Matt Layman Posted March 17, 2021 Share Posted March 17, 2021 Continuing the Online Homeschool Planners in 2020 thread, I'm back to share my experience researching Google Classroom. The first thing I'll note is that the experience with Google Classroom is pretty well polished, especially if you already have Google accounts (as we do at my house). Google being Google means they have a ton of resources to throw at the education space so they can win people over to the value that they propose. The overall experience is pretty slick for a classroom setting. I had no trouble creating assignments, setting material to study on the schedule, and connecting to Google Drive items. Teachers have the ability set items on their Google calendars and share those things with students. While using my student account, I received email notifications when new material and assignments became available. The process for submitting to assignments was very straight forward. Back on the teacher account, I could grade assignments and set up some fairly complex rubrics to define how my students would be scored. Google Classroom certainly has some downsides from a homeschooling perspective. Because it's designed for a classroom setting for teachers that likely don't have the same students each year, the tracking of students outside of grades for a particular class seemed very minimal to me. I could see how this setup would be challenging if you tried to use Google Classroom for all the classes that your student was in for a school year. I didn't see any evidence of transcript reporting, progress reporting, or other features that you might want to manage your student's academic history. In Google Classroom, everything seems to focus around the individual classroom. I have no doubt this fits for a lot of academic institutions, but I'm very certain it wouldn't fit well for my own family where my spouse is tracking over 30 subjects/courses between my two kids this year alone. I added some other notes when I compared Google Classroom to School Desk, the product that I'm building to help my wife (and others) with homeschool planning. Do some of you use Google Classroom? If so, how do you include it into your homeschool? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cintinative Posted March 17, 2021 Share Posted March 17, 2021 I used it for a co-op class and it worked well for that, and was especially helpful when we were forced to do class on Zoom due to the pandemic. I liked that if I ever taught the class again, I could just copy the entire course and put in new dates. It was a lot of work to put in all the assignments, due dates, points, etc. It does calculate the grade for you. For a "classroom" like a co-op or tutorial or just an informal group of students all studying the same thing, it works great. That said, unlike other homeschool schedule tracking things--if you want to adjust the entire schedule, you have to change all the dates. It won't auto shift everything. Since it is not designed for homeschool specifically, there is no way to track hours that were spent on the assignments in the software. Personally I have never been thrilled about having to type all my assignments in which is why I haven't used an online/software based homeschool tracker. If and when they come up with something that would allow you to input a spreadsheet and have it autoload a planner, then I would be very interested. My planning always starts on spreadsheets, and my kids pretty much check off what they have finished as they go along. I do have some friends that use Home School Tracker and things like that, and since they use mostly popular curriculum (Notgrass, Apologia), they can import other people's schedules and modify them. Unfortunately we are using very little of that and many homegrown courses, so there would be no time savings for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Layman Posted March 20, 2021 Author Share Posted March 20, 2021 Thanks for sharing! I thought Google Classroom might work well in a homeschool group context so it's good to hear confirmation of that. I also hadn't really thought about hour tracking for assignments. My kids are still in grade school and I'm not sure that our state requires very detailed time tracking. Time tracking isn't on my mind much because of my family situation. Can you help clear something up for me? You wrote: "I have never been thrilled about having to type all my assignments" and also "My planning always starts on spreadsheets...." That left me confused because I would expect you have to type into spreadsheets too. Were you referring to online forms or something? I'm not really understanding how typing in assignments vs. typing into spreadsheets is different from a typing perspective. I'm guessing there's more to what you meant than what I'm reading into it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cintinative Posted March 20, 2021 Share Posted March 20, 2021 11 hours ago, Matt Layman said: Can you help clear something up for me? You wrote: "I have never been thrilled about having to type all my assignments" and also "My planning always starts on spreadsheets...." That left me confused because I would expect you have to type into spreadsheets too. Were you referring to online forms or something? I'm not really understanding how typing in assignments vs. typing into spreadsheets is different from a typing perspective. I'm guessing there's more to what you meant than what I'm reading into it. Yes, I can see where that was confusing! I don't mind spreadsheets. I can take a template and adjust it. It's easy to adjust or add or take out things. With the homeschool scheduling software I tinkered in (it was free), you have to put in a bunch of information in form fields. I would most likely have still done the spreadsheet, and then entered it into the program, because I like to have the big picture there in one place. It looked/was super tedious to put in all the assignments. If there had been a way to upload my spreadsheet in and have it create the assignments, that would have been awesome. It was just too much data entry, and I wasn't sure that it would be worth my time. I do tend to like paper over programs so that might play into it too. Currently my kids use the printed spreadsheets as their guides of what to do each day and just put the date (and time, if applicable) next to the day in the spreadsheet. For my class, Google classroom was worth it to use because it gave all my students access to all assignments, a way to submit them, and a way for the parents to keep track, without doing it on paper (which could be lost) or via email (which I have had hit or miss success with). With my own kids, I don't necessarily need to check all those boxes. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Layman Posted March 20, 2021 Author Share Posted March 20, 2021 3 hours ago, cintinative said: I don't mind spreadsheets. I can take a template and adjust it. It's easy to adjust or add or take out things. Cool. I figured this is what you meant, but I didn't want to presume. Importing tasks from a spreadsheet does seem like it would be a pretty cool feature for a online planner. Maybe I'll put that on the backburner for the project I'm building because you're not the first person on the forum that I've seen mention something similar. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ByGrace3 Posted March 22, 2021 Share Posted March 22, 2021 I am using GC for my outside classes that I teach and would like to use it for a tutorial I am starting next year, do regular google accounts have access to GC or do you have to have a gsuite account? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lori D. Posted March 22, 2021 Share Posted March 22, 2021 (edited) Zoom platform user here, for teaching online co-op classes. Zoom has been fantastic for me. I teach co-op classes and a year ago had to switch overnight to all online due to the pandemic. Zoom was super fast and easy for me to learn, and has all of the features I might need. Things I use a lot are the whiteboard and screen share features. I love that I can set the chat box to 'everyone only' rather than allowing private chats -- which has helped to keep students focused on class teaching and activities. Meetings are super easy to set up. I've had no technical difficulties myself, and only one student has had troubles, but it is due to working with an old computer that had a tendency to freeze up. I'm using the $14.99/month plan, which gives me unlimited meetings and unlimited meeting lengths. It is also easy to start/stop payments without losing my account -- that allows me to pay for the winter and summer months when I am not teaching. Rather than a shared calendar or upload to the platform (which Zoom does not do), I prefer to email my students the handouts, assignments, and the weekly information/reminders. That allows me to keep things very private for each individual student and their parents. Glad to hear that Google Classroom is working well for others. Just wanted to throw in a good word for Zoom as a very useful alternative! Edited March 22, 2021 by Lori D. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cintinative Posted March 23, 2021 Share Posted March 23, 2021 23 hours ago, ByGrace3 said: I am using GC for my outside classes that I teach and would like to use it for a tutorial I am starting next year, do regular google accounts have access to GC or do you have to have a gsuite account? You can get GC without a gsuite account. That is what I did for my co-op class. 😃 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cintinative Posted March 23, 2021 Share Posted March 23, 2021 22 hours ago, Lori D. said: Zoom platform user here, for teaching online co-op classes. We used Zoom for the online class portion and Google Classroom for the homework assignments, grades, dates, etc. I have used Google Meet and I don't like it as well as zoom. 😃 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Layman Posted March 24, 2021 Author Share Posted March 24, 2021 On 3/22/2021 at 2:24 PM, Lori D. said: Zoom platform user here, for teaching online co-op classes. ... Rather than a shared calendar or upload to the platform (which Zoom does not do), I prefer to email my students the handouts, assignments, and the weekly information/reminders. That allows me to keep things very private for each individual student and their parents. Glad to hear that Google Classroom is working well for others. Just wanted to throw in a good word for Zoom as a very useful alternative! Interesting! I've always imagined Zoom more as an alternative to Google Meet than Google Classroom. I've used Zoom for work, but I don't know what it offers for education. Are you using Zoom for Education (https://zoom.us/education)? Do you have some particular privacy concern about Google Classroom? In my testing of the service, only the teacher account could see student submitted information for assignments. What privacy aspect(s) are you referring to outside of that? From your description, I gather that Zoom is great for class delivery, but I'm not seeing how it would help with all the other bits of the class. I get the impression that you manage all the other parts manually. Is that accurate? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lori D. Posted March 24, 2021 Share Posted March 24, 2021 (edited) 10 hours ago, Matt Layman said: Interesting! I've always imagined Zoom more as an alternative to Google Meet than Google Classroom. I've used Zoom for work, but I don't know what it offers for education. Are you using Zoom for Education (https://zoom.us/education)? Do you have some particular privacy concern about Google Classroom? In my testing of the service, only the teacher account could see student submitted information for assignments. What privacy aspect(s) are you referring to outside of that? From your description, I gather that Zoom is great for class delivery, but I'm not seeing how it would help with all the other bits of the class. I get the impression that you manage all the other parts manually. Is that accurate? No, I am using a very basic Zoom Meeting option, which probably is more similar to Google Meet (I have no personal experience with Google Meet). It looks like the Zoom Education you linked offers a few more features similar to options you kindly reviewed for Google Classroom. re: privacy -- because I only have a small number of students (less than 2 dozen), I really do prefer direct email for communicating with students and for handing in assignments/returning graded assignments. Just my personal preference and what I feel most comfortable with. 😉 Because I don't need other features beyond a "class meeting space", the basic Zoom Meeting works extremely well for me. While I have been extremely grateful for Zoom with the unexpected pandemic need to move from in-person to online with my co-op, I am very much looking forward to getting back to in-person! (Although, I am thinking about the possibility of keeping the basic Zoom Meeting as an option for "office hours" on another day than the in-person co-op classes... 😉 ) Edited March 24, 2021 by Lori D. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.