Google Classroom

I think the public educational IT system should not be outsourced to the private sector, where schools completely lose control of the data and depend more or less on the good will of the company. University courses should not be organized by Facebook and pupils should not be forced to use IT systems of non-trustworthy companies like Google, which earn money by profiling their customers. Maybe my view is too German, but I think of education as an sovereign function of the state, where everything (theoretically) can be controlled by the citizens (yes, I know that this is some kind of optimistic). We should teach kids to think critical about centralization of data and knowledge and show them how to manage their digital lives with free and open tools which respect the users rights.

Senior at the International Academy here (a public high school in Michigan). One of my classes uses Google Classroom.<p>I think that Google truly took a &quot;Google Plus&quot; look and morphed that into a website for teachers. I love how it has a clean and easy to use UI. The assignments are on a side bar, announcements are clearly displayed in a &quot;stream&quot;. You can easily post a message to your class, and you have access to everyone&#x27;s email (making it easy to communicate).<p>Teachers in my school have used three platforms. Moodle, Google Classroom, and Edmodo. Quite frankly, I have come to like Edmodo much more. They&#x27;re identical to Facebook, but the layout is so much better than the alternatives (in my preference). Edmodo has truly thought everything out.

Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View has switched over to this, we love it. The amount of parent&#x2F;student&#x2F;teacher collaboration and transparency is unparalleled.<p>BTW: they&#x27;re not using Chrome Books, but some kind of fancy HP Android tablets.

If you are not a teacher or student actively using Google Classroom, you should pay attention to the comments from teachers and students here. Or go talk to a local teacher for their impression.<p>I&#x27;ve been doing that and the general response is overwhelmingly positive. Others have already stated why. I would like to amplify those sentiments:<p>+ Many alternative solutions on the market are generally considered to be sub-par, such as Moodle, Blackboard, etc. (I personally love the open source concept behind Moodle and have high hopes for them, but their implementation is oudated; fortunately, they know this and are working on it.)<p>+ Home-grown solutions are generally very poor for all kinds of reasons, including inability to find technical talent, bureaucracy and mismanagement, lack of budget, lack of project management, etc.<p>+ Google has a strong positive brand with teachers. While privacy concerns are growing, the overall community doesn&#x27;t have the same stigma with Google that many readers of HN have. Google Apps for Education (GAFE) already had a decent footprint within schools and Google Classroom is piggybacking off of that penetration.<p>With that said, concerns about privacy, being operated by a separate for-profit, and comprehensiveness of features are great points and present ample opportunities for aspiring competitors. In some ways, Google Classroom just stepped up the game. If this causes anyone to release even better software for teachers and students, that&#x27;s a great thing for teachers and students.

If this is a Blackboard competitor, that&#x27;s good news. Google definitely has the bankroll and patent magazine to go toe-to-toe with them, which could open up a lot of options in the higher education space.

If I was a teacher, there&#x27;s no way I would use this... privacy concerns aside, there&#x27;s nothing to suggest that Google won&#x27;t suddenly shut it down in two or three years when whoever is maintaining it gets bored of it, like Google has with so many other projects.

I have a younger brother in high school that has to use Google Classroom&#x2F;Chromebooks&#x2F;Google whatnot. Ask him anything through me.<p>What I&#x27;ve heard so far:<p>- It sometimes acts weirdly<p>- When it emails an assignment, the full text of the assignment is put in the title, resulting in comically massive titles.<p>- Using it at the same time as a personal gmail account is strange&#x2F;not fun<p>- It doesn&#x27;t have as many features as Edmodo (what the school was using before)

I got into the demo over the summer, and I was pretty underwhelmed. They list the features on the front page there, and that&#x27;s exactly what they have. So in other words, you can manage a feed of assignments (&quot;X is due on Tuesday&quot;, &quot;Here is a link to a video!&quot;) and some very simplistic google docs control. I really expected something on the level of Canvas or Moodle, but it&#x27;s clearly just a few convenience features for running GAfE.

As much as I would love for educational institutions (and government in general) to fund open source projects to solve their needs, that doesn&#x27;t seem very realistic right now. Maybe when startup culture becomes the norm. The people who make decisions about technology purchases in education are, in my experience, non-technical and highly risk averse. They pay absurd prices for outdated software. There is little pressure to create a better product. I have to use Moodle for my teaching, and I&#x27;m sure anything Google creates will be far superior. This was at the top of my startup ideas list, but I&#x27;m glad someone is working on it.

I never quite understood why everybody thinks storage should be in the local server and cannot be provided by a private company.<p>IMHO, storage is a commodity.<p>Would you argue that schools need their own power generators because otherwise they&#x27;ll be submitted to private companies? Should schools also have their own satellites and internet connections?<p>If the data is sensitive why not just encrypting it when is stored the same way we do when we need to transmit something over the wire?<p>Now, from the school POV I think if they go for a private solution they should demand open standards (avoid being locked in) and appropriate SLAs.

My university has GApps, and also it has a longstanding Moodle platform. Moodle is awful. It&#x27;s much better than it used to be, but it&#x27;s still clunky and ugly. If this is Google&#x27;s solution, I&#x27;d like to see it take off. It&#x27;d be easy to integrate and switch from Moodle.

Damn it Google. Over the summer I approached the government of my country to build a simple learning management system since they were about to start using tablets at the secondary schools here. Nothing has been finalised yet but I have a working model.<p>If they go with what I am working on for them they would be able to run analytics across all secondary schools and they would own their data.

If you want to use open source software for this, Google has released Course Builder[1] a while back. Caveat: It uses App Engine, as far as I know.<p>[1] <a href="https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;course-builder&#x2F;</a>

Personally I&#x27;d love to have this as a part of my normal Google Apps. It would be a neat way to create tutorials and documentation for my teammates.

Does it require Google Account for each student?<p>What if student doesn&#x27;t want account, and doesn&#x27;t agree with Google Terms of Service?

10 years ago, people would have welcomed this. Today, the brand Google is a red flag for any school that cares about their reputation and any parent who cares about their child&#x27;s privacy.<p>It&#x27;s utterly unsellable unless Google follows the old &quot;evil&quot; Microsoft route and simply bribes schools. And even that won&#x27;t be enough to counter the shit storm that will hit any school that delivers the privacy of it&#x27;s students into the hands of Google.<p>(The link sends me to the Dutch version of this. Google is seriously tone deaf it they think they can still sell this here.)

What I dislike about Google Classroom is students need institution email address for logging in.

Usually it goes like this:<p>In-house solutions -&gt; Centralized commercial offering -&gt; Open source installed on premises

Well, I can&#x27;t even take it seriously, because I fully suspect that 3 to 5 years down the road Google loses interest in the product and decides to drop it. Then all the investment the schools and teachers have made is lost.<p>If Google didn&#x27;t have a habit of killing their own products I&#x27;d maybe take the time to actually think about their products.

A good way to push the chromebook

How does this get around the US FERPA and COPPA regulations?

this looks awesome.

play

Classroom is something that competes directly with Hapara&#x27;s [1] Teacher Dashboard product that they charge at $4&#x2F;student<p>[1] hapara.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;#teacher-dashboard

Why tie yourself to the current state of technology (keyboard, pc, printer), which may be defunct in 8-15 years?<p>Let the kids learn to use computers but limit it specifically to that. In the classroom emphasis should be on teaching the subject (and let them use pencil, pen and paper).<p>And I&#x27;m appalled that public schools now teach computer skills but have abandoned cursive writing.