Has student dashboard with multi-class view
Challenges:
- Limited assignment options (points, rubric, no due date, complete/incomplete)
- Teachers do not have access to student work until it is submitted (turned in); however, students can manually share files if desired
- Does not Integrate with Google Calendar, Sites, or Blogger
- Not ideal for large projects (sharing multiple docs and templates with varied sharing rights)
- All student comments are put in a single continuous line with no organization, but it should be improved come release date.
- Does not allow students from multiple domains or allow for multiple teachers
Not all of the details are out there yet as Google is still making changes before making Classroom available to everyone in the fall.
Additional Information:
Classroom will require the Chrome browser to run
Teacher and students must be in the same domain
Google Classroom creates a folder structure in the students’ drive account with a Classroom Folder and Individual class folders within
Access to Classroom:
If you are interested in signing up, please do so here: https://classroom.google.com/signup
If you are an APS teacher and would like to join a class to Google Classroom for a student’s view, email me at jrsloan@aps.k12.co.us and I will share the login information.
Additional Resources:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your feedback.