Nowadays, we have smartphones, laptops, tablets in our hand through which we are doing things a hundred percent easier and faster than we could do without them. Meanwhile, we don’t even need to go outside for shopping, meeting, and attending parties as we are doing all of these while sitting in the living room.
There are smartphone apps, computer software’s and integrations, websites that make things easy to manage for us. Google classroom is one of the popular applications that comes in big help for students, teachers, and others.
Over the years Google has launched lots of great apps and integration has brought us many benefits. Google docs, google drive, Gmail, translation, Google photos, Google Classroom, etc are some of them.
Each of them is different in terms of work, features, and the reason for use. Among all the google integrations, the most common are Gmail, drive, photos, docs. But most of the people aren’t familiar with google classroom, forms, travel, earth, keep, Jamboard like options which also come with great advantages for us.
If you heard about google classroom but don’t have a clear idea, what is it, or you have got some reasons to use it and so you search for what is google classroom. Whether you are a student or not, you may need google classroom for your own purpose.
Let’s see what is waiting for you in the article. We are going to understand the world’s best free video collaborating application Google classroom below.
Contents
Introducing google classroom application
Google classroom is a free learning and collaborating platform implemented by google. In other words, it is a free-based learning tool used all over the world. It highly comes in handy for students, teachers, schools, businesses, friends, families and so other purposes.
Google Classroom is one of the services included in G Suite and was launched in August 2014. The goal was to make learning easier by avoiding the barriers of distance. So, it is successful and reaches all over the world as the handiest online collaboration tool.
In this way, google classroom has made the online learning process easier. However, it was implemented with the primary purpose of sharing files between students and teachers. So, you can use this as a streamlined assignments management system, collaboration, and communication tool as well.
To go deeper into this excellent tool, let’s see the features of google classroom and get what we can do with it.
What are the features of Google Classroom?
Google classroom has so many features included and since it is one of the google workspace applications, users can take advantage of the other workspace programs like form, docs, sheets, calendars while collaborating on projects.
You can find everything you need on google classroom. Here are some of the best google classroom features described for you.
User-friendly interface
We all know that Google always prioritizes the user experience and ensures user friendly interface to all its integration. As part of this, Google is always looking to provide the most upgrade settings for all of its applications by system update.
Similarly, google classroom also comes with an easy to use interface which has only four options to keep individual students or instructors stay organized. If you are a new classroom user, then open it on your device, input the email account to make your personal classroom access.
After that, you will deliver to the main screen of google classroom where you can see just four options above.
● Stream
● Classwork
● People
● Grades
In the stream section, you can announce something to your class, create and schedule announcements and also respond to students’ posts.
In the classwork, you can assign work to your class here. Use this section to create assignments and questions, create topic-based classwork modules to make things easier. Here you will find two options, one of them is ‘google calendar’ to easily manage classwork plans with specific dates and the other option is ‘google drive’. It will allow you to directly access google drive to attach files to your assignments.
The third section is people where you can see all the attendees in the classroom, including co-educators. From this section, one can invite anyone whom they want to join the classroom.
And, finally, grades section is one of the most important functions of the Google classroom. Here students can see grades given by the teacher for assignments.
Assignments
With google classrooms, teachers can create assignments and share them with the students. Teachers can submit any file as assignments that students can fill and edit as part of completing the assignment. Instead of sharing documents that reside on the student’s Google Drive with the teacher, files are hosted on the student’s Drive and then submitted for grading.
Not only this, assignments can submit letters for grading instead of allowing students to view, copy or edit anything from the returned assignments. Assignment programs can be run for all students or individuals.
Students can also attach additional documents from their google drive to the assignments if needed. However, the host can immediately close out the learning activity or can schedule for more specifying date and time.
Grading system
Assignment grading made easy by google classroom. After submitting assignments by the students, teacher can grade them as they want. Google Classroom supports many different grading systems and it allows individual pages for each assignment to make grading and sharing easy. Teachers can assign grades in such ways like,
Total points grading
An overall grade is calculated for you by dividing the total points a student earns by the total points possible in the class. You can create grade categories and setpoint values for classwork in each category. For example:
| Writing test | Listening test | Total Score | Overall grade |
| 90/100 | 95/100 | 185 | 92.5% |
The table shows that a student scored 90 points out of 100 on an essay, and 95 points out of 100 on a test. The student earned a total of 185 points out of 200 possible in the class. Divided, this gives an overall grade of 92.5%.
Weighed by category grading
In this grading system, teachers set weights to grade categories and the score is calculated and multiplied according to the grade weight. This system calculates as follows,
- Finds a student’s average for a category
- Multiplies each category’s average by its weight (as a decimal), giving category scores
- Adds the category scores for an overall grade out of 100%
For instance, look at the table below,
| Writing test | Listening test | Overall grade out of 100% |
| Test-1: 70/100 | Test-1: 90/100 | |
| Test-2: 80/100 | Test-2: 100/100 | Overall grade: 37.5 + 47.5 = 85% |
| (70 + 80) ÷ 2 = 75 avg.75 x .5 = 37.5 | (90 + 100) ÷ 2 = 95 avg.95 x .5 = 47.5 | |
| Category score = 37.5% | Category score = 47.5% |
The table shows weighted by category grading. In the writing category, the student averaged 75. Multiplied by the category weight, .5, this gives 37.5% for Essays. In the listening category, the student averaged 95. Multiplied by the category weight, .5, this gives 47.5% for Tests. Adding the category scores (37.5 + 47.5) gives the student an overall grade of 85%.
No overall grade
If teachers select no category for any of the assignments, it will be selected as no overall grade.
However, teachers can control the activity of the students and how they can edit or comment on the assignments. After grading, assignments can be returned with the teacher’s opinion, advice as comments when students can check and revise them. While checking, students won’t allow editing documents.
Virtual communication
If educators need to arrange live discussions with any students, they can do it with google classroom. As google classroom allows several ways to make two-way communication between the students and teachers.
They can do it by commenting on the attached google drive file. Besides, students can also post to the class stream in terms of communicating with each other. Teachers can send direct mails to one or more students through the Gmail option included in it. Teachers have the full authority to mute any discussion at any time for participants they want.
Announcements
If it is a long term learning program, then there may come situations when teachers have to make urgent announcements. It can be simply noticed about the break, deadlines, test, or any classwork-related announcement that needs to be visible for everyone.
Announcement isn’t counted as any learning material. Teachers can post announcements and can control the comments and replies section.
Originally report
It is a new addition to google classroom features that allow teachers to identify plagiarizes and ensure the originality of the documents. When doing research, students need to take the necessary information from the internet, books, and online discussions.
In this case, there are students who just copy the information the same as it is the real source and paste the information into their report. It’s called plagiarizing unless the students include cite source and citation mark in that.
However, the feature helps both students and teachers. It uses the power of Google Search to help students properly integrate external inspiration into their writing – while making it easy for instructors to check for potential plagiarism. Originally report works for,
- Compare student work against hundreds of billions of web pages and over 40 million books with a single click
- Highlight potential plagiarism and link to external sources within your grading interface
- Get answers quickly and avoid manually searching for web matches
- Enable students to check their own work for recommended citations up to three times before submitting
- Help students learn to build on outside ideas and properly incorporate them into their work
Archive course
At the end of a term, teachers can archive the whole lectures, courses to use them further for the students. Students can’t accomplish any modification of the archived resources as they only allow them to watch them if needed.
No matter if the teacher forgets to archive the class, students can still get it from the class’s page. Archived classes stored in an area separated from the active classes on the active class’s page. Until archived class is restored, it can’t be edited by students nor teachers.
Live class
This feature is recently included by google to simplify classroom discussion through Google meet. Google meet is another G Suite application used for organizing distance video meetings. Using google meet in the classroom platform, teachers can make hangout calls with up to 250 student’s participation.
Teachers can also participate in live streams discussing chapters and topics for the students from a distance. Also, live meetings and streams can be recorded for the learners who can’t participate and missed the live session.
However, it is a great addition for google classroom as there is nothing good other than creating live discussion in distance learning. In live sessions, students and teachers can discuss serious issues and can come to a solution through group discussion.
Organize simply drag and dropping
As Google classroom is perfect for large online learning operations, instructors and teachers may need to run several classes and discuss a lot of topics. Since they can’t capture the whole topic in a single discussion, they have to divide it into multiple classes to manage the whole topic precisely.
With lots of discussed and non-discussed topics, teachers need to be organized to choose daily topic discussions quickly. In the google classroom interface, teachers can organize classes in various ways with the help of classroom tools.
But now Google has made it almost easy with the new drag and drop feature. In the classwork page where all the classwork items and topics divided chapter-based, teachers can rearrange the order by simply drag and drop that to any species where the place they want
Accessibility
Google Classroom is accessible to mobile and computer platforms as it has distinguished applications for android users. Google classroom mobile apps launched in January 2015 for the iOS and Android operating system devices.
Google classroom mobile application provides more flexibility allowing users to take photos and attach them to their assignments, share files from other apps and also support offline access.
So, students who don’t have laptops or configured computers can use them via smartphones. But for teachers, as they are the host and controller of the classroom, they have to join using a laptop or computer.
That’s all the features of google classroom you should know as a first-time user. When you get used to it, you can do everything by yourself with Google classroom.
Frequently asked questions about google classroom
Google classroom is now popular for its easy to make online learning system. At present, people feel comfortable trusting Google’s product. As there always competition between tech giants to bring products and engage the highest people as the competitors.
Google has successfully created a distinguished reliable brand identity all over the world and is dominating over the other competitors in various places.
However, we know that there are so many questions that come when you are using things for the first time. We have tried to answer a few of them that people commonly ask about google classroom.
Who can use Google classroom?
Anyone who needs to collaborate with other contributors for any commercial or non-commercial purpose can use google classroom. Online collaboration has become so important nowadays. We need to collaborate for so many purposes and therefore, we need tools that can come in handy to all of us.
Google classroom fulfills the demand as it allows work together in a platform where users can share documents with each other, communicate and also grade for learning operations. So, it is clear that google classroom can use anyone who has got reasons to use this.
Is google classroom free?
Yes, google classroom is a free learning tool included in the Google G Suite workspace. Schools that use Google apps for education can access them free of cost and take advantage of its features. There is also a paid G Suite Enterprise for Education tier that includes some additional features like advanced video conferencing, advanced security, and premium support.
The paid promotion requires only $4 per use, per month. But if you think that you don’t need the advanced option of google classroom, then you can go with the free version as well.
What can you do with Google classroom?
Google classroom comes in handy in several requirements. So, one can use google classroom when they have got any of the following situations. In such situations, google classroom is the best option to deal with and manage things simply.
Here are some reasons to use google classroom.
- Sharing resources
- Video meeting
- Made online learning super easy and cool
- Classroom collaboration for schools
- Great platform to manage online assignments and grading
- Good platform to perform in live video
How do you sign in to google classroom?
Google makes it almost easy to sign in to any of its applications as it is just a click you need to get access to any of them. But wait, it will be possible if you have a personal Google account. You may have heard of the Google slogan “One account all of Google”.
That is true almost, once you have a google account, you can access all the free Google services such as google docs, sheets, drive, photos, classroom, Gmail, and so on. So, it is clear that you can access google classroom with just a google account.
But if you want to sign in through your school account, you need to ask a teacher to know your Google Workspace for Education account details.
To access google classroom from your computer, search for google classroom on the browser. And if you are an android user, then get the classroom app from Appstore and start using it.
How to use google classroom on PC, laptops, or Mac?
You can use google classroom no matter if you are a PC, laptop, or Mac user. You can still use google classroom on your screen with your personal or school email address and password. Just Go to the browser > type https://classroom.google.com/ or you can get it by simply typing Google classroom and Boom! It will appear in front of you.
The next screen is the sign-in other option for google classroom. You have to choose the Gmail which you want to use as classroom identity. Then you can use google classroom even if you are a PC, laptop, or Mac user.