On Monday I had the opportunity to play around with Google Classroom at ISTE for the first time. Being a long time Google Apps for Education user, the announcement this spring excited me, so I rushed over to the Google booth at ISTE as soon as I saw an opening. I sat down at the Chromebook they had running it, sat down and began to explore. The first thing I noticed was that it was hard to tell all of the classes in their dashboard view apart because of the limited colors used. Classroom is an aesthetically attractive application, there is no doubt about it. I made a few assignments, switched to a student and turned them in, switched back, viewed the submissions, graded them, and handed them back to the student. This all went well, but was very slow. I looked for a way to talk to my students privately that wasn’t attached to an assignment, and I didn’t see one. There also was no way for students to talk to each other. Huh.

After all of the hype surrounding Google Classroom, I walked away disappointed. At a time when blended learning is taking off, Google Classroom feels like a step backwards.

All of the new methods of learning seem to have been completely ignored by Google when they created Classroom, and the value it adds is minimal. Let’s take a look at what it actually does:

The only feature I saw that really drew me to Classroom was the easy way students and teachers could use Google Drive to hand out assignments and turn them in. But there are many other platforms that allow you to do this as well, including Schoology and Chalkup just to name a couple.

Now that we’ve looked at Classroom, lets take a look at Schoology and Chalkup to see what they claim to bring to the table:

When I looked at the Drive folder of the demo user Google was signed into at ISTE, I was taken aback by how cluttered it appeared. One of Classrooms claims to fame is that it manages all of the documents in your drive for you, and controls them. If you view the “Most Recent” view in Drive though, all you see are Classroom documents. This doesn’t really work for me, as I use the “Most Recent” view to see what has changed recently in my many shared folders, and Classroom just makes that harder.

Schoology has a fairly limited version of a Drive integration where they allow students and teachers to upload documents from Drive to their submissions and materials, but after that they are just regular documents.

Chalkup has a more substantial implementation of Drive with their system, where Drive uploads work everywhere, and files can then be copied to the students Drive straight from their site.

Both Chalkup and Schoology are also built to enable blended learning, but Classroom is not. In Classroom, there are no integrated discussions or any way for students to converse among themselves to work on projects or collaborate on work. There is also no gradebook, which just seems ridiculous to me. They include the ability to assign students grades on assignments, but you can either download the grades as a csv one assignment as a time, or view them by assignment. There is no way for me as a teacher to see the average grade a student has earned in my class, and my students cannot see their average either.

Now that I have used Google Classroom, Chalkup, and Schoology extensively, I can safely say that I have found Chalkup to be the better solution for my classroom with Schoology coming in a close second and Classroom a distant third. Chalkup allows my students and I to collaborate using engaging discussions, I can easily create new assignments that they can hand in using Drive, and it has a functional grading system. I plan on using it in all of my classes this coming year, and I encourage you to check it out as well.

Google Classroom was announced to much fanfare earlier this year, but it simply feels like a step backwards to me, and I will not be using it. Sure, it’s free and comes bundled with Google Apps for Education accounts, but it just doesn’t work for me. I would encourage all of my fellow teachers to look at the other solutions like Chalkup and Schoology, but to me it’s a fairly clear cut choice. I will be using Chalkup for all of my classes next year.