Google Classroom: a collaborative platform for distance education
According to a UNESCO estimate, about 91.3% of young people in the world who are in school, or about 1.57 billion were confined to their homes in April following the health crisis of the ” Coronavirus COVID 19 “.
Schools around the world are grappling with a problem most of them had never been prepared for establishing pedagogical continuity through distance education. Google Classroom helps students and teachers organize homework, strengthen collaboration, and improve communication.
What is Google Classroom?
The classroom is a collaborative platform that allows you to distribute homework daily and send teachers back to teachers.
Google Classroom helps streamline homework, facilitate collaboration and discussion, and make teaching more effective and relevant. Teachers can create lessons, assign homework, and send comments. In addition, Classroom integrates seamlessly with other Google tools, such as Google Docs and Drive.
Schools and non-profit organizations benefit from Classroom as the main service of G Suite for Education (Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.) and G Suite for associations, which are free applications. People with a personal Google Account can also use Classroom for free.
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Main functionalities?
The classroom is made up of free productivity tools including messaging, document editors and storage space. Classroom allows you to save time, organize your lessons and communicate more effectively with your students.
- Easy to set up: Teachers can create a class and then invite students and other teachers to participate. The “Homework and Homework” page allows them to share information (homework, questions and materials).
- Save time: teachers can create lessons, distribute homework, communicate and get organized, all from a single interface.
- Better organization: students can view their homework from the “To do” page, the course flow or the agenda. Course materials are automatically saved to Google Drive folders.
- Communication and feedback made easy: Teachers can create assignments, make announcements, and directly initiate discussions. Students have the opportunity to share resources with their classmates, and to interact in the course stream or by email. Teachers quickly know who has and has not finished their work. They can rate and comment on copies in real-time.
- Integration of familiar apps: Classroom works with Google Docs, Calendar, Gmail, Drive, and Forms.
- Affordable and secure: free for schools, associations and individuals, Classroom does not display any advertising, and does not use your content or student data for advertising purposes.
Access to Classroom is done online from a computer and its browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari. The classroom is also available for Android and Apple iOS mobile devices.
Tools to save time
- Easily add students: Students can register for a course with a code.
- Manage multiple courses: You can reuse announcements, assignments and questions created for another course. Share posts with multiple classes and archive your lessons.
- Teach as a team: You can invite up to 20 other teachers to your class.
- Enrich Assignments: Embed materials in assignments, such as YouTube videos, Google Forms surveys, PDFs, and other Google Drive items.
- Create worksheets with one click: Attach a worksheet to an assignment and create a copy for each student with a single click.
- Customize Assignments: Add grade categories, deadlines, grade scales, and topics to your assignments.
- Perform end-of-term checks and quick polls: Post a question to your students, then view the results in Classroom.
- Centralize resources: Create a theme for key resources so that students can always access materials such as a sign-up sheet for your on-duty hours, a course schedule, or online text.
- Help students organize: Classroom creates a Google eventCalendar for each course, in which the assignments and their deadlines are indicated. Students can also view homework assignments with one click.
- Help teachers get organized: Review student work, including previously added homework, questions, grades, and comments.
- Customize the notation: Select a rating system, create categories degrades and view all grades for a course on the Grades page.
- Grading quickly and easily: You can sort students, see who returned their homework, add comments, assign temporary grades to papers to communicate to students later, or return graded homework to all students with just one click. You can also add annotations and visual comments to your students’ assignments in the Classroom mobile app.
It is possible to organize as many lessons as you want. Each course is attached to a group of students who will follow the lessons and activities to be done. Communication tools make it possible to publish information gathered in one place and form a discussion thread for better reading by students.
A Google Classroom class is built on the basis of a chronological flow that brings together all the information and all the assignments of the students. The flow is organized automatically according to the dates of publication or planning of assignments.
To be able to use Classroom with students within a school, the school must create a free “ G Suite for Education” account . It is then up to the school to select the Google services to which its teachers and students have access.
With regard to the GDPR, the protection of personal data and privacy, Google is committed to ensuring that Classroom does not display any advertising and does not use the content or data for advertising purposes. Note that since May 04, 2020, Google has offered free access to the general public, its professional videoconferencing solution ” Google Meet “.
