13 ms·

Google Classroom

250 points by diegolo 12y ago

donw 12y ago
If this is a Blackboard competitor, that's good news. Google definitely has the bankroll and patent magazine to go toe-to-toe with them, which could open up a lot of options in the higher education space.
- pwelch 12y ago
  Agreed. It has been a few years since I was in college but the Blackboard software had a long way to go but they were the main one on the market. Would be nice to see some competition to encourage growth.
- wooyi 12y ago
  I doubt it. Blackboard is a full blown Learning Management System (LMS). This looks more like an Edmodo competitor -> pretty much like a Hangouts for Classrooms.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    Given the hatred students and many teachers have for Blackboard, it may not need to do as much, if it provides ways to work without a "Learning Management System". Occasionally, the "system" approach gets ousted by something simpler, more general, and more transparent. I'm thinking of Novell's old integrated systems for managing print/file/document sharing, email, accounts, etc., which became less important and integrated into operating systems and supplanted by web-based sharing. So many institutions relied on Novell for that stuff, and then...eventually there were none left.
- stephenr 12y ago
  I have never heard of or used this Blackboard software that keeps being referenced, but I find it hard to believe that Google entering nay market is "good news" for anyone except Google fanboys. Google has an atrocious history of entering a market with commercial and open source options, obliterating them all with "hosted, free" solutions, feeding all the new data into their already massive profile building infrastructure, and often, shutting it down after a few years, after the previous solution providers have all had to shut shop because they couldn't compete with free.
  - ceras 12y ago
    Do you have an example of that sequence happening (other than Google Reader)?
    - scourge 12y ago
      google voice. google browser sync. google send to phone. google wave. then there's a list of things that are STILL around but have stifled competition anyways: gmail (hopefully people might get behind mailpile but i doubt it), gtalk (again, we have to wait another decade at least before a sensible IM standard is used), G+ (how many in the tech community have moved from one company (facebook) to another (google Plus). Just because they haven't axed a product like they did with reader of voice doesn't mean they won't misuse their power. Look at all the features they've removed from google maps because "mama google knows best". And no one dares to compete with them.
      - icantthinkofone 12y ago
        Google Voice is still around. Browser sync is built in. Send to phone, I don't recall what that was. Wave is built into the browser, too, iirc.
        yincrash 12y ago
        I believe the GP meant Chrome to Phone which was one of Google's first examples of using push messaging. It's still around and usable. [1] [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.chrometophone&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
        scourge 12y ago
        the firefox version of it was axed. you have to use chrome. perhaps chromium can be hacked to work with the service, idk, haven't tried.
        scourge 12y ago
smurfysmurf 12y ago
A good way to push the chromebook
- josefresco 12y ago
  Speaking of... I saw this on the Chromebook page "Chromebooks start at just $249 with a $30 management fee per device." Does Apple or other vendors charge a similar "management fee" to this? Unless I'm missing something, the fees will surpass the per-unit pricing before the first year.
  - nnnnni 12y ago
    Things like Windows Server (required for SCCM, I believe), Jamf Casper, and FileWave all cost money.
  - bingobob 12y ago
    in windows world you pay for the servers, exchange, cals for both and on top whatever price for office we haven't even got to hardware yet Chromebooks are cheap.
  - ben1040 12y ago
    It's a one-time fee to enroll the device in their MDM service, not an ongoing charge.
    - josefresco 12y ago
      It appears you are correct, but it seems it was a change from early pricing models: "It's a big change from the pricing model Google offered with Chrome OS in the past: The first generation of Chromebooks came with monthly fees for business and school accounts -- $28 a month per device for businesses and $20 a month for schools. With the new plan, organizations pay only the single flat fee for the lifetime of each device. " http://www.computerworld.com/article/2471845/cloud-computing/google-s-chrome-os--the-dirty-little-secret-about-those-new-devices.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2471845/cloud-computing...
  - 12y ago
gricha2380 12y ago
Personally I'd love to have this as a part of my normal Google Apps. It would be a neat way to create tutorials and documentation for my teammates.
greyskull 12y ago
My university has GApps, and also it has a longstanding Moodle platform. Moodle is awful. It's much better than it used to be, but it's still clunky and ugly. If this is Google's solution, I'd like to see it take off. It'd be easy to integrate and switch from Moodle.
- mjn 12y ago
  I'm also not a big fan of Moodle, but it does have the advantage of being self-hosted and open-source. Moving student data to a cloud provider adds a bunch of legal complexity, at least here (Denmark). I can use anything I want for non-student data, such as syllabi, assignments, notes, lecture slides, and the like. But I don't think I could have students submit formal, graded assignments through a Google cloud product, or put the actual grades there. Relying on a third-party service would also probably be ruled out unless it comes with some kind of deprecation guarantee (e.g. we're guaranteed at least one academic year lead-time for notification of major changes, discontinuation, or fees). We do use MS Office 365 for email and calendaring, but I believe they (Microsoft) got some sort of stamp of approval from the education ministry first, and it does come with a long-term service agreement (it isn't free, though).
Diederich 12y ago
Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View has switched over to this, we love it. The amount of parent/student/teacher collaboration and transparency is unparalleled. BTW: they're not using Chrome Books, but some kind of fancy HP Android tablets.
- seanc 12y ago
  Having experience with it, how do the parents connect in? Our board uses Apps for Education, but I don't have a parent account. I suppose I could get in the game by using my child's account, but often it is helpful to interact directly with teachers.
Hengjie 12y ago
Classroom is something that competes directly with Hapara's [1] Teacher Dashboard product that they charge at $4/student [1] hapara.com/products/#teacher-dashboard
sagischwarz 12y ago
I think the public educational IT system should not be outsourced to the private sector, where schools completely lose control of the data and depend more or less on the good will of the company. University courses should not be organized by Facebook and pupils should not be forced to use IT systems of non-trustworthy companies like Google, which earn money by profiling their customers. Maybe my view is too German, but I think of education as an sovereign function of the state, where everything (theoretically) can be controlled by the citizens (yes, I know that this is some kind of optimistic). We should teach kids to think critical about centralization of data and knowledge and show them how to manage their digital lives with free and open tools which respect the users rights.
- FD3SA 12y ago
  Cannot agree more with this. Open source software is a perfect fit with public institutions. I don't understand why any government uses proprietary platforms. It would be cheaper and far more effective to hire a dozen open source devs to cater a particular platform to the public's needs, and have it be open and free to use forever. Developers aren't that expensive compared to software licenses for thousands of machines. As I understand, Germany and many European countries are heading in this direction.
  - stephenr 12y ago
    While I agree that Open Source can form part of a good solution I think there needs to be a distinction made between proprietary software that the institution controls, and proprietary SaaS solutions like Google offers. E.g., In the 90s and early 2000's Novell had a big presence in Universities/etc, providing network systems such as eDirectory (their Directory Services stack) Groupwise (email) etc. Yes these were proprietary, but they were also controlled by the customer - if you wanted to switch to OpenLDAP or AD or whatever, you could dump your whole Directory Services tree to LDIF file(s) and import them elsewhere. If you wanted to migrate from Groupwise to something using MBOX or even to Exchange, there were tools to do so, and there was never any need to worry about "well what happens with the data?" I have no problem with a school or government using proprietary software, so long as the data created remains in the institution's hands, and is in a format that can be easily read by or exported to alternative formats. I absolutely have a problem when educational institutions say "yeah we're going to use this solution for email because it's free" - the students have no fucking choice, and there is little or no consideration given to how the company uses the data.
zyxley 12y ago
If I was a teacher, there's no way I would use this... privacy concerns aside, there's nothing to suggest that Google won't suddenly shut it down in two or three years when whoever is maintaining it gets bored of it, like Google has with so many other projects.
- ChicagoBoy11 12y ago
  This concern would not make a whole lot of sense for teachers. The matter of fact is that the stability and longevity of this service is far more certain than the typical length of LMS contracts in school districts or the length of time that certain online educational platforms manage to stay relevant with current technologies.
- wsxcde 12y ago
  Why would a teacher worry about something that might happen 3 years down the line? You only need this to work for a particular term or semester.
  - sosuke 12y ago
    Because learning new products each semester or term is a PITA? Just imagine how long books last in a curriculum, there is nothing that iterates quickly in education. A question though is do all teachers use the same software in a school or is it all ad-hoc?
    - wsxcde 12y ago
      It's not really new products very semester, is it? We're talking about an unlikely event that might happen sometime in future after a few years. A lot of professors have adopted Piazza is a relatively short time because it offers real benefits. And you could make the exact same argument about the longevity of Piazza. I think we ought to applaud anything that makes life easier for educators because the reality is that most academic software, or at least blackboard which seems to terribly popular and is what I've used extensively, is a terrible mess. I'm not dismissing the concerns about privacy and longevity but they seem to putting potential future problems ahead of real present benefits.
phantomenace 12y ago
Is this like coursera?
phantomenace 12y ago
People should go to a proper Uni, end of story. Anyone not getting a masters or PhD is not worth hiring, because they just lack brainpower and skills to compete on hard problems.
oneplusonephone 12y ago
I really don't like this.
Grazester 12y ago
Damn it Google. Over the summer I approached the government of my country to build a simple learning management system since they were about to start using tablets at the secondary schools here. Nothing has been finalised yet but I have a working model. If they go with what I am working on for them they would be able to run analytics across all secondary schools and they would own their data.
- judk 12y ago
  Send a resume to Google. That's life in business.
  - Grazester 12y ago
    Funny. When I lived in the U.S. I was called by a Google recruiter. I don't see Google besting me here where it comes to the tailored needs.
acbart 12y ago
I got into the demo over the summer, and I was pretty underwhelmed. They list the features on the front page there, and that's exactly what they have. So in other words, you can manage a feed of assignments ("X is due on Tuesday", "Here is a link to a video!") and some very simplistic google docs control. I really expected something on the level of Canvas or Moodle, but it's clearly just a few convenience features for running GAfE.
- ChicagoBoy11 12y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I am in charge of Canvas at our school, and we are deploying Google Apps for Ed. next year. Not thinking of using Classroom at all - at least not with the current feature set.
  - teach 12y ago
    On the other hand, at my school we ALREADY have a lot of teacher using Google apps with their students. The clever ones have been able to cobble together something decent using gmail, google drive, calendar, etc. Google Classroom streamlines what they were already doing. And it will allow some less-technically-savvy teachers to do some of the same things.
    - acbart 12y ago
      And I think it has a strong sell for just that - It has good features now, I just want MORE features. I'm hoping this is just the start of something bigger.
  - sjy 12y ago
    What are the missing features that your school needs? I'm not sure how things work at primary and secondary level, but I used various LMSes at university over 7 years and never found any use for features beyond the ability to download lecture notes.
vfgf 12y ago
Does it require Google Account for each student? What if student doesn't want account, and doesn't agree with Google Terms of Service?
- josefresco 12y ago
  I don't know which would be more concerning, Google's terms of service, or the school's acceptable use policy.
- jestinjoy1 12y ago
  Yes it needs.
- boydjd 12y ago
  Of course it does. It also requires the institution to have a Google Apps for Education account, which usually means that the University email accounts are all Google Accounts anyways.
jestinjoy1 12y ago
What I dislike about Google Classroom is students need institution email address for logging in.
- raldi 12y ago
  Why does that bother you?
  - VLM 12y ago
    I will post for my kids who suffer under the same restriction, that it's yet another email address they don't/won't use, but the admin types will only use it for CYA purposes. So risk adverse administrator sends email to the unused address that its "dress like a hippie day" on thursday and 99% of the students don't check an unused addrs so they never know. "Obviously" they just need an email forward feature, but of course that would require admin effort for the kids that screw it up or intentionally create mail loops or mess with another kids account, so for CYA reasons that can't be done. So the net effect is we've gone from a modest amount of paper correspondence to no correspondence at all because the tech doesn't work and nobody is interested enough in the message to fix it. Another problem is for privacy reasons each kids email looks like "a java GUID"@something.k12.edu and nobody wants to use an address or username like that. ts impossible to remember their email addrs or passwords (they're written down on stickers on their devices) but I think it would be funny if its not "a java GUID" but actually their SS numbers run thru md5 or something even dumber from a security perspective. As an adult, I have an email address like that from my cable company. I don't even know what my cable company email addrs is, much less its password. I've never used it and never will. God only knows how much marketing spam the cable co has sent to it. Maybe electronic bills too, who knows.
    - raldi 12y ago
      If the student account does support forwarding, would that put to rest all of your concerns? I think it's a false comparison to say it's like your cable address; a school has a multitude of good reasons for wanting to send email to its students. A cable company has mostly terrible reasons.
jrells 12y ago
As much as I would love for educational institutions (and government in general) to fund open source projects to solve their needs, that doesn't seem very realistic right now. Maybe when startup culture becomes the norm. The people who make decisions about technology purchases in education are, in my experience, non-technical and highly risk averse. They pay absurd prices for outdated software. There is little pressure to create a better product. I have to use Moodle for my teaching, and I'm sure anything Google creates will be far superior. This was at the top of my startup ideas list, but I'm glad someone is working on it.
- gerbal 12y ago
  The problem with open source software in academia and education is the price. The cost of hiring a developer to maintain and support a piece of software is more often than not far more than the cost of a software license from a company that provides decent quality support and customer service.
giardini 12y ago
Why tie yourself to the current state of technology (keyboard, pc, printer), which may be defunct in 8-15 years? Let the kids learn to use computers but limit it specifically to that. In the classroom emphasis should be on teaching the subject (and let them use pencil, pen and paper). And I'm appalled that public schools now teach computer skills but have abandoned cursive writing.
- tnorthcutt 12y ago
  This reads like "technology will change, so don't let kids use modern technology in the classroom". Why not just keep up with the changes?
  - giardini 12y ago
    If I were selling computers/computer technology then I would want to sell them to millions of children over and over endlessly and make billions of $$. With each new gadget, I'd want to sell all over again. Schools and the current malfunctioning education systems are an infinitely deep money pit for computer vendors/technologists to dip into: parents will toss $$ into the pit so that their children can "keep up with the Joneses'". The only worse set of predators on society are politicians and childrens' cancer research institutes (and, in the latter case, your child will die anyway). Schools obviously can't keep up with the changes: they've dropped cursive writing so that your child can play tic-tac-toe on a computer. Your son or daughter likely signs his/her name with block letters. If so, your child is, IMO, illiterate and here is your child in 15 years: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 (this used to be funny but under the current political administration it has become a clear probability). Current technology will be defunct in 5-10 years. Children are taught skills that will be as useful as navigating the Commodore 64 operating system. Instead they should learn current technology outside the classroom. My pet peeve: cursive writing, tied to higher-level cognitive functioning in the brain, is no longer taught: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/30/should-schools-require-children-to-learn-cursive/the-benefits-of-cursive-go-beyond-writing http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/30/should-schoo... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-hand... http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-writing-hand-could-make-you-smarter http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-... Signed, X
infinitebattery 12y ago
Senior at the International Academy here (a public high school in Michigan). One of my classes uses Google Classroom. I think that Google truly took a "Google Plus" look and morphed that into a website for teachers. I love how it has a clean and easy to use UI. The assignments are on a side bar, announcements are clearly displayed in a "stream". You can easily post a message to your class, and you have access to everyone's email (making it easy to communicate). Teachers in my school have used three platforms. Moodle, Google Classroom, and Edmodo. Quite frankly, I have come to like Edmodo much more. They're identical to Facebook, but the layout is so much better than the alternatives (in my preference). Edmodo has truly thought everything out.
freshflowers 12y ago
10 years ago, people would have welcomed this. Today, the brand Google is a red flag for any school that cares about their reputation and any parent who cares about their child's privacy. It's utterly unsellable unless Google follows the old "evil" Microsoft route and simply bribes schools. And even that won't be enough to counter the shit storm that will hit any school that delivers the privacy of it's students into the hands of Google. (The link sends me to the Dutch version of this. Google is seriously tone deaf it they think they can still sell this here.)
- gerbal 12y ago
  Google has quite a good history of keeping private information private. Unless I'm mistaken. In anycase, Chromebooks are quite popular in education, and the efficient integration of services at a low (or free) cost outweighs any unsubstantiated privacy concerns.
- cromwellian 12y ago
  The reality of Google's brand image is different. Schools don't buy software based on privacy and the privacy policies of much of the software being used by schools is often worse. Maybe it won't sell in EU, but you don't need the EU to run a successful profitable business.
  - chestnut-tree 12y ago
    "Schools don't buy software based on privacy" They should do in my opinion. I find it depressing that so many people overlook or dismiss privacy concerns, particularly where kids are concerned. The kids who are asked to use Google classroom have no choice in the matter since the decision is made by the school. That means they must sign up for a Google Account regardless of whether they want one. It's the responsibility of the adults to evaluate the impact of the software they choose. And privacy should be one of the top concerns for anyone evaluating software for educational use in my view. Google's educational privacy policy [1] is carefully worded to state that they do not mine the content you upload to Google classroom ("Your data is yours"). What they don't state is whether they track the activities of school students and what this actually entails. How is that data aggregated? Who sees that data inside Google? Is the data anonymised? Or is it tied to an individual student? Given that you must enter a date of birth to create a Google Account, Google is capturing very specific and personal details of thousands, perhaps millions of students. Over time, Google will have amassed a staggering amount of information about the behaviour and activities of these students and will continue to do so into their adult lives (if the students continue to use their Google Account). If Google isn't tracking the online activities of Google classroom users, why do they not simply state that? [1] https://www.google.com/edu/privacy.html https://www.google.com/edu/privacy.html
cognivore 12y ago
Well, I can't even take it seriously, because I fully suspect that 3 to 5 years down the road Google loses interest in the product and decides to drop it. Then all the investment the schools and teachers have made is lost. If Google didn't have a habit of killing their own products I'd maybe take the time to actually think about their products.
- pelasaco 12y ago
  a good point.
ap22213 12y ago
How does this get around the US FERPA and COPPA regulations?
EGreg 12y ago
Usually it goes like this: In-house solutions -> Centralized commercial offering -> Open source installed on premises
pdevr 12y ago
If you want to use open source software for this, Google has released Course Builder[1] a while back. Caveat: It uses App Engine, as far as I know. [1] https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/ https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/
mikeleeorg 12y ago
If you are not a teacher or student actively using Google Classroom, you should pay attention to the comments from teachers and students here. Or go talk to a local teacher for their impression. I've been doing that and the general response is overwhelmingly positive. Others have already stated why. I would like to amplify those sentiments: + Many alternative solutions on the market are generally considered to be sub-par, such as Moodle, Blackboard, etc. (I personally love the open source concept behind Moodle and have high hopes for them, but their implementation is oudated; fortunately, they know this and are working on it.) + Home-grown solutions are generally very poor for all kinds of reasons, including inability to find technical talent, bureaucracy and mismanagement, lack of budget, lack of project management, etc. + Google has a strong positive brand with teachers. While privacy concerns are growing, the overall community doesn't have the same stigma with Google that many readers of HN have. Google Apps for Education (GAFE) already had a decent footprint within schools and Google Classroom is piggybacking off of that penetration. With that said, concerns about privacy, being operated by a separate for-profit, and comprehensiveness of features are great points and present ample opportunities for aspiring competitors. In some ways, Google Classroom just stepped up the game. If this causes anyone to release even better software for teachers and students, that's a great thing for teachers and students.
owenversteeg 12y ago
I have a younger brother in high school that has to use Google Classroom/Chromebooks/Google whatnot. Ask him anything through me. What I've heard so far: - It sometimes acts weirdly - When it emails an assignment, the full text of the assignment is put in the title, resulting in comically massive titles. - Using it at the same time as a personal gmail account is strange/not fun - It doesn't have as many features as Edmodo (what the school was using before)
cviedmai 12y ago
I never quite understood why everybody thinks storage should be in the local server and cannot be provided by a private company. IMHO, storage is a commodity. Would you argue that schools need their own power generators because otherwise they'll be submitted to private companies? Should schools also have their own satellites and internet connections? If the data is sensitive why not just encrypting it when is stored the same way we do when we need to transmit something over the wire? Now, from the school POV I think if they go for a private solution they should demand open standards (avoid being locked in) and appropriate SLAs.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Because if all the computation is still happening on the remote server then that remote server has access to whatever encryption key was used. That defeats the whole purpose of what you're suggesting. Which means you have to shuttle the encrypted data to some private server, decrypt it, and then operate on it which means you might as well just host it locally. The only way this works is if we get practical homomorphic encryption at which point storage truly becomes a commodity and that's when Google loses all interest in hosting that data.
MattWard 12y ago
this looks awesome.
brayan123 12y ago
play
brayan123 12y ago
play
brayan123 12y ago
play

250 points by diegolo 12y ago

donw 12y ago

If this is a Blackboard competitor, that's good news. Google definitely has the bankroll and patent magazine to go toe-to-toe with them, which could open up a lot of options in the higher education space.

pwelch 12y ago
Agreed. It has been a few years since I was in college but the Blackboard software had a long way to go but they were the main one on the market. Would be nice to see some competition to encourage growth.
wooyi 12y ago
I doubt it. Blackboard is a full blown Learning Management System (LMS). This looks more like an Edmodo competitor -> pretty much like a Hangouts for Classrooms.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  Given the hatred students and many teachers have for Blackboard, it may not need to do as much, if it provides ways to work without a "Learning Management System". Occasionally, the "system" approach gets ousted by something simpler, more general, and more transparent. I'm thinking of Novell's old integrated systems for managing print/file/document sharing, email, accounts, etc., which became less important and integrated into operating systems and supplanted by web-based sharing. So many institutions relied on Novell for that stuff, and then...eventually there were none left.
stephenr 12y ago
I have never heard of or used this Blackboard software that keeps being referenced, but I find it hard to believe that Google entering nay market is "good news" for anyone except Google fanboys. Google has an atrocious history of entering a market with commercial and open source options, obliterating them all with "hosted, free" solutions, feeding all the new data into their already massive profile building infrastructure, and often, shutting it down after a few years, after the previous solution providers have all had to shut shop because they couldn't compete with free.
- ceras 12y ago
  Do you have an example of that sequence happening (other than Google Reader)?
  - scourge 12y ago
    google voice. google browser sync. google send to phone. google wave. then there's a list of things that are STILL around but have stifled competition anyways: gmail (hopefully people might get behind mailpile but i doubt it), gtalk (again, we have to wait another decade at least before a sensible IM standard is used), G+ (how many in the tech community have moved from one company (facebook) to another (google Plus). Just because they haven't axed a product like they did with reader of voice doesn't mean they won't misuse their power. Look at all the features they've removed from google maps because "mama google knows best". And no one dares to compete with them.
    - icantthinkofone 12y ago
      Google Voice is still around. Browser sync is built in. Send to phone, I don't recall what that was. Wave is built into the browser, too, iirc.
      - yincrash 12y ago
        I believe the GP meant Chrome to Phone which was one of Google's first examples of using push messaging. It's still around and usable. [1] [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.chrometophone&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
        scourge 12y ago
        the firefox version of it was axed. you have to use chrome. perhaps chromium can be hacked to work with the service, idk, haven't tried.
      - scourge 12y ago

smurfysmurf 12y ago

A good way to push the chromebook

josefresco 12y ago
Speaking of... I saw this on the Chromebook page "Chromebooks start at just $249 with a $30 management fee per device." Does Apple or other vendors charge a similar "management fee" to this? Unless I'm missing something, the fees will surpass the per-unit pricing before the first year.
- nnnnni 12y ago
  Things like Windows Server (required for SCCM, I believe), Jamf Casper, and FileWave all cost money.
- bingobob 12y ago
  in windows world you pay for the servers, exchange, cals for both and on top whatever price for office we haven't even got to hardware yet Chromebooks are cheap.
- ben1040 12y ago
  It's a one-time fee to enroll the device in their MDM service, not an ongoing charge.
  - josefresco 12y ago
    It appears you are correct, but it seems it was a change from early pricing models: "It's a big change from the pricing model Google offered with Chrome OS in the past: The first generation of Chromebooks came with monthly fees for business and school accounts -- $28 a month per device for businesses and $20 a month for schools. With the new plan, organizations pay only the single flat fee for the lifetime of each device. " http://www.computerworld.com/article/2471845/cloud-computing/google-s-chrome-os--the-dirty-little-secret-about-those-new-devices.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2471845/cloud-computing...
- 12y ago

gricha2380 12y ago

Personally I'd love to have this as a part of my normal Google Apps. It would be a neat way to create tutorials and documentation for my teammates.

greyskull 12y ago

My university has GApps, and also it has a longstanding Moodle platform. Moodle is awful. It's much better than it used to be, but it's still clunky and ugly. If this is Google's solution, I'd like to see it take off. It'd be easy to integrate and switch from Moodle.

mjn 12y ago
I'm also not a big fan of Moodle, but it does have the advantage of being self-hosted and open-source. Moving student data to a cloud provider adds a bunch of legal complexity, at least here (Denmark). I can use anything I want for non-student data, such as syllabi, assignments, notes, lecture slides, and the like. But I don't think I could have students submit formal, graded assignments through a Google cloud product, or put the actual grades there. Relying on a third-party service would also probably be ruled out unless it comes with some kind of deprecation guarantee (e.g. we're guaranteed at least one academic year lead-time for notification of major changes, discontinuation, or fees). We do use MS Office 365 for email and calendaring, but I believe they (Microsoft) got some sort of stamp of approval from the education ministry first, and it does come with a long-term service agreement (it isn't free, though).

Diederich 12y ago

Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View has switched over to this, we love it. The amount of parent/student/teacher collaboration and transparency is unparalleled. BTW: they're not using Chrome Books, but some kind of fancy HP Android tablets.

seanc 12y ago
Having experience with it, how do the parents connect in? Our board uses Apps for Education, but I don't have a parent account. I suppose I could get in the game by using my child's account, but often it is helpful to interact directly with teachers.

Hengjie 12y ago

Classroom is something that competes directly with Hapara's [1] Teacher Dashboard product that they charge at $4/student [1] hapara.com/products/#teacher-dashboard

sagischwarz 12y ago

I think the public educational IT system should not be outsourced to the private sector, where schools completely lose control of the data and depend more or less on the good will of the company. University courses should not be organized by Facebook and pupils should not be forced to use IT systems of non-trustworthy companies like Google, which earn money by profiling their customers. Maybe my view is too German, but I think of education as an sovereign function of the state, where everything (theoretically) can be controlled by the citizens (yes, I know that this is some kind of optimistic). We should teach kids to think critical about centralization of data and knowledge and show them how to manage their digital lives with free and open tools which respect the users rights.

FD3SA 12y ago
Cannot agree more with this. Open source software is a perfect fit with public institutions. I don't understand why any government uses proprietary platforms. It would be cheaper and far more effective to hire a dozen open source devs to cater a particular platform to the public's needs, and have it be open and free to use forever. Developers aren't that expensive compared to software licenses for thousands of machines. As I understand, Germany and many European countries are heading in this direction.
- stephenr 12y ago
  While I agree that Open Source can form part of a good solution I think there needs to be a distinction made between proprietary software that the institution controls, and proprietary SaaS solutions like Google offers. E.g., In the 90s and early 2000's Novell had a big presence in Universities/etc, providing network systems such as eDirectory (their Directory Services stack) Groupwise (email) etc. Yes these were proprietary, but they were also controlled by the customer - if you wanted to switch to OpenLDAP or AD or whatever, you could dump your whole Directory Services tree to LDIF file(s) and import them elsewhere. If you wanted to migrate from Groupwise to something using MBOX or even to Exchange, there were tools to do so, and there was never any need to worry about "well what happens with the data?" I have no problem with a school or government using proprietary software, so long as the data created remains in the institution's hands, and is in a format that can be easily read by or exported to alternative formats. I absolutely have a problem when educational institutions say "yeah we're going to use this solution for email because it's free" - the students have no fucking choice, and there is little or no consideration given to how the company uses the data.

zyxley 12y ago

If I was a teacher, there's no way I would use this... privacy concerns aside, there's nothing to suggest that Google won't suddenly shut it down in two or three years when whoever is maintaining it gets bored of it, like Google has with so many other projects.

ChicagoBoy11 12y ago
This concern would not make a whole lot of sense for teachers. The matter of fact is that the stability and longevity of this service is far more certain than the typical length of LMS contracts in school districts or the length of time that certain online educational platforms manage to stay relevant with current technologies.
wsxcde 12y ago
Why would a teacher worry about something that might happen 3 years down the line? You only need this to work for a particular term or semester.
- sosuke 12y ago
  Because learning new products each semester or term is a PITA? Just imagine how long books last in a curriculum, there is nothing that iterates quickly in education. A question though is do all teachers use the same software in a school or is it all ad-hoc?
  - wsxcde 12y ago
    It's not really new products very semester, is it? We're talking about an unlikely event that might happen sometime in future after a few years. A lot of professors have adopted Piazza is a relatively short time because it offers real benefits. And you could make the exact same argument about the longevity of Piazza. I think we ought to applaud anything that makes life easier for educators because the reality is that most academic software, or at least blackboard which seems to terribly popular and is what I've used extensively, is a terrible mess. I'm not dismissing the concerns about privacy and longevity but they seem to putting potential future problems ahead of real present benefits.

phantomenace 12y ago

Is this like coursera?

phantomenace 12y ago

People should go to a proper Uni, end of story. Anyone not getting a masters or PhD is not worth hiring, because they just lack brainpower and skills to compete on hard problems.

oneplusonephone 12y ago

I really don't like this.

Grazester 12y ago

Damn it Google. Over the summer I approached the government of my country to build a simple learning management system since they were about to start using tablets at the secondary schools here. Nothing has been finalised yet but I have a working model. If they go with what I am working on for them they would be able to run analytics across all secondary schools and they would own their data.

judk 12y ago
Send a resume to Google. That's life in business.
- Grazester 12y ago
  Funny. When I lived in the U.S. I was called by a Google recruiter. I don't see Google besting me here where it comes to the tailored needs.

acbart 12y ago

I got into the demo over the summer, and I was pretty underwhelmed. They list the features on the front page there, and that's exactly what they have. So in other words, you can manage a feed of assignments ("X is due on Tuesday", "Here is a link to a video!") and some very simplistic google docs control. I really expected something on the level of Canvas or Moodle, but it's clearly just a few convenience features for running GAfE.

ChicagoBoy11 12y ago
My thoughts exactly. I am in charge of Canvas at our school, and we are deploying Google Apps for Ed. next year. Not thinking of using Classroom at all - at least not with the current feature set.
- teach 12y ago
  On the other hand, at my school we ALREADY have a lot of teacher using Google apps with their students. The clever ones have been able to cobble together something decent using gmail, google drive, calendar, etc. Google Classroom streamlines what they were already doing. And it will allow some less-technically-savvy teachers to do some of the same things.
  - acbart 12y ago
    And I think it has a strong sell for just that - It has good features now, I just want MORE features. I'm hoping this is just the start of something bigger.
- sjy 12y ago
  What are the missing features that your school needs? I'm not sure how things work at primary and secondary level, but I used various LMSes at university over 7 years and never found any use for features beyond the ability to download lecture notes.

vfgf 12y ago

Does it require Google Account for each student? What if student doesn't want account, and doesn't agree with Google Terms of Service?

josefresco 12y ago
I don't know which would be more concerning, Google's terms of service, or the school's acceptable use policy.
jestinjoy1 12y ago
Yes it needs.
boydjd 12y ago
Of course it does. It also requires the institution to have a Google Apps for Education account, which usually means that the University email accounts are all Google Accounts anyways.

jestinjoy1 12y ago

What I dislike about Google Classroom is students need institution email address for logging in.

raldi 12y ago
Why does that bother you?
- VLM 12y ago
  I will post for my kids who suffer under the same restriction, that it's yet another email address they don't/won't use, but the admin types will only use it for CYA purposes. So risk adverse administrator sends email to the unused address that its "dress like a hippie day" on thursday and 99% of the students don't check an unused addrs so they never know. "Obviously" they just need an email forward feature, but of course that would require admin effort for the kids that screw it up or intentionally create mail loops or mess with another kids account, so for CYA reasons that can't be done. So the net effect is we've gone from a modest amount of paper correspondence to no correspondence at all because the tech doesn't work and nobody is interested enough in the message to fix it. Another problem is for privacy reasons each kids email looks like "a java GUID"@something.k12.edu and nobody wants to use an address or username like that. ts impossible to remember their email addrs or passwords (they're written down on stickers on their devices) but I think it would be funny if its not "a java GUID" but actually their SS numbers run thru md5 or something even dumber from a security perspective. As an adult, I have an email address like that from my cable company. I don't even know what my cable company email addrs is, much less its password. I've never used it and never will. God only knows how much marketing spam the cable co has sent to it. Maybe electronic bills too, who knows.
  - raldi 12y ago
    If the student account does support forwarding, would that put to rest all of your concerns? I think it's a false comparison to say it's like your cable address; a school has a multitude of good reasons for wanting to send email to its students. A cable company has mostly terrible reasons.

jrells 12y ago

As much as I would love for educational institutions (and government in general) to fund open source projects to solve their needs, that doesn't seem very realistic right now. Maybe when startup culture becomes the norm. The people who make decisions about technology purchases in education are, in my experience, non-technical and highly risk averse. They pay absurd prices for outdated software. There is little pressure to create a better product. I have to use Moodle for my teaching, and I'm sure anything Google creates will be far superior. This was at the top of my startup ideas list, but I'm glad someone is working on it.

gerbal 12y ago
The problem with open source software in academia and education is the price. The cost of hiring a developer to maintain and support a piece of software is more often than not far more than the cost of a software license from a company that provides decent quality support and customer service.

giardini 12y ago

Why tie yourself to the current state of technology (keyboard, pc, printer), which may be defunct in 8-15 years? Let the kids learn to use computers but limit it specifically to that. In the classroom emphasis should be on teaching the subject (and let them use pencil, pen and paper). And I'm appalled that public schools now teach computer skills but have abandoned cursive writing.

tnorthcutt 12y ago
This reads like "technology will change, so don't let kids use modern technology in the classroom". Why not just keep up with the changes?
- giardini 12y ago
  If I were selling computers/computer technology then I would want to sell them to millions of children over and over endlessly and make billions of $$. With each new gadget, I'd want to sell all over again. Schools and the current malfunctioning education systems are an infinitely deep money pit for computer vendors/technologists to dip into: parents will toss $$ into the pit so that their children can "keep up with the Joneses'". The only worse set of predators on society are politicians and childrens' cancer research institutes (and, in the latter case, your child will die anyway). Schools obviously can't keep up with the changes: they've dropped cursive writing so that your child can play tic-tac-toe on a computer. Your son or daughter likely signs his/her name with block letters. If so, your child is, IMO, illiterate and here is your child in 15 years: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 (this used to be funny but under the current political administration it has become a clear probability). Current technology will be defunct in 5-10 years. Children are taught skills that will be as useful as navigating the Commodore 64 operating system. Instead they should learn current technology outside the classroom. My pet peeve: cursive writing, tied to higher-level cognitive functioning in the brain, is no longer taught: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/30/should-schools-require-children-to-learn-cursive/the-benefits-of-cursive-go-beyond-writing http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/30/should-schoo... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-hand... http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-writing-hand-could-make-you-smarter http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-... Signed, X

infinitebattery 12y ago

Senior at the International Academy here (a public high school in Michigan). One of my classes uses Google Classroom. I think that Google truly took a "Google Plus" look and morphed that into a website for teachers. I love how it has a clean and easy to use UI. The assignments are on a side bar, announcements are clearly displayed in a "stream". You can easily post a message to your class, and you have access to everyone's email (making it easy to communicate). Teachers in my school have used three platforms. Moodle, Google Classroom, and Edmodo. Quite frankly, I have come to like Edmodo much more. They're identical to Facebook, but the layout is so much better than the alternatives (in my preference). Edmodo has truly thought everything out.

freshflowers 12y ago

10 years ago, people would have welcomed this. Today, the brand Google is a red flag for any school that cares about their reputation and any parent who cares about their child's privacy. It's utterly unsellable unless Google follows the old "evil" Microsoft route and simply bribes schools. And even that won't be enough to counter the shit storm that will hit any school that delivers the privacy of it's students into the hands of Google. (The link sends me to the Dutch version of this. Google is seriously tone deaf it they think they can still sell this here.)

gerbal 12y ago
Google has quite a good history of keeping private information private. Unless I'm mistaken. In anycase, Chromebooks are quite popular in education, and the efficient integration of services at a low (or free) cost outweighs any unsubstantiated privacy concerns.
cromwellian 12y ago
The reality of Google's brand image is different. Schools don't buy software based on privacy and the privacy policies of much of the software being used by schools is often worse. Maybe it won't sell in EU, but you don't need the EU to run a successful profitable business.
- chestnut-tree 12y ago
  "Schools don't buy software based on privacy" They should do in my opinion. I find it depressing that so many people overlook or dismiss privacy concerns, particularly where kids are concerned. The kids who are asked to use Google classroom have no choice in the matter since the decision is made by the school. That means they must sign up for a Google Account regardless of whether they want one. It's the responsibility of the adults to evaluate the impact of the software they choose. And privacy should be one of the top concerns for anyone evaluating software for educational use in my view. Google's educational privacy policy [1] is carefully worded to state that they do not mine the content you upload to Google classroom ("Your data is yours"). What they don't state is whether they track the activities of school students and what this actually entails. How is that data aggregated? Who sees that data inside Google? Is the data anonymised? Or is it tied to an individual student? Given that you must enter a date of birth to create a Google Account, Google is capturing very specific and personal details of thousands, perhaps millions of students. Over time, Google will have amassed a staggering amount of information about the behaviour and activities of these students and will continue to do so into their adult lives (if the students continue to use their Google Account). If Google isn't tracking the online activities of Google classroom users, why do they not simply state that? [1] https://www.google.com/edu/privacy.html https://www.google.com/edu/privacy.html

cognivore 12y ago

Well, I can't even take it seriously, because I fully suspect that 3 to 5 years down the road Google loses interest in the product and decides to drop it. Then all the investment the schools and teachers have made is lost. If Google didn't have a habit of killing their own products I'd maybe take the time to actually think about their products.

pelasaco 12y ago
a good point.

ap22213 12y ago

How does this get around the US FERPA and COPPA regulations?

EGreg 12y ago

Usually it goes like this: In-house solutions -> Centralized commercial offering -> Open source installed on premises

pdevr 12y ago

If you want to use open source software for this, Google has released Course Builder[1] a while back. Caveat: It uses App Engine, as far as I know. [1] https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/ https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/

mikeleeorg 12y ago

If you are not a teacher or student actively using Google Classroom, you should pay attention to the comments from teachers and students here. Or go talk to a local teacher for their impression. I've been doing that and the general response is overwhelmingly positive. Others have already stated why. I would like to amplify those sentiments: + Many alternative solutions on the market are generally considered to be sub-par, such as Moodle, Blackboard, etc. (I personally love the open source concept behind Moodle and have high hopes for them, but their implementation is oudated; fortunately, they know this and are working on it.) + Home-grown solutions are generally very poor for all kinds of reasons, including inability to find technical talent, bureaucracy and mismanagement, lack of budget, lack of project management, etc. + Google has a strong positive brand with teachers. While privacy concerns are growing, the overall community doesn't have the same stigma with Google that many readers of HN have. Google Apps for Education (GAFE) already had a decent footprint within schools and Google Classroom is piggybacking off of that penetration. With that said, concerns about privacy, being operated by a separate for-profit, and comprehensiveness of features are great points and present ample opportunities for aspiring competitors. In some ways, Google Classroom just stepped up the game. If this causes anyone to release even better software for teachers and students, that's a great thing for teachers and students.

owenversteeg 12y ago

I have a younger brother in high school that has to use Google Classroom/Chromebooks/Google whatnot. Ask him anything through me. What I've heard so far: - It sometimes acts weirdly - When it emails an assignment, the full text of the assignment is put in the title, resulting in comically massive titles. - Using it at the same time as a personal gmail account is strange/not fun - It doesn't have as many features as Edmodo (what the school was using before)

cviedmai 12y ago

I never quite understood why everybody thinks storage should be in the local server and cannot be provided by a private company. IMHO, storage is a commodity. Would you argue that schools need their own power generators because otherwise they'll be submitted to private companies? Should schools also have their own satellites and internet connections? If the data is sensitive why not just encrypting it when is stored the same way we do when we need to transmit something over the wire? Now, from the school POV I think if they go for a private solution they should demand open standards (avoid being locked in) and appropriate SLAs.

dkarapetyan 12y ago
Because if all the computation is still happening on the remote server then that remote server has access to whatever encryption key was used. That defeats the whole purpose of what you're suggesting. Which means you have to shuttle the encrypted data to some private server, decrypt it, and then operate on it which means you might as well just host it locally. The only way this works is if we get practical homomorphic encryption at which point storage truly becomes a commodity and that's when Google loses all interest in hosting that data.

MattWard 12y ago

this looks awesome.

brayan123 12y ago

play

brayan123 12y ago

play

brayan123 12y ago

play