Course inquiries & development

Hi Amanda,

In my experience, it's very difficult to clone/share Google Classroom courses between teachers. I've had many issues when "copying" a course that a lot of files do not copy over correctly to the new course. It is also very difficult to update documents (such as assignments) without updating each teacher's classroom manually. 

I also feel that Google Classroom is much more limited in how the course content can be organized. All the content is just in a big list and if you have many elements it can get overwhelming and difficult to find what you're looking for. The gradebook is also not very user friendly.

Just my 2 cents.

I'm in the NWT and we have all switched over to using only Google Classroom.

It has a lot of limitations in the kinds of questions you can ask, and automatic marking is largely gone.

For most teachers who never got into the coded side of tests, it works absolutely fine, and it is one single digital suite with email, and the live meets, and the resources all in one space.

Overall I've found it positive. 

I don't think Google Classroom is robust enough. It lacks many tools regarding student management, grading, data, and flexibility of overall design. I know some people love it, but I'd take Moodle over Google Classroom in an heartbeat. 

I've used both. As a teacher, Moodle is more flexible for creating course content. It also has some great teacher features like grade me that shows a list of what assignments still need grading. You can see when a student was last logged in and what they have looked at (and how many times). I have posted an example from a student. 

You can easily set due dates with cut offs (can't submit late without permission) for each assignment and give extensions to individual students. 

They both have rubric systems for easier grading. They both allow you to create sections for organization. Moodle allows you to create user groups so that only certain students can see certain sections. This works well if you have say a 10/20/30 level split class and want to use 1 Moodle page. 

For creating content, Google classroom is pretty limited 

Whereas Moodle has a multitude of things you can create.

I use the forum a lot where students can post photos and comment on each others photos for an interactive class experience.

Google works for a very basic online class. You can create assignments and Material. It certainly doesn't have the same features as Moodle for a virtual classroom and it doesn't have the same teacher tools that make online teaching easier.

If you are going to be teaching online, I would check out 

https://nearpod.com/

Which lets you create content that you can use with Google Classroom and Moodle

and 

https://www.mentimeter.com/

Which lets you create interactive polls and presentations to enhance your teaching.

I hope this helps 

Pax Crawley