Google Classroom

Presentation

Google has just released a new tool, Classroom, which aims at helping teachers organize their classes. The goal is to take advantages of technology in order to reduce the time spent on secondary tasks. Google Classroom is now part of the Google Apps for Education suite and create a new synergy between those tools. Specifically, Google Classroom enables the teacher to :

• create and collect assignments
• improve class communications
• stay organized

This tool harnesses the power from other Google tools, such as Google Documents, Google Drive and Gmail. Basically, the teacher can now create new assignments for the class, easily send them to students, track which students have turned in their assignments, review and grade them.

Limits

This tool is best used for assignments that can fit within Google Documents functionalities. If the assignments only requires the writing of words, creating a spreadsheet or a keynote then Google is just fine. However it is hard to imagine how the teacher and students can only rely on this when it involves the writing of complex equations or the drawing of diagrams and illustrations.

The Strategy

Google found just the way to teach young people how to use Google tools. These tools will be part of their life and will likely become the apps that they will use later when they need an email address, a cloud solution, an application to create documents and sync them easily or edit them in the browser. That is rather intelligent.