While we do not primarily use Google Classroom at Jamestown Community College, we do have some faculty experimenting with it. Since, I do not use Google Classroom that often, I decided to sit in on this session. Rebecca Velikaneye from Wheatland Middle School provided a thorough review of Google Classroom. She highlighted a number of the paperless benefits of this application.
Going Paperless
Google Classroom is not the only learning management system (LMS) that has paperless benefits. I would have to say that all of them do. Velikaneye noted that 36% of her school’s budget was being spent on copies. An LMS can significantly reduce this expenditure by putting copies online.
In addition to a paperless workflow, Velikaneye highlighted these benefits:
- Easy collaboration with co-teachers and students
- Works seamlessly with Google Drive
- Communicate with individual students, groups of students, or the entire class
- The class can be easily archived after the class is done
- Easy to organize and maintain
Other Benefits of Google Classroom
Google Classroom has features typical of other LMSs such as a calendar for tracking assignments and exams. You can also create polls.
One feature I especially liked is the ability to send one announcement to multiple classes at the same time. This is useful when you have multiple sections of the same class.
When you save documents to Google Drive through Google Classroom, a new folder will be created for the specific class. Folders are also created for individual assignments. Alice Keeler shares more on this in her post, Google Classroom: Understanding the Classroom Folder.
Another great feature is the ability to communicate with guardians through guardian summaries. This is especially useful for primary and secondary teachers,
Google Classroom can also be enhanced with add-ons for Google Docs. One add-on that was strongly suggested was Doctopus. According to the Doctopus site, “Doctopus gives teachers the ability to mass-copy (from a starter template), share, monitor student progress, and manage grading and feedback for student projects in Google Drive.”
Other Recommended Resources
This was an informative presentation. Google Classroom is pretty straightforward. If you have experience with other LMSs, you will be able to quickly use Google Classroom.
Stan is Director of Technology-Enhanced Instruction. He has over 20 years experience working as an instructional technologist and trainer. He has a master’s degree in computing technology in education and a doctorate in education specializing in instructional technology.
