Under the latest worldwide development and issues, Google Classroom has become the talk of the town. It has emerged as an excellent alternative for any educational institute’s physical classes and a revolutionary step towards a future of digitized education. Backed by a trustworthy name like Google, Classroom has successfully helped educational institutes to provide their students with a regular dose of learning.
Hence, students never got deprived of their right to education even if the institutes get closed, and the flow of knowledge kept going. Read till the end to know; the benefits of using Google Classroom.
What is Google Classroom?
Google launched Google Classroom in 2014 to streamline the online learning experience. This free web service aims to simplify education’s complex digitalization and introduces a proper system for assignments, projects, and gradation. The main feature of Google Classroom is an effective and efficient file-sharing system between students and teachers.
Google Classroom manages the communication and engagement between teachers and students by integrating Google services like Calendar, Slides, Docs, Gmail, and Sheets under an efficient platform. The working and the interface of this service have been kept very simple for everyone.
Students enter a class through the private invitation codes provided. Either by a teacher or the primary school domain. The environment created by Google Classroom allows teachers to create, share, and grade assignments very quickly.
Data from every class in Google Classroom remains secured in the cloud-based Google service called Google Drive. Students’ projects and assignments are submitted in the Drive for assessment by teachers. Teachers can also continuously track every student’s progress by observing a document’s revision history and providing valuable comments.
Moreover, to further ease this e-learning process, Google Classroom was launched as a mobile application in 2015 for Android and iOS platforms. It allows users to take pictures, integrate them into the assignments, share data from other applications, and have offline accessibility. And like other G-Suite learning services, Google Classroom is ad-free, doesn’t access user data, and is free to use.
Benefits of Using Google Classroom
As per the latest reports, Google Classroom users lie somewhere between 40 to 100 million people. Listed below are some of the benefits of using Google classroom.
1. Better Student Engagement
Moving over from the monotonous education system in schools and colleges, Google Classroom has successfully opened up a whole new world of virtual teaching. With advanced technology and digitalization merged with the study courses, students will be fascinated and more engaged with the process.
Teachers teaching through virtual classrooms allow them to look upon every student individually. The most important aspect of Google Classroom is its convenience and smooth interface. It helps every user learn about its features, get familiar with this system faster, and ups the engagement quotient a lot.
2. Organized Classroom
Teaching is never an easy profession. Teachers often get caught up in a cycle of frustration because of the sheer amount of paperwork they go through daily. There are also high chance that an important document can get lost time in this chaos. From a student’s point of view, this issue of unorganized schoolwork makes it hard for them to keep up with the curriculum.
However, Google Classroom effectively solves all of these issues. It is a cloud-based system that stores all essential documents safely. Moreover, anyone can access the Google Classroom software from anywhere on earth with a device having an active internet connection.
3. Paperless Classroom
Google Classroom provides scope for every teaching organization to go paperless. Under normal circumstances, a teacher needs to make thousands of copies and go through much paperwork for their students, which can pose severe financial issues and confusion.
But Google Classroom provides a realistic solution to this problem. Now, every teacher can create a single document and share it; with the students. Hence, students can easily access these files through their PC and mobile phone.
4. Observing Student Development
According to many people, the absence of physical classes shadows the real-time progress of a student. They believe someone cannot achieve the engagement between a student and teacher existing in a physical classroom through online formats.
But with Google Classroom, tracking a student’s progress in real-time becomes one of the most critical aspects. This service by Google allows teachers to witness all the students’ projects and note their progress. Also, teachers can exchange comments regarding those assignments, thus, striking a conversation in real-time with students.
5. Conducting discussions
Engaging in an insightful conversation and debate regarding the lessons and subjects taught is very important for students to develop their mindsets and give rise to new ideas. Therefore, it provides a feature of the Discussion Board that will allow teachers to post a thread regarding any ongoing topic.
They can ask questions to their students digitally, who need to answer them. Depending on the setting, these answers can be viewed only by the teachers, or they can allow the students to comment within themselves, thus triggering a digital debate.
6. Student Database
For any teacher, keeping track of the student’s progress is not enough to guarantee success. To determine these students’ overall growth, it is also essential to collect progress data from them and evaluate them. This challenging process is more approachable, thanks to Google Classroom.
Teachers may now access all of a student’s activities and assignments in one place. They can use this to their advantage at parent-teacher conferences, meetings with the teaching board, or conferences with the principal. By looking through these databases, a teacher might identify a student’s shortcomings and areas for improvement.
7. Assignment Organization
The shift from a physical classroom to a digital one; has significantly increased the importance of assignments. Grading students based on studies has now become more convenient than ever. Earlier, assigning students with projects would have been a painstaking task. Teachers had to go through a vast amount of paperwork and distribute activities.
With the introduction of Google Classroom, assignments have become a cakewalk because of the organizing mechanism of this framework. So, whenever a teacher develops a project, it gets organized in Google Drive. Moreover, when a student begins this assignment, the student’s name is automatically added to the Google Drive file, making the process easy.
8. Differentiating Education
Not to be confused with any immoral teaching discrimination, differentiating education is essential for every student’s growth. Some students are a little slow mentally from the rest of the batch in a class. And making them compete against the brainy people makes it unfair for them.
So, to counter this, teachers can now differentiate them with Google Classroom. Teachers can now create a specific assignment for these students and send them individually for their betterment. They can also use this feature with other projects, homework, submission dates, and study material, which were not possible in physical classrooms.
9. Student Assessment
As discussed earlier in this article, Google Classroom allows teachers to stack up each student’s data individually. This is important for assessing all the students in a batch. In physical classes, this assessment process is done continuously every day through all kinds of projects and examinations.
It also allows such activities for examining student development in an organized manner. Besides proving assignments and checking them, teachers can even start a discussion among students or take quizzes. This will help students undergo a continuous evaluation process, allowing teachers to create their grades and character certificates effortlessly.
10. Student Teamwork
Teamwork among students is an essential factor that every educational body prioritizes the most. It is vital to shape young minds and prepare them for the life that lies ahead of them. Student collaboration is done through group projects or homework given by schools when physical classes are going on.
However, in this digital scenario, group work can still happen with Google Classroom. After students are assigned group assignments, they can seamlessly cooperate with each other through numerous Google Applications available. Using critical applications of G-Suite like Slides and Docs can help them to set up their project for submission, thus promoting teamwork.
Therefore, these are some essential benefits of Google Classroom. Starting with this beautiful Google framework is very easy since the User Interface is straightforward to understand. Therefore, students and teachers will have no problem mastering this application within a short span. Google Classroom keeps the flow of education going even though schools or colleges are closed. Anyone can see this as a useful option for the digitalization of the education system.
Conclusion
That’s it; these are the benefits of using Google Classroom. You can also check; Why Teachers and Students Start Using Google Forms.
I hope the topic of Google classroom was helpful to you. If you find this blog interesting, then share it with your friends. However, if you are interested in any other topic, you can leave a comment below.
