This week Google Classroom is celebrating 10 years of serving to academics set up their digital classroom. A current survey of EdTech instruments put Classroom because the #1 studying administration system in the US.
It hasn’t all the time been like this. I keep in mind educating earlier than Google Classroom, and it wasn’t fairly.
Life earlier than Google Classroom
I used to be the primary trainer at my faculty to pilot the usage of Google Docs with my ninth grade college students approach again in 2009. It was superior!
A number of years later we gave every pupil an iPad (Chromebooks weren’t a factor but) and used Google Drive as our major device for creating paperwork, spreadsheets, and displays.
Creating assignments was straightforward, however getting them to my college students was actually difficult.
- It wasn’t straightforward to provide each pupil their very own copy of a doc
- College students shared their work incorrectly which slowed grading and suggestions.
- There was no straightforward option to observe whose task was lacking.
- My e mail inbox was full of “homework” and “untitled” file notifications
It solely took just a few weeks within the faculty yr to understand that this was going to be an issue.
Lots of my colleagues started coming to me to share their frustration with this method. I felt dangerous as I used to be the one who had promoted the usage of Google Docs within the first place. We limped alongside that first yr and made it work, but it surely wasn’t straightforward and lots of academics determined to return to utilizing paper and pencil.
Google Classroom – the device we wanted
In the summertime of 2014 Google introduced a model new product created only for academics – Google Classroom! I used to be one of some educators who bought early entry and was excited to check out this new device.
For the primary time, academics had a way of managing and organizing class sources in a central location. This was the answer that I wanted again in 2009! The magical “make a replica for every pupil” button was launched on the similar time. This function continues to be considered one of my prime causes to make use of Classroom!
One key ingredient that was NOT included within the first model of Classroom was the “classwork” web page which was added to assist academics set up their sources utilizing subjects. The gradebook was added just a few years after that.
Trying again at a few of my outdated weblog posts and displays was a stroll by reminiscence lane…that early model of Classroom is sort of a bit totally different than what we use at the moment!
Getting higher yearly
The introduction of Classroom was an enormous deal.
As much as that time, Google had by no means created a device for a selected trade: all of their functions have been common. This transfer signaled that Google was all in on schooling and 10 years later, that guess appears to have paid off as Google Classroom is the #1 LMS in the US with over 150 million customers.
I’ve to provide Google quite a lot of credit score. They’ve constantly added new options to Google Classroom for the previous 10 years:
The record of enhancements is LONG! If you wish to keep up-to-date on the most recent, be sure you join the Google EDU replace, my month-to-month e mail.
The momentum continues even at the moment as Google is asserting a new beta program for integrating a particular model of Gemini referred to as LearnLM into Google Classroom. They’re additionally searching for faculties who’re thinking about piloting a complicated analytics function that’s beneath growth.
Cheers to Google Classroom and one other 10 years of serving to academics set up their assignments.
