I attended the KYste2014 conference in Lexington yesterday and came back feeling like Google has so much potential in the classroom, we should definitely be using it more! I plan to have a PD session on Google but in the meantime, I wanted to highlight some of what I learned at the conference. First, I had heard of
Google Classroom, read reviews, and was not impressed when it initially came out three months ago. However, it seems Google has taken some of the criticism to heart and made it much more robust in the past few months. The Google representative made a point emphasizing that it is not an LMS. For our purposes it functions as an LMS and for comparison I think it can be best understand as an LMS. One of the coolest features of Google Classroom is that it has the ability to digitally copy work you want to submit to your students. So, once you have a digital classroom set up and you want to distribute an assignment you simply press a button and each student gets a copy of the assignment. You can imagine how simple it would be to have a paperless classroom! Here are two other tidbits that have to do with Google drive that I think would be a great addition to any teachers' repertoire of tools. Would you like to have a rubric on your assignment so the students know what you were looking for?
Goobric is a Chrome extension that allows you to put such a rubric on each assignment you create. What about student work,
Google Take Out allows students who maybe graduating to pack up their files and take them with them! There are lots of uses for Google and in the next few months I will explore some of these features so I can introduce them in a Tech Tuesday session. Lastly, I am not quite sure how I feel about this piece of news but the Google representative did say that Google would be increasing drive space to 5TB. That is HUGE!
