No access to Blackboard or Moodle? Google Classroom is a great option.

Google Classroom as a great alternative to Moodle or Blackboard

Google classroom was a total unknown to me up to a few weeks ago. I had heard it mentioned at the occasional conference but I had never looked any further into it. I always had either Moodle or Blackboard to use as a VLE so I didn't look into the alternatives.
However, a few weeks ago I started a short course with students who were attempting to qualify to enter college and so did not have access to the college's main blackboard system. I find it very wasteful to print of reams of notes that probably end up in the bin and asking students to take down loads of notes seems like wasting time to me. I decided to look into what free system I could use that would be fairly straightforward for myself and the students.
And so I started looking into google classroom. It only took me about 20 minutes to go from looking it up to actually having a classroom up and running. I was delighted with how simple it was to get going.

For the most part I just used the classroom to share the class notes/examples with the students. The only "fancy" thing I used it for was to embed a quizizz quiz in the classroom as a homework assignment. This worked really well. As well as not having access to blackboard this cohort of students also didn't have access to the campus wi-fi. This severely limited the interactive ed tech I could use with them. I found the quizizz homework to be a good way to get around this as the students could do it wherever they had wi-fi access. It also meant that there was no log in code needed for the quizizz and also their results were tracked in the google classroom.

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