Online education has been becoming popular for a long time. However, the latest events touched the education system globally. Due to the pandemic, lots of schools and learning centers switched from the offline mode to virtual. As it turned out, adapting to the new way of teaching could be problematic, especially if you have never tried to speak to your students or try to teach them something through the screen.
Fortunately for both sides, instructors and students, today we have incredible tools that make it is at least possible and the most effective and convenient.
In this post, we want to talk about one of this great tools — Google Classroom. We are going to discuss the benefits of this service and the necessity of its integration with your website. We hope you will explore many useful things and simplify your work by following our recommendations.
What is Google Classroom
Google Classroom is a complete system for teachers to create and manage productive classwork for their students, where they can submit assignments and participate in different learning activities.
Nonprofit organizations and schools can use Classroom for free as it is a core service of G Suite for Education and G Suite for nonprofits. Also, service is available for free for individuals with a personal Google Account. Organizations may use Classrooms as it goes as an additional service in G Suite products like G Suite Business or Enterprise.
What is more, service smoothly integrates with other popular tools such as Google Docs and Drive.
Classroom allows teachers to monitor and manage classwork making it more organized and providing productive learning environment. It is easy for each instructor to create classes, distribute assignments, send feedback, and see everything in one place.
What Does Google Classroom Do
We can define Google Classroom (GC) as an intermediary between you and another great service Google Drive. GC provides students and instructors an easy way of managing classes and documents. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly you can do using GC.
Create announcements. You can quickly notify students about schedule changes or remind them about the assignment due date by using an announcement, which will be sent as an e-mail to the whole group.
Take assignments. Homework and good practical tasks are the key to successful learning. They help students to retain the knowledge. And GC is giving you the ability to make homework assignments for learners. You can create an assignment and upload the required files and documents for students to work on, and also grade their performance.
Keep learning materials. Any materials, documents and files you can store on Google Drive. This provides easy access to files and allows you to organize them depending on classes or subjects for example.
Key Features of Classrooms
Based on what we discovered in the previous paragraph we can highlight some key features Google Classroom has.
- Access anytime anywhere — classrooms are accessible 24/7 in online mode, you can also use it via mobile apps on any Android and iOS devices.
- Manage multiple classes — teachers can reuse existing content such as announcements and questions from another class, share the content across the classes.
- Add students easily — there is a special code for each class that students use to join.
- Keep classes organized — teachers can structure the classwork page, create, manage, and reorder topics.
- Keep students organized — by using Classrooms you can create a calendar with all the upcoming events, class dates, and due dates, so students can easily check the schedule of their class.
Summarizing all the above we can come to the following conclusion, Google Classroom is a perfect managing tool which helps to organize classwork and allows you to establish a distance learning system. But will it be that beneficial if you integrate it with your website or LMS already serving you as the digital learning platform? Could GC give an additional value to the educational website?
Why You Should Integrate It With The Website
Integrating your educational website with such a tool as Google Classroom makes your content synchronized first. If you as a teacher work on both platforms — website and GC, so instead of copying content and assignments from one platform to another, you can just synchronize it and save your time. Besides this, if you’re dealing with a big amount of classes and students, integration of GC helps you to organize the classwork and avoid the mix-ups. Link your Google Classroom with your website and systematize your classes.
MasterStudy + Google Classrooms
We can observe a similar technique on the example of MasterStudy LMS. Recently there was added a new feature of Google Classroom. When enabling the function you can integrate all the classes from your Google Classroom account with your website. Students will get special codes that they can use to enroll in a particular classroom and enter the class directly from your MasterStudy website.
It is worth noting that the MasterStudy learning management system is very convenient to use and will be a great find for all those who wish to conduct a productive educational business. MasterStudy provides an easier way to connect your website with Google Classroom, allows syncing of your rosters. With the integration, you can create your classrooms in GC to match the website classes. What is more, the setup process won’t take much time. Even if you are working with LMS for the first time, you will have no trouble setting it up thanks to a user-friendly interface.
Benefits Of Integrating Google Classroom
Convenient managing tools and structuring options are not the only advantages of the Google Classroom. With the right approach, you can use this service as a mean to improve communication among students, support the consistency of workflow, increase engagement rate, save your time.
- Consistency
GC can help you to support the consistency of your workflow. Easily distributing the assignments to students you also allow them to submit their homework prepared in any file types. All the submissions are neatly organized in Google Drive. You can access it anytime and check all the work been done. For students, it’s easy as well as not confusing using only one system.
- Communication and collaboration
Among other benefits, one of the best is online collaboration. Teachers and curators can initiate the online discussion with their students by sending a short notification to them. But not only students can interact with the instructors. They have an opportunity to leave feedback to their classmates by posting directly to the GC discussion stream. If they need help with the assignment, or they want to work in groups on the project, they can get immediate support.
Thus, Google Classroom boosts social learning and collaboration.
- Time Saver
GC service will save your time. Due to the one big storage where you can keep all the resources, you will not be distracted by any organizational work, which significantly reduces the time waste. This leads to the ability to complete other more important tasks.
- Engagement
Google Classroom offers lots of ways to make learning more interactive and engaging. It gives teachers the ability to create different types of assignments, attach videos to lessons, videos, and create collaborative group projects. You can ask students to complete the quiz after watching the video, for example. This will increase engagement and responsibility. It also allows the teacher to see the results at the end of the video, and he will be able to cover the material once again if students had problems responding with the correct answers.
- Feedback
Feedback is a must for online education. Lacking communication, you still have a chance to provide proper feedback to students. This makes learning more valuable and effective.
You can submit comments and grade the assignments. Getting the evaluation with professional explanations students will be able to work on their mistakes and fill the gap they might have for the subject.
- Simplicity
Google Classroom is incredibly simple. It doesn’t take much time to set up a new classroom and you don’t have to be a technical expert to do this.
What is more, Google Classroom is more cost-effective and better for the environment. When it comes to copies and printing, this service could be more cost-effective. Paperless approach and usage of any device connected to the Internet and every sheet of paper that you can save make your school more environmentally responsible.
The reason Google Classroom is great is because of the organizational advantage it gives them. Assignments never get lost and each classroom is already organized by the teacher. Students can share docs and work from home together.
The Google Classroom benefits both students and teachers. The combination of traditional teaching and the latest technology creates an incredible experience for everyone, making education more accessible and changing its face forever.