Lab Entry #2
Google Classroom
The Google Classroom is a really neat application that facilitates online engagement within an educational context. What’s especially neat about it is that it essentially removes the need for overly-complicated, inaccessible school portals (or at least simplifies them, to an extent).
I like that the Google classroom can be accessed both through the computer and through a mobile application. It acts almost like a cloud in itself, while also functioning with Google Drive and G-Mail. As someone who likes the universality and interconnectedness of Gooogle products, the Google Classroom is just another addition — an especially important one considering my interest in education and my pursuit to teach.
For our second lab, we explored its uses by creating our own classroom (titled Cool Kids Club).
The Google Classroom may be used for different things, such as to post assignments, due dates, and quizzes, as well as documents and events. It has a very clean interface, cool customization tools, and is very easy to use and post.
Students could use the Google classroom to keep track of their required readings
While Classroom doesn’t keep track of students’ academic progress, such as their grades and averages, it is a great resource for a teacher to post all the readings and videos necessary to complete a unit or assignment. They can be grouped by topic and can include multimedia sources.
Students can easily contact their classmates and teacher
One of the best things about living in the 21st century is the ease of communication. With Google classroom, students can send a message to their teacher if they have a question about a specific assignment or can message their classmates about the group project they’re working on without diverting to other social media platforms. This keeps all schoolwork neat and bundled together.
Google Classroom facilitates group work
Students will have the opportunity to create their own classrooms to post their own documents and agendas. When it comes to group projects, this can be extremely useful given that all the work can be logged onto the platform and easily accessed at any time by anyone with a code, including the teacher, who will be able to monitor who submits the most work or puts in the most effort (as well as those who don’t).
I will absolutely use Google Classroom in the future as a teacher and will try to appropriately implement its functions with my teaching so that students will feel not only required to use it but comfortable as well.
