Using Google Classroom Alone? It Might Not Be Enough.

Imagine it’s lunchtime. Your stomach is growling. You walk to the refrigerator, dreaming about the food you’ll find there to satisfy your hunger. But when you arrive, all you find is an empty ice tray, two slices of American cheese, and an old fruit cake. The refrigerator is there, sure. It’s doing its job: it’s holding food. But in terms of helping you meet your goals—filling your stomach—it’s falling short.

Google Classroom, by itself, can be a little like that. It’s a great vessel for educational content, but in terms of fulfilling the needs of today’s high school math educators, it falls a little short. The fact is, however, that a lot of educators are teaching online today, and most of them are using Google Classroom or Google Drive exclusively, according to a recent Forbes article.

A recent study from the educational communications company ClassTag showed that over half of the teachers surveyed were “not prepared to facilitate remote learning.” In fact, many of them said that they alone were responsible for deciding which online and remote tools to use for their lessons. Considering the ubiquity of Google in today’s computing landscape, it’s not surprising that many of them turned to Google resources. Unfortunately, many of them found themselves wanting more.

With Walch’s Curriculum Engine, we provide customizable, aligned, and coherent remote math curriculums that complement Google Classroom lessons. In our experience with educators who work with Google Classroom, we’ve found that:

• Many teachers feel unsupported in their efforts to teach online. In effect, they’ve been given the directive to shift their lessons to the online space with little to no instruction. In the ClassTag study, only about a third of the teachers said their district gave them direction about tools to use for online learning, and one in five said school leadership did so. In the majority of these cases, we’ve found that Google Classroom is the tool most often recommended, with little training. Going back to our refrigerator example, you wouldn’t feel very comfortable if you bought a new “smart” fridge, but you were then left to figure it out on your own without a manual or customer support.
• Just because you have Google Classroom, it doesn’t mean you’re done. Teachers still need to build out every individual lesson, homework, quiz, and test they need from scratch. For many teachers, creating lessons consists of sharing documents online (Google Classroom currently lacks the ability to host video lessons). It’s true that Google Classroom allows you to host slides and simple worksheets and quizzes. But in our experience, that’s not enough to create the more robust content that high school-level math courses require.
• The Google Classroom user interface can be challenging. Let’s be honest, not every educator is as tech savvy as they’d like to be. Without a moderate understanding of content management systems, the Google Classroom user interface can be daunting when building out high school math-specific content. Many school districts are rushing onto new online platforms and simply scanning worksheets for kids to do online, rather than building “engaging, effective online learning, which involves some strategy,” said Richard Culatta, chief executive officer of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), a nonprofit group based in Arlington, Virginia, in a recent USA Today interview.
• People make mistakes. It’s that simple. Without a centralized source of quality, vetted educational content, the lessons that educators create in Google Classroom are subject to typographic errors and technical mistakes. These things can affect the quality and effectiveness of lessons. Often, it’s not even clear that the content addresses a given educational topic accordingly.

Curriculum Engine, Walch’s platform for teaching math online, empowers educators to focus on what they do best: teach. It combines over 10,000 ready-to-use instructional objects, curriculums aligned to state standards, and an online teaching platform with a simple student interface to support distance learning.​

Curriculum Engine is more than just an LMS. It provides everything educators need to develop and deliver math courses online all in one package. There’s minimal setup required: teachers can use the pre-populated courses “out of the box” to start teaching math to their high school students online today, or customize lessons and create their own courses with just a few clicks.

There are a variety of ways in which Curriculum Engine and Google Classroom can work together. Teachers can link to the Curriculum Engine student login in Google Classroom so that students have ready access to the digital course materials. They can create assignments in Google Classroom from the PDF and print materials in your Curriculum Engine course, which are readily downloadable. And they can link to interactive practice questions and assessments in Curriculum Engine via Google Classroom assignments.

Importantly, Walch supports educators with robust training. We help you learn how to teach with Curriculum Engine, as well as how to incorporate our digital resources in the classroom—online and offline. Our training focuses on both real-world classroom and “beyond the classroom” implementation and how best to meet the needs of all learners. We are happy to assist educators in setting up their Google Classroom course to align with Curriculum Engine resources.

For more information about Curriculum Engine, visit this page or request a live demo here.