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Google Announces "Classroom"
theodp (442580) writes "Meet your new 'Room Mom', kids! On Tuesday, Google announced a preview of Classroom, a new, free tool in the Google Apps for Education suite. From the announcement: 'With Classroom, you'll be able to: [1] Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly. They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students. [2] Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class. [3] Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what's due on their Assignments page.'
Addressing privacy concerns, Google reassures teachers, 'We know that protecting your students' privacy is critical. Like the rest of our Apps for Education services, Classroom contains no ads, never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.' After the recent torpedoing of Bill Gates' $100M inBloom initiative, Google might want to have a privacy pitch ready for parents, too!"
Addressing privacy concerns, Google reassures teachers, 'We know that protecting your students' privacy is critical. Like the rest of our Apps for Education services, Classroom contains no ads, never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.' After the recent torpedoing of Bill Gates' $100M inBloom initiative, Google might want to have a privacy pitch ready for parents, too!"
But we'll log your interactions forever, freely available to anyone with a subpoena or NSL.
I'd like to see locally hosted servers so that I have some confidence that it's separated from the hive.
"never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes" isn't exactly reassuring. Let's see. Could be used for research purposes so that someone else can make money off the results. Could be used to recommend mind altering drugs. Could be used to report "violent tendencies" to the government. Could be used to refine profiles for making advertising more effective on kids outside the class setting.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
They will end up shutting it down in 2 or 3 years from now.
Google is too big and its emerging power rivals that of any government by and for the People.
This is just another example of a massive corporation become more massive, except now your kids' minds are directly in play.
At what point will Google Curriculum be announced?
'We scoured the best teachers to find the best information to teach you how to be a good consumer and not ask questions.'
This has that misfit stank all over it. Google will be all excited to get it out into the world. They'll let you play with it for a semester or 2 and then it'll get the axe or be absorbed as feature bloat into some other project.
In 10 years they'll sell stats on your previous school work to businesses.
As somebody whose job is to work with Blackboard on a daily basis, I really really hope this puts the fear of God into Blackboard.
I don't even necessarily want to switch to this, just introduce some competition that Blackboard can't buy out, and has to step up their game to match.
I'm a bit skeptical, but the existing stuff is so bad that I might look. Google would have to actively spend many person-years of engineering effort to produce a system as bad as Blackboard.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm not. Every single "free" thing they offer has huge strings attached. Oh now they're interested in education? I'm sure they're going to HEAVILY mine it for the personal data of anyone using it.
It's like skynet meets firefly virtual classroom, scary and yet you want to see just how far the rabbit hole goes. An advertising company that happens to have a good search engine becomes the defacto name in classroom apparatus and is in control of all your data and grades. Let's call it a pre-employment screening process shall we...
I've tried to use Blackboard and it is a horrible waste of time and energy for little benefit. If Google can get something straightforward and simple out there, I'll be happy to take it for a spin.
My college currently employs moodle, but all of my teachers already link to google docs for their assignments, powerpoint presentations used with the Smart Board; all pushed into ppt and pdf to look at and study from later.. This would work perfectly as a substitute for moodle, which is terrible in some aspects. By the time schools incorporate it, i'll be done. Still, cool to see. I'm not too worried about my grades being mined, but then again I'm also not a privacy nut.
never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes
So your content and student data will be collected, stored, mined, aggregated, sold for all other purposes Google can profit from?
Ranging from giving them all to NSA, selling the homework reports for every students to anyone who pays, selling identities of students with poor grades to law enforcements to flag as potential future criminals, etc? Contrived as some of these were, none was prevented by their statement.
Paranoid? Or just reasonable prediction based on Google's MO?
Go look at Google'ss T&C's for this.
They reserve the right to go looking through customer accounts if their corporate interests (such as copyright) *might* be infringed.
Just like Microsoft, so you have to ask yourself "is it possible that Google (or one of the firms it owns) may feel that some student in my school may have infringed copyright ?
Also the T&Cs are the standard "if at any time we decide to have new T&Cs we can just do this by making some vague attempt of leaving a note that you probably will miss and in any case we get to choose where you can sue us.
I think their greater advantage would be the lock in effect.
Looks like Google wants to get children used to the idea of using Google Docs when they're young so that they keep on using it as they get older.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
The only advantage of blackboard is that it's so fucking horrible that they can't possibly be successfully datamining.
What about "Glassroom" , I hear transparency is big these days...
Moodle has been around since 2002. its open source and pretty easy to install and maintain. Google classroom, like most other google apps, ablates the responsibility of servers, networking, and an IT staff and in turn allows educational institutions to experience the full wealth of googles Software As A Service. Just imagine, your proctoring a major exam when suddenly your application just disappears in a fashion not unlike the massive gmail outage on 1/24/14. Google has no technical support, no publically available points of contact and zero fucks to give about your students or your lesson plan because you arent the consumer, you're the product.
the SaaS classroom is the ultimate opportunity to determine what a target demographic understands and how they understand it in the context of the larger world. If kids are all learning about the importance of the american revolution, but failing homework and exams, Google can take advantage of this by incorporating answers into its search results. Maybe iced tea companies would see their advertisements placed more prominently for this specific social studies class so as to exploit the subconscious link between the boston tea party and their product. More importantly, the ability to understand mathematics and science could be used to determine a basal comprehension level, which in turn may affect whether your advertisements are for TMZ and blingies or private colleges and bookstores. This is no different than a pharmaceutical company studying how angus cattle chew their cud so as to better learn what varieties of grains will best deliver their antibiotic.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I use Blackboard (9.1) and do like it. I also use Google Docs with my students (I use it for virtual office hours), so we can review papers together (while talking on the phone, make mutual edits, Etc.). One issue I have with Blackboard is there isn't a great way to hand in assignments; I do it in a discussion forum. I'm really eager to see what Google comes up with.
That said, given Google's track record, I'm really concerned that this system might not last long. I can't imagine what would happen if/when it goes away in the middle of a term; I wonder if Google is willing to guarantee Classroom for X # of years.
FYI I am an Adj. Instructor at a College in NYC. I also provide commentary about Technology in Higher Education for the FIR Higher Ed Podcast (http://forimmediaterelease.biz/index.php?/weblog/C20).
http://www.hawknest.com/
This is obviously to get people hooked at a younger age and create a generation of even more dependant people.
You used to be able to do classwork and homework with just paper, no tech giants involved, no e-mail sent to you by the teacher, no real time data of what everybody has done by the minute.. If you had to write an essay till Thursday, nobody would know before Thursday 2 AM that you've not written anything yet.
The pupils (I don't think you're a "student" at high school) will be tied to a keyboard or tablet for the most basic of interactions, and in the folowing years will be incapable to live without tech gadgets in direct reach at all time so smart phones and the reduced capability computer that are tablets will be virtually mandatory if you don't want to end up as beggar on the street, just like a car got mandatory in the second half of the 20th century. Google services and Android will profit (and a few competitors and fuckbook). Extreme consumerism will be unescapable. You will need more and more dirtily-made LCD displays and li-ion batteries to not get shunned.
The privacy is not limited to advertisers.. With such systems the teachers and parents will have too much data already, or even the pupils themselves. Data will leak in various ways (if only by way of copy-paste, screenshots, forwarding and looking at something entering their password)
Then when you leave high school you have to take a conscious approach into not using Google services and such, else you will get data mined, as Google effectively promises it.
Whenever some service talks about 'outside the classroom' it's a giant mess. Teachers forget that students have their own lives with their own concerns, not to mention a whole mess of other classes. Leave people alone when they're not in class, let them work on their own time.
Have gnu, will travel.
Reality is overwhelmingly liberal.
like every other project google has started they will pull the plug a 2 years.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Considering how many services Google has started then discontinued over the years, getting this one embedded in your day-to-day life sounds foolish, no matter how cool it might be.
You sound like a trained monkey. Please try and support this, use facts, references, logic and reason.
You cannot.
[1] Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly.
To "create assignments", I make a pdf in my favorite pdf-maker, then post it on the course website (a plain HTML page with links), then tell the students about it.
To "collect assignments", I tell the students to email them to the course submission email -- shared between the lead instructor and the grader, if there is one.
They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.
I don't have the time to play policeman ("I see little Susie hasn't even started coding yet and the homework's due tomorrow"); if Susie wants my help she has my email.
[2] Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class.
I can best "improve class communications" by talking to the damn students. If they want to talk to me and I'm around, there's email or coming by my office; if I don't respond to either, then chances are I won't be reachable by google widget, either.
[3] Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what's due on their Assignments page.'
They can easily see what's due by visiting the course website and seeing "Homework 4 (link) -- due Monday, April 14".
Sorting things by assignment and by student is as simple as asking them to include their name and the assignment number in their submission, and running a perl script. For less technically inclined teachers, use whatever file-sifting features your OS of choice has.
I've seen highly-technologized courses run way off the rails, because there's a delusion that fancy computerization can take the place of talking to the students. It can't. The only instructional technology I really have a need for is:
1) The computers that we actually use (I teach computational physics)
2) A projector, so I can show them examples
3) A website, where they can download shit (pdf's of assignments and notes) and see what's due
4) Email
They've been secretly building ad profiles of Google Apps for Education student users even if ads were turned off by the administrator to show them ads on other Google sites. They give schools free Chromebooks and all, but they should atleast declare what kind of profiling they're doing to the students who are forced to use the Google cloud for student email. They denied it when asked, but couldn't get their employees and lawyers to lie in federal court, silently removed language about not tracking from their site and finally a few days ago turned it off! If not for a lawsuit, this tracking would've not come to light. Couple that with massive spending on lobbying compared to Apple and MS makes me feel uneasy. The below article makes me wonder if they use paying Google Apps for Business email accounts to build ad profiles too? Anyone know?
http://www.edweek.org/ew/artic...
"As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, the giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of email messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools. In the suit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising." ...
"A Google spokeswoman confirmed to Education Week that the company “scans and indexes” the emails of all Apps for Education users for a variety of purposes, including potential advertising, via automated processes that cannot be turned off—even for Apps for Education customers who elect not to receive ads. The company would not say whether those email scans are used to help build profiles of students or other Apps for Education users, but said the results of its data mining are not used to actually target ads to Apps for Education users unless they choose to receive them."
"Student-data-privacy experts contend that the latter claim is contradicted by Google’s own court filings in the California suit. They describe the case as highly troubling and likely to further inflame rising national concern that protection of children’s private educational information is too lax." ...
"Mr. Thiele said his district has used Google Apps for Education since 2008. Officials there have always been aware that the company does “back-end processing” of students’ email messages, he said, but the district’s agreement with Google precludes such data from being used to serve ads to students or staff members. As long as the company abides by those terms, Mr. Thiele said, “I don’t have any problem with it.” In an emailed statement provided to Education Week, Bram Bout, the director of Google Apps for Education, said that “ads in Gmail are turned off by default for Google Apps for Education and we have no plans to change that in the future.”"
"Those plaintiffs in the California lawsuit allege that Google treats Google Apps for Education email users virtually the same as it treats consumer Gmail users. That means not only mining students’ email messages for key words and other information, but also using resulting data—including newly created derivative information, or “metadata”—for “secret user profiling” that could serve as the basis for such activities as delivering targeted ads in Google products other than Apps for Education, such as Google Search, Google+, and YouTube."
"The plaintiffs allege that Google has employed such practices since around 2010, when it began using a new technology, known as Content Onebox, that allows the company to intercept and scan emails before they reach t
privacy is NOT what they exist for; in fact, they exist for 100% the opposite! to collect, sort, analyse and market your info to their real customers.
First: It is not YOUR INFO in the first place.
Secondly: It isn't YOUR INFO they are selling.
What Google does is they do next kind arrangement:
User (you) - Google - Third party Corporation
The third party does not get anything about you from the Google. But they get A LOT from you when you visit the third party sites like microsoft.com or slashdot.org.
When third party wants to show ads on their sites, Google gets to know that you have seen or clicked X, Y and Z ads. And then Google bills the corporation whos advertisements you have seen.
The third party doesn't get to know what ads you have seen, they only know you have visited on the site and how you have behaved on their site.
Google does collected your data of your BEHAVIOR. Like what URL you type, what links you click, what ads you see.
And then it sell the anonymity behavior data to researchers corporations and to own use. Example that 24 million unique users made search query with keywords of X, Y and Z. Or that 65% X, Y and Z services users are directed to sites via Google search.
Google DOES NOT sell anything about you. They don't sell your name, your address, your email subjects, your email content, how many person you know, who you know, information what ads you do click, or are you cheating your gay friend. So don't worry, your wife doesn't get to know it.
It is just sad that Google gets lots of lies from people like you claiming that they sell your info to their real customers. YOU ARE THE CUSTOMER, and every third party is GOOGLE CLIENT.
Google doesn't sell your information, it sell only behavior analytic data (big data as some people might say) just like governments do sell such by how many people lives in specific district and how often people move to there and out of there. Or how many cars move between specific points on the county roads. What is the income tax level on specific areas, how many stores and malls are on area and how people behave by criminal records by amount of arrests and convictions on specific areas. But government isn't selling or gathering YOUR INFORMATION but information of citizens and so on.
Sure if you are paranoid, you can believe you are so important that someone at government really starts to focus at you and follows you. It can be true as even your neighbor can follow and spy at you or you can stalk specific woman for a search of fuck buddy.
What you should be angry about, is what your bank is doing. What big corporations what those banks own are doing. What insurance corporations are doing. As they track you, the identify you as well as they can, they follow what you buy and when you buy and then they target ads to you and new sales or they deny your insurance benefits when action happens because the bank sold the credit card data to them.
Banks are the biggest evil there, you can't do anymore anything without having a bank account in western country. You can't rent a apartment, you can't get a tax returns, you can't get a contract for mobile phone as others can. Sure you can get a ticket from government to be assigned at your name to your wanted bank so you can withdraw your tax returns but it is huge hassle. Sure you can get prepaid phone but getting more credits to it is hassle.
Finally sure you can go and pay bills via bank without bank account but when you are paying 15€ per each bill for the bank, you do not want to go to bank and pay 4-5 bills what total worth is just around 80-100€ as you pay extra for that almost same amount.
Hell, in many countries you can't anymore even do a withdraw from banks or put money to any account as most banks don't anymore handle cash. And if you go to bank what is 80km from your location what still handles the cash, you need to pay 5-7€ to a bank from it.
There are thousands of cases every year where insurance corporat
So how come, yanks are stupid with all these HIGH TECH classroms et al.? Why are the lower tech countries BETTER than them at education?
In my class, laptops closed (unless it is a practical lesson by example) and eyes forward and ears open and participation.
Sure seems like it.
I will not try this nor recommend it until Google states clearly that this service will be maintained for X years. I understand that nothing is forever, but too many projects have been created by Google only to be abandoned within 2-3 years.
After a short testing period, the inBloom database tracking system created by a partnership between Bill Gates and Rupert "Fox News" Murdoch (yes, Slashdot never tells you betas that supposed enemies and opposites of the political spectrum are actually the closest of allies) has been moved to the NSA full surveillance program.
inBloom data gathering now targets the online database information of most schools- much of which is stored in 'cloud' services run by partners of the NSA, like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. The inbloom database (which, remember, tracks every aspect of every child's life in the USA) no longer has an obvious 'public' access point, but government officials, including law enforcement, can indirectly get information from this source under various programs.
Despite what the owners of Slashdot attempted to propagandise, inBloom had NOTHING to do with education services. This nonsense arose from yellow journalism, when disreputable technical writers finally dared to talk about inBloom to their readers, and actually WRONGLY drew conclusions of their own about what inBloom was 'obviously' about.
-Common Core
-inBloom (which Slashdot's owners only now allow discussion about, because they can lie to their readers about its demise)
-the NSA spy platform, Kinect 2, bundled with every Xbox One console, and originally a compulsory device in any use of the console (before the public backlash).
Bill Gates was the driving force behind each of these initiatives. And why? The greatest reason is his desire to out do Google in usefulness to the NSA, the US war machine and the full surveillance police state. But Google cannot be beaten. And Google is currently designed the battlefield autonomous war machines of the near future, so that the US will never again have to hesitate in the Holocaust of a nation like Iran. Google, of course, is the R+D arm of the NSA, and wants to be a primary R+D arm of the US war machine as well.
Oops! Wow that was fast but apparently Google has announced that Classroom will be discontinued.
I probably won't even bother checking this out. Here's why.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
GP here. Actually, my wife is a volunteer teacher at our local grade school. It's completely selfish; our daughters go to school there. However, yes, there are volunteer teachers. And given how little we pay teachers in Georgia, the good ones are effectively volunteers.
I support 500K students and teachers using google drive and it is painful. If you share a file to a group and you change the group membership, the new members won't see the shared files. When you raise this issue with google's enterprise support, they tell you to find a way to make it work on your own. When you ask the question on stackoverflow, the google development team doesn't respond.
Should you move key features of your business to Google's platform when they don't implement basic sharing features correctly? In general, the big problem with using Google is that they don't need to fix things they don't like since they make their money from search and ads. It is great that their products are very low cost but if they don't fix basic features needed by your business, it is probably better to pay a little more for a product with reliable support.
Yes, I'm a math professor at a Division 1 school.
So your workload is to create a document in a "PDF creator", edit another document in another lanuguage on another system (HTML on your department's website), where with a google account, I just use google docs to do both seamlessly.
Blackboard is from ass. I don't use it. However, when the flow of completed assignments is slow, I occasionally notice and identify a problem. Being a professional and too lazy to deal with 43 students bitching when they're late, getting that feedback in a nicely packaged form would allow me to easily see if the students aren't prepared for the homework. This isn't about being policeman, it's about getting feedback.
You can only "talk to the damn students" during lectures, and by proxy at recitations. However, a convenient bulletin board is not a bad idea. BB is from ass.
Stay organized by recreating a programmer every time is a poor use of a researchers time. I see no value in writing a script that will break when my students waffle between using their given names and nicknames, or tuning one to identify that.
You're advocating replacing an extant computer system with what should be valuable research time. Perhaps you should find yourself teaching at a community college instead of wasting a professorship.
Pissy jealous foreigners?
The same one's that companies cannot get enough visa's for and are fighting for more visas? Btw, they are not cheaper, they get the same level of pay in the BIG companies that are fighting hand over fist to recruit them. Why? They're smarter and work harder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPM_qX6sbNU
This is how American Universities teach debating. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is laughing at you all.
Funny how Finland is one of the top education systems in the world, and it does not use the American system.
Nobel prizes? Made a laughing stock by them giving them out to Obama et al.
and fuck common core
combined, they will produce a generation of complete and utter retards.
" Room Mom "
WTF? Has school truly become day care? I figure that all kids can now get their answers from the Internet on demand, so no testing is needed anymore aside from PhysEd. but still...
My guess is they are building a currently-latent profile that will be used for targeting ads once the kid leaves school
Maybe. My guess is that this is an attack on Microsoft. By getting an entire generate of young people used to Google Docs, they can kill Microsoft Office, and deprive Microsoft of their main cash cow. My son is in 4th grade in a California public school, and they already use Google Docs to do much of their school work. The teacher can see their progress, and track their work from outline, to draft, to polished report. It seems to work well, and I am glad to see Google putting more effort into it.
A wise man once told me: Any worthwhile activity achieves multiple goals. So is "Classroom" an attack against Microsoft (and Apple)? Very likely. Is it a way to build shadow profiles of kids so Google can target the child's profile (or even an anonyimized version) when that child becomes of-age (i.e., fair game)? Would make a lot of sense.
The contract wording doesn't exclude it, and once the information is in Google's hands, they can do whatever the contract allows. There's really no going back at that point.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Unless they implement things like attendance tracking, a gradebook, a solid method for it to interact with the school's SiS, and several other things, no school will consider it to be an LMS and Blackboard will have nothing to worry about. This will only be useful to individual teachers that want to use tech in their classes instead of their school's LMS (assuming it has one).
Silly remark. If Classroom can do a single thing better than Blackboard and that's worth using, some institutions may implement Classroom+BB(or Angel or Canvas or D2L, etc) and simply integrate between the systems to provide a "best of breed" type approach. There are costs involved, but sometimes the benefits outweigh the costs.
From BB's point of view, this is a threat as once that starts happening, it's a beachhead for Google (or an ISV) to deploy Classroom and standardized integration suite, and build up an existing customer base for which to sell other competitive features.
Just because one provider happens to provide more features doesn't mean it's invulnerable to disruption.
A possible response from BB would be to simply improve their product to prevent such defection, which would be a win for customers.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Reality is overwhelmingly liberal.
Not overwhelmingly, it's just that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Sure Google is getting something out of this. Duh. It really isn't about the data I bet (they already have almost all of that, I'll bet most studnets already use google gmail, youtube, etc.) I bet the big payoff for Google is, students use more of the Google apps and get used to them, and find out how useful they are.So in the future, they don't consider MS software to be the only possibility.
Students and teachers get a ready built tool that saves teachers time and gives students feedback.
I used to avoid a lot of the Google apps, not so much because of their data collection, but because I didn't want to be locked in. I didn't see an advantage to using them. But the Google apps are for the most part so good (and monetarily free) that the convenience outweighs the inconvenience of possible lock in for me.
Gmail, great
Google Cal, love it
Chromebook, used more than any other computer I have, because it just works.
I don't like to drink the koolaid, but when the koolaid is so damn good, and everyone else is giving me castor oil or hemlock, I'll take the koolaid.