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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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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
...well at least for the next 3-5 years until we decide to cancel this project.
neorush
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