Google classroom: An enticing tool that can change your teacherpreneurship!

Google classroom: An enticing tool that can change your teacherpreneurship!

A couple of years ago I started designing courses for my business students bearing in mind two different teaching trails: a synchronous (live) one trail and an asynchronous moment. That way, I would provide my learners with multiple benefits such as more exposure to the language, more teaching/learning opportunities and an online educational tool that connects me with my learners.

At first, I used Asana, a project management tool that met my teaching needs back then. My students, already used to having project oriented lessons and flipped classes, saw great opportunities with the app. However, the app was not flawless. It was not user friendly and the learning curve proved to be challenging to say the least. That downside didn’t prevent me from using the app exhaustively until recently, about 3 months ago to be more exact, when I first met Google Classroom.

Google Classroom has all the benefits of Asana and even more. It’s way easier to use, it’s elegant, resourceful and designed not for project management, but for education per se.

Some possible ways to use Google Classroom:

• You may assign activities which will activate your learners’ schemata (previous knowledge) related to your lesson and save precious teaching time, allowing you to invest more in language clarification and freer practice.
• You can use it to keep track of your learners’ projects.
• It can be an assessment tool and help you to have your learners’ portfolios in one place.
• It may be your learners’ composition area, they can save their productions there for your analysis.
• You can use it as a flipped learning environment
• It is ideal for task based final product area.
• If you teach groups, it allows collaborative work
• In keeping with sales and pricing, your teacherpreneurship also wins. See how:
• You may divulge your personal Google Classroom as an online learning platform and you may customize it according to your learners’ needs, adding value to your business proposal.
• You can design activities there for your busy students who keep traveling and demanding more learning opportunities online, and include this option in your pricing package.
• You can double your learners’ exposure without necessarily doubling your teaching presence, adding more profit to your teaching.
• It will allow more learning opportunities thus adding more value for your proposal.

As previously said, Google Classroom is quite easy to use. You create classrooms and invite your student by email. In the Google Classroom environment you can create tasks with external links, documents from your Google Drive or Google Docs, write instructions and set deadlines. As soon as your learners finish their assignments or tasks you get a message on your email and you can correct their tasks. Your learners will see in real time your comments and/or final grade on their activities. You may also interact with your learners through messages and announcements, check who’s behind schedule, give feedback and design group activities.

One scary issue about flipped classroom is when you design your lessons under the premise that your learners will do the assigned activities and then they show up and let you know that they didn’t do what was expected from them. Google classroom allows you to see what was done and, in case students didn’t do their share, you can contact them and remind them of their activity. All very simple and in real time.

Since I started using Google Classroom and just stopped using Asana, my clients have never been happier. The same goes with my teaching satisfaction and teacherpreneurship. A tool I strongly recommend you start getting familiar with. You may get more info on the link as follows: https://edu.google.com/products/productivity-tools/classroom/

In case you already use Google Classroom, what are your thoughts on it?