Google Classroom is a good idea. It’s going to help teachers create better lessons, keep students engaged and reach out to parents more. The real question is whether it’s worth the price of admission.

Google Classroom

The availability of free education is a gift, but only if it can come with high quality. Google Classroom has given students in classrooms around the country an online option to supplement their learning. A potential downside to these options is the inability to meet with professors and apply classroom learning. As a part of the University of Washington system, we have found the use of Google Classroom during the quarter distance courses produced good results for both parties. Distance learning is here to stay and has only grown over time. If you want to make sure you aren’t left behind in a digital world, you may want to consider your options and how they will help or hurt your future professional prospects.

Google Classroom is a reliable one-stop-shop for managing all of your coursework and communication. It is definitely worth checking out if you are in a distance learning program, or even just want to streamline some of your everyday communication tasks.

Benefits and Drawbacks

There are several other features that set Google Classroom apart from the competition. It is a free tool and it works on computers and mobile devices through the GAFE platform. The discussion features of Google Classroom do an excellent job at encouraging interaction between students and teachers, making it a very effective tool for working with groups of all sizes. The major drawback to Google Classroom is that it is a relatively new tool, so it does not work with iPads, Android tablets or Kindle Fires. The lessons created within Google Docs can be exported directly into Google Classroom on the computer, but in order to view or edit those documents or upload them onto the iPad tablet, students will have to use other third-party tools such as Documents 5 and iBooks Author.

Integration

If you are using Google Classroom for your teaching and learning, it is important to note that it does require integration with Google Apps for Education. This means that you are using Gmail along with Calendar and Drive (Docs, Sheets, Slides) etc., so the other school faculty members need to have access to all of these tools. The obvious way to do this is through the use of a domain. It is required that you have a domain in order to use Google Classroom or any other GAFE tool/application.

By going through a step by step process, one can easily move one’s entire digital repository into Google Classroom for easy organization and management; therefore, allowing access to all student work without having to worry about losing any data or files that are not needed for a current class engagement.

Google Classroom Future Prospects

According to the Scholastic Parent & Child list of the most popular educational apps , in 2015 Classroom wasn’t one of them, indicating that this tool is still relatively new and also relatively unknown. While the design is nothing particularly innovative, the new Google Classroom 2022 is a promising step towards more effective and efficient learning, especially in a classroom setting. Though it appears to be geared towards teachers, students will benefit from having access to Google Classroom, whether they’re in an online or a traditional classroom. With that said, it should be noted that it may take some time before this update fully penetrates into secondary schools and universities. But nonetheless, Google Classroom is off on the right foot, leaning further into an online world which we’ll all have to face sooner or later.

Bottom Line

Google Classroom has made a huge impact in the world of educational technology, especially for teachers who don’t have face-to-face access to students. It’s a powerful tool that will likely continue to be developed and improved upon, as educators keep gravitating towards it.

In the end, there is no one best way to teach and learn, but instead many valid options. Whether you are interested in the low-cost education of a MOOC or the high-end technology of Sketchfab virtual reality tours, it’s exciting to see that educational technology is progressing at a rapid rate. Let’s hope that as more schools begin to adopt innovative techniques like Google Classroom, we will continue to see positive changes in how students learn around the world.