Google Classroom- Six Week Progress Report

As our students receive their week-six interim report cards, I think it's also time to assess my first six weeks with Google Classroom.

Achievement- Satisfactory

Strengths

• Classroom is a much nicer user interface than Google Drive previously provided.
• The real-time nature of Classroom's Stream provides a valuable way to share learning goals with attached media and documents.
• This is particularly useful for teachers who are in a one-to-one device environment, as well as for students who are absent on a particular day.
• The Assignment functionality within Stream makes giving and receiving assignments of all
  types of media easy, as well as makes checking progress a one click task.
• The "Students" page allows for easy email communication between the teacher and students.
• The "About" page allows for easy setup of course material for which students need regular access.
• The ability to share Announcements and Assignments with multiple "Classrooms" improves workflow and cuts down on copying.
• The user interface makes it easy for students to find what they are suppose to be looking for. There are no distractions, just the work and information a teacher wants them to have.
• The tight integration with Google Apps For Education is the only key differentiator of this product and unless a teacher fully integrates Google into their classroom, Classroom may not have broad enough appeal to be useful to him/her.

Weaknesses

• There is NO WAY to share your Classroom Stream with people outside of your GAFE domain. 
• For me, one of the greatest benefits of the connected classroom has been the ability to keep parents informed about what is happening in their child's course with little effort actually required on my part. Classroom does not allow this.
• Privacy concerns can be dealt with easily by removing user names from the view of people outside of the GAFE domain. This is no excuse for putting my course in a black box!
• Even if I wanted to show my colleagues how I am using Classroom I can't unless I add them as a student (which means they show up as incomplete assignments) or I log in and show them. The inability to allow Student Success teachers access makes supporting my students much more difficult.
• Classroom needs an automatic "Notebook" folder created for students.
• Much like how the teacher can set an assignment to "Make a Copy for Each Student", attaching documents to an Announcement needs the same functionality. One of my classes still refer to a handout given on September 4th, which requires several pages of scrolling to access. Hoping students will "make a copy" of information sheets and file them properly is not terribly practical.
• The real-time nature of Classroom can cause problems. There have been numerous times when Classroom has not been available or is extremely slow to load.

• Although occasionally this is the fault of the wifi hub, there have been many times over the past six weeks where I have not been able to access the Stream or Assignments despite having robust wifi.
• Customizability is extremely limited.
• The inability to rearrange the order of Announcements within the Stream or the About page may require you to delete and repost items if you need to add something extra.
• The About page, or side bars of Stream, would be infinitely more valuable if you were able to add gadgets like Calendar, in order to provide easy access for students. Unless it is in their face or you stand over them, many will not remember to check a second site for the class calendar.
• Classroom seems to have been designed by people who were trying to remember what their teacher did when they were students.
• The inability to attach documents to a student's assignment submission is frustrating. If a student has turned in their written work, there is no way for the teacher to attach a video of their presentation after the fact.
• There is no way to create Announcement or Assignment posts ahead of time. This creates extra steps and documents if a teacher needs or wants to plan ahead. 
• On a picky note, Google calling their service "Classroom" makes it very difficult to talk about in and outside of class. Telling students to go to Classroom, or submit it in Classroom has already lead to some confusion.

Next Steps

• Create a "Notebook" functionality as mentioned above.
• Allow outsiders a way to see what is going on in Classroom. 
• Give the teacher the option to break down the black box.
• Improve server support. 
• Many times I see the "Oops! This is taking longer than it should" message. This message only means something if it doesn't appear more often than not.
• Allow for greater customization. 
• Even the ability to change font size within the Announcements would be a vast improvement. Students can't read what an Announcement says if Classroom is on the Smart Board.
• Create some reusability functionality in order to make Classroom useful to a teacher teaching the course a second time. 
• I would suggest being able to reverse the timeline when a course is done to allow easy reference the next semester/year.
• Maintain a positive attitude, Classroom. You have made excellent first steps, but the only way to learn how to do better is to listen and act upon the feedback from your teachers.

The Google Docs Table Work-Around (iOS)

As was obvious in my last post, my frustration with the Google Docs app and its lack of support for editing a table made in Docs was intense, to say the least. This was only furthered when some of the iPads we use were forcing students to use the app, not allowing them to edit the table in Chrome where it is editable. Today, one of my students discovered the work-around.

To make sure that Chrome opens the Google Doc, simple click and hold on the edit button (as seen in the picture). This will bring up a menu that allows you to choose "Open in New Tab." I can't begin to express how significant this little trick is to my classroom. We use many, MANY tables to organize and show thinking, and without this trick I would have had to reconsider using Google Classroom and my iPads in any significant way.

In a few cases students were forced into the Docs app when they selected the file from Classroom. The same click-and-hold trick works in that situation as well.

Learning Goals and Media

Although perhaps obvious to most, today I finally caught on to how I think the people at Google envisioned a teacher utilizing the stream in Classroom.

At the beginning of every class I layout our Learning Goals for that class. Typically this turns into a list of the tasks we are going to complete, but when it comes to learning specific skills, I try to articulate those as clearly as possible.

Today I listed my Learning Goals and then attached all of the media and documents for that particular class to that announcement. This allowed everything to be closely tied together and will certainly help prevent the stream from becoming too crowded. I think this will also make it easier for absent students to pick up on what they missed.

I still feel that the inability to create draft announcements (including media), with options for formatting, is a major drawback still to be overcome. If Google allowed me to create draft announcements, attach appropriate media, and format it in a Google calendar, Classroom would become a much more serious player in the Educational platform game.

In the beginning

As of yesterday, I have access to Google's new Classroom application. I am very excited to begin this journey, but thought I would start with an introduction of myself before I begin to explore what Google Classroom has to offer.

I am a secondary school teacher in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. I am in my tenth year of teaching and in my sixth school. I have been at Stratford Central for the last four years and it has been somewhat of a dream. We are a high achieving, publicly funded high school, with very few behaviour issues, which makes classroom management a simple task in comparison to many other schools.

This coming school year, I will be completing my last three semesters of my Masters degree in Digital Experience Innovation from the University of Waterloo. With this added demand, my Principal has given me an excellent schedule; I will be teaching 3 sections of academic grade 10 English and 3 sections of grade 12 college level English.

Starting this fall I will also be in a one-to-one device environment. I will have full time access to 17 iPads and 10 Chromebooks. With the reduced number of preps and the access to technology my goal this year is to be completely paperless by using Google Classroom as my starting point and to take advantage of Turnitin.com (and a variety of other sites) to help facilitate assessment.

Over the next year I will be posting about the rewards and challenges of Google Classroom, as well as any tips or tricks I pick up on the way. If you are reading this and have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to post.

Thanks and enjoy your summer!