Google Announces "Classroom" 143
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!"
"For advertising purposes" (Score:2, Funny)
But we'll log your interactions forever, freely available to anyone with a subpoena or NSL.
They just got caught doing exactly that... (Score:1)
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 the
Re:"For advertising purposes" (Score:5, Insightful)
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there probably also is a "...while they are students under the age of 18" clause in there somewhere... so once they hit that magic date, they can start putting all that data they mined into making some money.
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That's completely unfair - they'll decided to retire the product in a couple of years not only ceasing collecting information from those users but also leaving them stranded and without a solution because they'd spent the previous years stifling competition by offering a competent free alternative.
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Don't you mean buying the competition?
Local Infrastructure (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to see locally hosted servers so that I have some confidence that it's separated from the hive.
Re:Local Infrastructure (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, and I'd like to see volunteer teachers, so that I have some confidence it's separated from greed.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that completely reasonable pragmatic constraints happen within the confines of education all the time.
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Teachers get paid. Most places their salary ranges are a matter of public record. If they don't get paid, they stop teaching. It's an exchange where everybody knows what they're getting, and at what price.
Google is a for-profit publicly traded company with a legal obligation to make as much money as (legally) possible for their shareholders. They insist they're giving this product away for free, no strings attached. See the difference?
Re:Local Infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is a for-profit publicly traded company with a legal obligation to make as much money as (legally) possible for their shareholders.
This isn't true for Google, and in fact it's not true for many corporations.
What corporations are legally obligated to do is to fulfill the promises made in their articles of incorporation and in their statements to prospective shareholders during offerings (public and otherwise). Generally, these documents specify profit as the primary motive, but they often include caveats which allow the company to seek other goals alongside or perhaps even to the detriment of profits.
Google's documents, in particular, include a lot of such weaseling. The primary document to consider is the founders' letter to prospective shareholders [google.com] during the IPO, in which they set the expectation for the shares people buy. That letter specifically announced the intention of the founders to maintain control of the company so that it does not have to be motivated entirely by profit motive, and particularly not by short-term profit motive.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and hold a small number of Google shares -- most received as part of my hiring bonus -- but I don't speak for Google. This erroneous notion that corporations are legally obligated to generate maximum profits is one that bothered me long before joining Google and indeed I made posts very similar to this one long before going to work for Google.)
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Think through very carefully your proposition. Volunteer teachers would be ideologues.
Pretty sure that was making a point with sarcasm. And I think making a valid point.
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And those disconnected from "the hive" would have reliability problems and maintenance costs associated with having just a local school board's IT staff taking care of it.
I wasn't actually agitating for the thing I mentioned, I was drawing a parallel to another naive attitude.
Re: Local Infrastructure (Score:1)
Local infrastructure - or at least local to a given country - is important for this to be successful outside the USA. For example, in Canada, privacy laws require confidentiality that cannot be guaranteed for data held in the USA due to the Patriot Act. Even before the recent NSA revelations, it was technically illegal in Canada to use Google services for teaching purposes.
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Dude, it's Google! This for-profit, publicly owned company (owned by the likes of Fidelity, Black Rock and Vanguard), is of course giving things away for free with no strings attached! Everyone is so cynical.
weasel words (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:weasel words (Score:4, Insightful)
It's too bad the way Google shot their credibility to hell. A decade ago, there was boundless enthusiasm for everything google did, and now they've made it clear that they're trying to funnel you into their advertising-revenue-maximizing subsystems, regardless of what you actually want.
Re:weasel words (Score:4, Informative)
right - no sensible or aware person would willingly choose to get involved in yet another google boondoggle product.
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.
businesses that choose to get in bed with google 'data' are either ignorant or on the take, one way or another. no one with any respect for users will ever voluntarily choose to do business with google ever again.
Google doesn't sell your information. Period. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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It's too bad the way Google shot their credibility to hell. A decade ago, there was boundless enthusiasm for everything google did, and now they've made it clear that they're trying to funnel you into their advertising-revenue-maximizing subsystems, regardless of what you actually want.
Kinda the way television, radio, newspapers and other media work, just on a bigger scale.
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Re:weasel words (Score:5, Interesting)
A decade ago, there was boundless enthusiasm for everything google did, and now they've made it clear ...
Unless you were a complete retard, it was totally obvious what they were doing a decade ago as well. I don't see the big deal. Google offers lots of free services in exchange for targeted advertising. That is the deal, and they are very open and upfront about what they are doing and always have been. If you don't like it, then don't use their services. It is childish and silly to whine that they are not spending billions to provide you with something for nothing.
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Except for their education apps they insist they're NOT doing targeted advertising. Or at least, they insist they're not doing a list of specific things that might make you assume they're not doing targeted advertising.
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Right, those who collected bounties off letting the SS know where the Jews were hiding in Nazi Germany didn't actually kill the Jews themselves so I guess they're kinda ok.
Showing people ads relevant to their interests is not quite the same as gassing them.
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Can you prove they don't use scan people's info for other purposes, such as creating detailed profiles of individuals?
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Can you prove they don't use scan people's info for other purposes, such as creating detailed profiles of individuals?
No, I can't prove that. Can you prove that they aren't cloning an army of super-intelligent gorillas?
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Can you prove they don't use scan people's info for other purposes, such as creating detailed profiles of individuals?
Can you prove they do? And what makes you think the regular FTC privacy audits (from the Google Buzz consent decree) wouldn't catch it if they did?
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Well, why waste time and money gathering info if you're not gonna use it? Servers, network bandwidth, engineers, sys admins all cost a lot of money. It would be more cost effective if servers were installed inside the school and the school could then hire admins to maintain the servers.
Does the FTC have access to all source code that runs in the company and do the
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It would be more cost effective if servers were installed inside the school and the school could then hire admins to maintain the servers.
What?!? A full time admin, including health insurance, pension, etc., would cost over $100k/year. An basic Internet connection would cost 1% of that.
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Well, why waste time and money gathering info if you're not gonna use it?
You're the one asserting that the information is gathered. From what I can see, the information gathered is exactly that required to provide the services, and anything else is discarded.
Does the FTC have access to all source code that runs in the company and do they go thru it line by line?
The auditors have access to whatever they ask to see, I suppose. I haven't been involved in an audit, and am not likely to be.
They could compile the info by scanning your data, send it to some remote location and nobody would know anything about it.
Someone would know about it, notably the engineers that implemented it, and those that support and maintain it, and those that manage the network traffic, plus everyone near any of those people.
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Google is a giant advertising company. They rode an overly credulous public (led by geeks) to a market dominating position. Job well done, shareholders happy.
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Google wasn't a public company 10 years ago, FYI.
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"never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes" isn't exactly reassuring.
Yup - if a for-profit company like Google is offering a service for free, you can be darn sure they think there's going to be a financial return one way or another.
My guess is they are building a currently-latent profile that will be used for targeting ads once the kid leaves school - that's twelve years of information, and now they'll have a running start. They're almost certainly also building shadow profiles of the kid's contacts.
Re:weasel words (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
dont worry (Score:2)
like every other project google has started they will pull the plug a 2 years.
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This one has already been running for more than two years.
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Like gmail, and search, and docs, and everything else except the handful of projects they did cancel with a huge amount of forewarning and ample substitutes?
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I posit that there is no statement Google could make which you couldn't parse for loopholes, unless it comprised multiple pages of legalese.
I happen to know personally a lot of people on the Apps and Drive teams who would quit and blow the whistle if any of the abuses you posit were to happen, or even look like happening.
Never trust Google (Score:1)
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Two or three years? Aren't you being a little too optimist?
Another misfit project? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Google Apps for education is already several years old, and going strong. Besides being a way for Google to "give back" at almost zero cost, it's a great way to encourage enterprise sales (a non-trivial and fast-growing component of Google's revenues), since it gets the future workforce comfortable with the tools. This is a minor extension which may or may not be truly specific to education. I'd say the odds of it getting axed are basically zero, unless schools that use Google Apps don't like it and don't u
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I just remember how critical everybody here on /. was about the iPod. How many years ago was that?
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Please be a viable Blackboard competitor (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Please be a viable Blackboard competitor (Score:5, Informative)
I am the LMS Admin at the college I work for... when BB bought WebCT support dropped. We moved to Angel, things weren't much better and then BB bought Angel. When we started looking at new LMSes (LMSii ?) 2 years ago, it was decided that BB is a company we didn't want to do business with. Our short list got down to Canvas and D2L. We went with Canvas. It is Open Source (AGPLv3), it works much better than Angel did, and they actually fix bugs and implement features that teachers and admins want.
Re:Please be a viable Blackboard competitor (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Please be a viable Blackboard competitor (Score:5, Informative)
The work flow of creating classes, and the overall initial impression of the look and feel. We had a committee of almost 60 people - an instructor or two from every academic department/discipline, our IT department, my department (academic technology)
The big thing that convinced me to vote for Canvas was that in Canvas the HTML editor that is present basically everywhere you can input text has a widget that allows you to record voice/video direct from your computer (mic for audio only, webcam for audio and video), gets saved directly to Canvas, gets converted on the back end by Kaltura, and is served up in an appropriate format for whatever device is being used to view it. This is a big game changer for foriegn language, public speaking, any course that requires a student to make a presentation. Even changes math instruction - instructors can point a webcam at a piece of paper on the desk and work thru a problem, giving a voice over while showing the work being done.
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Take a look at QuestionMark they have some good stuff rolling around out there
Way better than Blackboard or Moodle echh!
Please be a viable Blackboard competitor (Score:1)
The only advantage of blackboard is that it's so fucking horrible that they can't possibly be successfully datamining.
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It could be worse. You could be stuck with Moodle.
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If Google really wants to create a LMS, the critical thing will be an exam/testing engine. Everything else - communications, presenting docments in a variety of formats, etc. can be done using thier existing tools. But giving a student a test, that is the tricky part.
could hardly be worse than the status quo (Score:2)
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.
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This is so goddamn true.
I hate Blackboard. So do the students.
Is anyone buying Google's "Free App" BS anymore? (Score:1)
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.
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I think their greater advantage would be the lock in effect.
Excellent... (Score:1)
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I'm not too worried about corporations knowing everything about me, but then again I'm also not a privacy nut.
I'm not too worried about the government and corporations tracking everything I do, but then again I'm also not a privacy nut.
I'm not too worried about getting molested by the TSA, but then again I'm also not a privacy nut.
I guess "privacy nut" is a term that describes people with a bit of sense, because with how often I see people defending egregious privacy violations, nothing else makes sense.
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You strongly implied that you don't give a fuck if some corporation has all this data about you. Unless you misspoke, that would make you ignorant.
The other things were merely things I've heard your comrades (other ignoramuses who mock privacy advocates) say.
So unless you meant "privacy nut" to be a good thing, which seems unlikely, I have to presume you were insulting privacy advocates.
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What it implied was that you don't give a fuck about privacy, considering the amount of data they'd be able to collect. What, because you don't care about a certain type of privacy, it doesn't matter? It's not just your grades (assuming they stop at grades, which they won't) that will be mined.
If you're willing to hand over random data to corporations, it is a very good assumption that you probably don't care all that much about privacy to begin with.
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Because I don't care that they data mine my grades, I don't give a fuck about privacy.
If you don't care about asshole corporations mining your grades, then you're an idiot. There's also a very good chance that you don't care about privacy in other areas. Maybe, for some reason, you think other data should magically be more private, but I'd say it's unlikely.
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Why shouldn't you? It's none of their fucking business. This whole thing can be used against you by companies who only see statistics in everything.
But it's not just about you. Educational institutions that use this garbage are essentially forcing many people to use them. That is unacceptable.
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I'm overqualified?
If you assume that grades that high really are a good thing. They might take it to indicate that you did not challenge yourself.
And not everything corporations or the government do is necessarily logical. The government could use this data, along with other data, to conclude that you may be a terrorist. With how they're defining "terrorist" nowadays, anything is possible. The worst part is that you have no idea how they're going to use the data or what they will conclude from it. It's better to keep the amo
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I'm not too worried about corporations knowing everything about me, but then again I'm also not a privacy nut. I'm not too worried about the government and corporations tracking everything I do, but then again I'm also not a privacy nut. I'm not too worried about getting molested by the TSA, but then again I'm also not a privacy nut.
I guess "privacy nut" is a term that describes people with a bit of sense, because with how often I see people defending egregious privacy violations, nothing else makes sense.
Let's see: lots of universities are already using Gmail for university accounts [ecampusnews.com]. The sky has not (yet) fallen.
Whether is pleases the tinfoil hat brigade or not, universities are moving to outsourced and cloud-based services for a lot of things that used to be done in-house. It's hard to see this as anything besides a net plus for education, since (in my experience at least), most university IT departments couldn't find their own asses with both hands and a special ass map. And their funding is getting
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Let's see: lots of universities are already using Gmail for university accounts.
Which is a terrible idea.
The sky has not (yet) fallen.
Many things which don't cause the sky to fall are still bad.
Whether is pleases the tinfoil hat brigade or not
Once again, people mock privacy advocates despite the fact that it has been shown many times over that the government and corporations collect a massive amount of data on everyone they can, and abuse it whenever possible. Especially after the Snowden leaks, such people should not be said to be wearing tinfoil hats, but even before that, it was obvious that surveillance was going on.
Both governments and corporations are fill
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For educational institutions, there is no fucking excuse to give in to cloud garbage, or for them to hand over data to asshole corporations.
I don't care how convenient or useful it is to you people; I have principles.
I certainly hope those principles involve being willing to pay the required costs, either in the form of tuition, or taxes. TANSTAAFL.
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Yes, they do (though it's not as if there was nothing before all this cloud garbage).
Catch 'em young (Score:3)
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.
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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.
https://support.google.com/a/t... [google.com] : "Phone support is available for administrators of Google Apps for Business, Education, Government, and Nonprofit accounts." Not sure how that compares to their Google Apps for Business stuff, but that has gone from mediocre to pretty good. I didn't loose anything in the great outage of 2014, despite having 3 gmail accts and using google docs with it. In fact, I've never lost a google doc in 6-7 years. And when you hear rants like this, there never seems the possibilit
My Use (Score:2)
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
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example
1)open window to chemistry course.
2)open window to calculus course
3) on chemistry course click on "assignments" link, arrive at the calculus course assignments list because that is the course you most recently opened.
later i switched schools and used the, at the time, much less featureful but much better designed ANGEL software, I was
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I've used Blackboard since ~ 2001 it's changed a lot over the years...
Google account mandatory (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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(I meant "looking at someone entering their password". Though the word "something" is almost acceptable there, if the children and adolescent are button-pushing drones devoid of critical thinking)
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Google Apps for Education is Google Apps for Domains, rebranded and with more controls.
You can't even tell externally that it's Google if you do it right. It uses your mail domain and your logo and nobody is any the wiser.
The only tell-tale... if you go to GMail.com and use your school address, it logs you straight in.
By what I've seen, the Google Accounts for Education are not "normal" accounts either - you can lock them down the same as on your domain - and even prevent user X sharing their drive with us
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Have you ever even met a teenager? It doesn't take Google in schools to get them using computing devices, this is something that they will happily do on their own non-fucking-stop.
In related news ... (Score:2)
Never again (Score:2)
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.
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Why do we need this? (Score:4, Informative)
[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
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Because not all education is to young-adults.
To the rest of the work, "school" means something that only children go to.
There, parents do have to supervise their homework schedule. They do have to be hand-held into completing assignments. They are managed by teachers who can barely login (so a plain HTML page is out of the question).
What Google has broken into is the VLE market - a growing, required trend in UK education sector, for example. And, yes, Google Apps for Education is available over here too
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The Microsoft solution is "do it in Sharepoint / Exchange". They are clearly targeting business-only. And though education discounts are good, they aren't free by a long shot. The home-brew method is beyond just about every school that doesn't have a full-time team of people.
The college I work for just went from locally hosted/managed Exchange to Office 365. According to our CIO, currently enrolled students are no cost, students who aren't currently enrolled are $3/month to keep active accounts for, and employees are $5/month.
Considering that we have 15k enrolled students per term (comes out to about 11k FTE) while not free it is certainly darn cheap.
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The Microsoft education licensing I deal with in the UK is tied to your staff FTE, on an annually recurring base.
What you install / do above that is up to you, but the base license certainly isn't free even if you can have any number of students / workstations for no extra.
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[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
I so agree and you have my mod points. The only, and I mean only feature I actually like about these products is that I can see the grade distribution (as a student). For some reason I always like to see what the highest and lowest scores are, also, how much I beat the average by. The only blackboard one needs is an actual blackboard.
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Yes, but tech knowledge and teaching ability/subject knowledge are two entirely different things. I'm a former classroom teacher whose job it is now to work with other teachers and help them use technology effectively in the classroom. There are some people who are great teachers, but they aren't great technology users. This looks simple enough that they could easily manage it.
Is slashdot owned by Microsoft now? (Score:2)
Sure seems like it.
Not until there is a guarantee of LTS (Score:2)
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I'd also like to see all data older than 1 year be wiped out. No adult should have their ability to get a job hindered by history dating back when you were 12. I for one didn't do all my homework and it didn't prevent me from doing very well in college and even better when my career started.
Dear Google, (Score:2)
I probably won't even bother checking this out. Here's why. [slate.com]
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You sound like a trained monkey. Please try and support this, use facts, references, logic and reason.
You cannot.
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Reality is overwhelmingly liberal.
Not overwhelmingly, it's just that reality has a well-known liberal bias. [wikiquote.org]
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Who says yanks are stupid? Seems to me, only those with an agenda.
1) Pissy jealous foreigners
2) Teachers unions *always* saying teachers need more money, smaller classrooms, and no accountability.
3) Corporations looking for an excuse to hire more visa workers.
When you bottom-line it, yanks don't look so stupid at all.
1) US Corporations: Apple, Cisco, IBM, GE, Microsoft, Intel, and on, and on.
2) US inventions - real inventions, inventions that changed the world, US has way more than it's share.
3) Universitie