Google Classroom Things that Kind of Work Well

Published: 2023-11-17 3:20 PM

Category: Technology | Tags: teaching, organization, lms, digital instruction, tech, edtech

This is my first year teaching with Google Classroom. It's tough to counteract the kool-aid that is Google stuff in schools, but it's safe to say that I'm definitely not a fan of the platform. It's not an LMS and it doesn't really make things easier to find or complete. It handles document creation and sharing permissions really well, but it isn't anything that could be done earlier with tools like Doctopus (which was incredible, by the way).

Alas, here I am. I come from Canvas, which has issues of its own, but I find myself really missing the flexibility of linking different items together in the LMS. Mainly, if I use a rubric to score something in Classroom, the only way to get that data is to go back to the assignment to find that student's data. There is no overall student page with aggregated data for each assignment shown in a useful way. It's not even possible to scrape because it's all a bunch of javascript instead of useful data.

I think my best discovery so far is the "picture upload" assignment. I can have students do work right into their notebooks, which means fewer copies, and it's all in context with the instruction. They submit a picture to an assignmentin Classroom and I have some nice annotation tools to leave feedback right on the photo. They can look on their paper and make adjustments as necessary rather than waiting for me to stand over their shoulder and point.

In addition to photos for submissions, you can unlink rubrics from the assignment score for qualitative feedback against standards (or other criteria). It took me a while to figure out, but I use this a lot. But, like I mentioned above, you have to prompt students to go back to the assignment to see that feedback. And you can't export it. At all.

...and yeah, that's about it. Other than making feedback a little nicer and being able to annotate student uploads, it's really just a firehose of stuff. The feedback cycle is kind of facilitated, but without better notifications or a way to get back to those cyclical things, it's a one-way stream of information.

Given all that we know about how people learn, it's sad that companies really shoot for the low hanging fruit and let marketing and hype take care of the defecits. It's even more disappointing that so many buy into it wholesale.