Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
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Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
On the one hand adding too much stuff annoys edu customers. On the other hand, it just has NO FEATURES, nothing you expect from "classroom" software.
For example, do you want to show an answer key to students after they post their homework?
Gotta do that by hand. Like a cave person.
@futurebird Interesting. By coincidence I just started using Google Classroom for an online Korean language course that I’m taking. I’m seeing it from the student’s point of view. I’m looking forward to see what others say about it. I’m so new at it I haven’t formed any opinion yet.
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Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
On the one hand adding too much stuff annoys edu customers. On the other hand, it just has NO FEATURES, nothing you expect from "classroom" software.
For example, do you want to show an answer key to students after they post their homework?
Gotta do that by hand. Like a cave person.
@futurebird It's ridiculous bc there's plenty of better LMSes out there now. But Google is "easy" and "cheap"
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@futurebird It's ridiculous bc there's plenty of better LMSes out there now. But Google is "easy" and "cheap"
That's not excuse for not having basic options and features that could save people thousands of hours of time.
Well unless you just don't really care.
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Blackboard was a hot mess but it was packed with cool features and if you learned how to... coax it to be normal. It was a lot better IMO.
@futurebird One of the best (worst) parts of Google Classroom is how every class (every 2 months), half the students can’t get their sign-on to work because they don’t have @ gmail.com email address and it doesn’t warn the teacher about this or give them any useful feedback in any way.
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@futurebird One of the best (worst) parts of Google Classroom is how every class (every 2 months), half the students can’t get their sign-on to work because they don’t have @ gmail.com email address and it doesn’t warn the teacher about this or give them any useful feedback in any way.
Normally when schools insist that teachers use classroom it's because they are using google to manage the student email system. So the login should at least work.
To force someone to use it but NOT have that seems kind of pointless?
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Google Chat (their Slack competitor) is...not to my liking. It is in fact, missing many if not most of the things one would expect to find in a Slack competitor, I'd imagine.
@rk @futurebird I wouldn’t even cal it a competitor and I hate Slack.
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That's not excuse for not having basic options and features that could save people thousands of hours of time.
Well unless you just don't really care.
@futurebird Oh I wasn't making an excuse for Google but for the institutions who use Google Classroom lol, though on the directorial level your point still applies
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
@futurebird but I'm too busy having nightmares about what they're doing with all the data they collect.
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The desire to just "quit and make my own" can be very dangerous.
@futurebird Google classroom is embarrassingly bad, and what’s even worse is that doing better for normal people would be pretty easy, and for a company with google’s resources it would be trivial.
(I am not talking myself into trying this either. Definitely not, that’d be foolish)
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
@futurebird
Speaking as someone who built LMSes for a living at one point, you're absolutely right and they're all garbage. -
@futurebird
Speaking as someone who built LMSes for a living at one point, you're absolutely right and they're all garbage.If I post a pdf to my classroom it takes my students 6 clicks to open it and 9 to download it.
WHY. Is this to make students come to the site more often and read it in the browser? It's not like there are ads? It just feels broken and badly designed.
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Normally when schools insist that teachers use classroom it's because they are using google to manage the student email system. So the login should at least work.
To force someone to use it but NOT have that seems kind of pointless?
@futurebird I think it’s mostly a case of it being a really small language school and they don’t have the infrastructure to self-host anything. It’s easier to just pay for a handful of teacher licenses for Classroom.
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@futurebird I think it’s mostly a case of it being a really small language school and they don’t have the infrastructure to self-host anything. It’s easier to just pay for a handful of teacher licenses for Classroom.
That makes sense. But, since you don't use google auth... in a way you are more free to look at other options.
But maybe they cost more.
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That makes sense. But, since you don't use google auth... in a way you are more free to look at other options.
But maybe they cost more.
@futurebird I honestly don’t know what other options are out there.
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@futurebird I honestly don’t know what other options are out there.
canva, blackboard, and a host of tiny ones that can be very nice.
canva is terrible in its own way (I'm told)
Blackboard is bloatware made by committee and very janky, but also kind of feature rich in a way?
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canva, blackboard, and a host of tiny ones that can be very nice.
canva is terrible in its own way (I'm told)
Blackboard is bloatware made by committee and very janky, but also kind of feature rich in a way?
just to give you an idea of how bloated blackboard is... it has a built in equation editor. (why not just LaTeX?) it's like the one in Microsoft word... but somehow ... WORSE.
BUT it can also generate and populate custom random matrices for your linear algebra students and give them a dynamic answer key. If you are willing to suffer to make it happen.
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If I post a pdf to my classroom it takes my students 6 clicks to open it and 9 to download it.
WHY. Is this to make students come to the site more often and read it in the browser? It's not like there are ads? It just feels broken and badly designed.
@futurebird
The competition is probably just as bad if not worse, but also Google gets market share because everyone already uses it?As for why it's poorly designed, it was probably slopped (and here I don't actually mean "AI" shockingly) together by committee. It probably had no user testing, no real design phase, and the people who designed it were software engineers, not learning systems experts. Learning systems are hard problems, and I can practically guarantee that Google didn't even try to solve them.
It'd be almost reassuring to learn that there was some nefarious reason for the shitty design, but sadly it was probably just incompetence. And again, I speak from experience as an incompetent programmer who was often asked to make decisions about systems which should have been made by learning systems experts.
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Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
On the one hand adding too much stuff annoys edu customers. On the other hand, it just has NO FEATURES, nothing you expect from "classroom" software.
For example, do you want to show an answer key to students after they post their homework?
Gotta do that by hand. Like a cave person.
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Carving the geometry assignment on the wall would be very similar TBH.
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just to give you an idea of how bloated blackboard is... it has a built in equation editor. (why not just LaTeX?) it's like the one in Microsoft word... but somehow ... WORSE.
BUT it can also generate and populate custom random matrices for your linear algebra students and give them a dynamic answer key. If you are willing to suffer to make it happen.
@futurebird I remember taking some of those tests (though I don’t think it was that advanced back then). I don’t know how teachers had the patience for that shit.
