The Thing With Google: Reflections on Google for Education as an E-Learning Platform

With schools around the world closed, many students and educators are getting a crash course in e-learning. Educators are trying to make the transition from the physical classroom to the virtual one as seamless as possible.

As a Google school, our students and teachers are already well-versed with the tools that Google for Education offers. Previously we used Google Classroom extensively. With the current situation, we are using Google Forms for quizzes and Google Meet as a virtual classroom. These tools are not designed for education so over the past three weeks my students and I have come across a number of problems that hamper the e-learning experience. Here are a few of the problems we’ve encountered, as well as some proposed workarounds or solutions.

GOOGLE CLASSROOM

Problem: Student Submissions

Students’ assignments cannot be viewed by the class to provide peer-to-peer feedback to each other.

Feedback is unidirectional: only the teacher can provide feedback for students.

Solution

Teachers can use the Question Tool in Google Classroom to collect responses from students. However, Questions cannot contain multimedia; students have to include links to images, videos, and files.

Flipgrid allows teachers to collect students’ videos and allow other students to comment on them. Flipgrid recently rolled out a screen recording feature so now students can record their own computer or tablet screens.

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GOOGLE FORM

Problem: Marking Different Sections

Teachers cannot mark form sections separately. This is problematic for teachers who teach different sections of the same class and would like to direct different classes to different sections of the Google Form so that all questions are in one place. However, the way Google Forms auto-corrects is that it tallies up the score from all questions in every section.

Solution

The easiest solution is for teachers to create two separate forms for separate classes.

For those who consider themselves as spreadsheets gurus, teachers can use the Flubaroo add-on for Google Sheets and manually grade the different sections using the add subtotal function.

Problem: Text Formatting

Forms do not support text formatting. This is particularly problematic in science and math.

Solution

Teachers can write the questions in Google Docs, then take screenshots of formulae or equations and insert them in the form as photos. This is not an accessible solution.

Alternatively, teachers can use Unicode symbols to typeset superscripts, subscripts, and mathematical symbols. There are many ways to generate these on a normal keyboard or using a web service. Here are some examples:

• Superscript

• Subscript

• Degree symbol

Finally, teachers can create quizzes on a separate platform such as Edulastic. On Edulastic, you can align the curriculum to individual quizzes, and the service supports full text formatting. Edulastic is now supporting educators who are affected by COVID-19.

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GOOGLE MEET

Problem: Blurring backgrounds

Participants cannot blur their backgrounds. This is distracting for all participants, and is also a privacy concern.

Solution

On Windows, Teachers and students can install Chromacam to remove the background.

Teachers can also have synchronous meetings from Google Meet to Zoom. However, Zoom is often disallowed in educational settings due to privacy issues.

Problem: Chats

Chat texts can only be seen by participants as they are joining the group. There’s no history of the chat unless you record the Google Meet.

Solution

As mentioned above, teachers can record the entirety of the meeting, which also records the text messages in Google Chat. After the meeting, teachers can attach the transcript on the Google Meet or post it on Google Classroom for students to revisit.

Problem: Multimedia attachments on Chat

Participants cannot paste images in Google Meet chat. Sometimes there are concepts that are best illustrated with an image. Or when students are working through problems by hand, they cannot take a picture of their work and send it over Chat for immediate feedback.

Solution

A simple solution is to share screen to display an image or use the laptop webcam or phone camera to show work.

Teachers can also create Google Chats for each class. Google Chats allow multimedia attachments on threads and threads are recorded.

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Despite these shortcomings, Google for Education has enabled me and my students to maintain a semblance of normality during these uncertain times. E-learning on such an incredible scale would not have been possible ten years ago. The massive uptake of e-learning in the past few months will necessarily force platforms such as Google for Education to adapt. One can only assume that these offerings will continue to improve as e-learning becomes more prevalent in the months and years to come.

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