For the first time, Google has designed a product for a specific industry. Fortunately for educators, that product is for them! Google Classroom is a brand new tool designed to help ease the burden of sharing and receiving assignments from students.
The excitement surrounding classroom has reached a fever pitch; teachers are ecstatic and can't wait to get their hands on classroom. The excitement may be contributing to inflated expectations, however. Classroom is not a complete classroom solution; it must be used alongside perennial favorites such as Edmodo, Hapara Teacher Dashboard, Moodle, etc.
Google Classroom Will:
- Help you communicate with your students.
- Streamline the sharing of documents to your students.
- Streamline the receipt of work from your students.
- Help you provide personal, timely feedback to individual students.
- Serve as a classroom hub
- Help students manage class resources.
- Replace/become your gradebook.
- Replace your existing learning management system.
- Eliminate the need to use Google Drive directly.
- Integrate with Google Sites, or Blogger.
- Have many assignment options (points, rubric, no due date, complete/incomplete)
Google Classroom is expected to launch in September of 2014. You can request access here.
Don't have access, but eager to see what classroom has to offer? Check out this sneak peak of Google Classroom including instructions on how to setup and manage your first class!
This could turn out to be a great solution for IT Based educational system.
ReplyDeleteSo basically Google Classroom is just a user friendly GUI for Doctopus. I say that having read Andrew Stillman's analysis of it that you posted on G+. And as much as I'd like to agree with him and the direction he sees for Doctopus, most teachers just want the ease of the Google Classroom workflow, and really aren't interested in the extensibility.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree. Initially, I thought that Classroom would be very minimalistic, but I have been very pleased so far. I would really like to see calendar and Google Sites integration. That would make it a slam dunk!
DeleteYes, certainly. It will be even better when we can add students from multiple domains.
ReplyDeleteAre there some who've already received their early access to Google Classroom? I signed up, but haven't been contacted yet. Just wondering what experience others have had?
ReplyDeleteYes, invitations are slowly being released. Classroom will be public in September. During the Demo period, it's hard to share classroom with others as everyone must be a member of the same Google Apps domain.
DeleteI have been waiting for several days now and still no access. It will be great once I could gain access so that I can get started with Classroom.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have the "Make copy for each student" option in the assignment share? Is this coming or do we have to get it "turned on" at the board end?
ReplyDeleteThe "make a copy" option is ONLY available for Google Drive resources (docs, sheets, presentations, etc). You will not see it for PDF files, Word Docs, etc.
DeleteI can't access the "make a copy" option either. I am trying to use it with a google doc and it still will not give me the option. Suggestions, anyone??
ReplyDelete