Using Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams in education

I have setup and trained staff in the use of both Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) and Google G-Suite (formerly Google Apps) for both the organisations I work for and thought I would write a short post to share my experiences with the use of both their popular collaboration tools when it comes to educating young people remotely.

The tools I am talking about are Microsoft Teams and Google Classroom (although they are often used in conjunction with the other tools both of these cloud-based services offer as part of their packages).

NOTE: both of these tools require an educational account to provide an effective learning environment for students and tutors. Google Classroom is only available with G-Suite for Education accounts (not G-Suite Business) and while Microsoft Teams is available through any Microsoft 365 account it is only particularly useful for education if your organisation has an education Microsoft 365 account such as Office 365 A1 (or A3 and A5 paid versions) as I discovered later on in our own experiences with it.

GOOGLE CLASSROOM

I first setup Google’s G-Suite for Education for a school when they initially set up. The entire process of adding student and tutor accounts with G-Suite is very simple although whilst you can create organisational units to organise your users they are all just users to begin with with no distinction between student or tutor.

When a user logs into Google Classroom for the first time they are asked to identify themselves as either a student or a tutor (users who select tutor are added to a group pending verification depending on the settings in the G-Suite admin console).

A class homepage is quite straight forward. You get four tabs along the top for stream, classwork, people and marks (students don’t get the ‘marks’ tab).

• Stream is where the tutor and students can communicate and leave messages. The class code for joining is displayed at the top and there is also a handy link to generate a Meet meeting (Google’s video meeting service taking over from Google Hangouts). This screen also displays upcoming work and assignments due.
• Classwork is where the tutor can create and set assignments and leave material for their students (classwork, quizzes, topics and simple questions) and access the classes online Google Drive folder (a folder saved inside the tutors Google Drive which houses the class documents and where students submitted work ends up).
• People is where the tutor can manage the students, either by inviting them through their own G-Suite accounts or by giving them a unique class code. Additional teachers can also be added to the class in this section.
• Marks displays a list of all the students enrolled on the class and a table of their assignments and marks (or grades or scores if you prefer!).

Students can open assignments and are given various options such as the ability to add or create a new Google Doc (or Google Sheet, Slide or Drawing) or upload a file and then hand it in. They can answer questions set by tutors and can also check classmates answers (if this has been allowed when setting the questions).

Tutors receive notifications for handed in assignments and can check received files from students and comment on them and either return them with a mark or grade. The student will be notified and can check their marks or make amendments as necessary.

The entire Google Classroom experience is very easy to use for both tutors and students and integrates very well with the other Google services available such as YouTube, Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Keep as well as additional lesser known Google apps such as Google Books, FeedBurner and Blogger (if enabled within your organisation).

MICROSOFT TEAMS

Be aware that with the default version of Microsoft Teams available through a business Microsoft 365 account there is no easy way to differentiate users as either a student or a tutor. Maybe I could have found a complex way to do it, through clever use of security groups and settings, but it would have been a nightmare to maintain and certainly would not have been user friendly for passing on adding users duties to somebody else. This means that by default students and tutors alike would be treated as just members of your organisation and as such would have access to all the same things. Not ideal! But Microsoft Teams likes to give a little more technical freedom to its users and I can understand that in an organisational setting. If you have an educational Microsoft 365 account though then it works in much the same way as Google Classroom.

With Microsoft Teams when the admin initially creates users they assign a product licence from the ones available to the account. If you are using the free Office 365 A1 (or paid Office 365 A3 or A5 versions) these accounts come in either ‘faculty’ or ‘student’ types. When a user is created they will be assigned a product licence as either student or faculty and as such the initial setup of a tutor or student is much simpler with Microsoft 365 and less prone to error later. This means that, unlike Google Classroom, when a user first logs in to Microsoft Teams their account type has already been set for them and they don’t get the option to choose whether they are a student or a teacher (so a student can’t try their luck at assigning themselves as a tutor and feigning ignorance… it happens!). So with Teams when a tutor first logs in they will simply see any classes they have already been assigned to or can create their own class (team) and be presented with four options: class (for discussions, group projects and assignments), professional learning community (educator working groups), staff (school administration and development) and other (for clubs, study groups and after-school activities).

When a student first logs into Microsoft Teams they are presented with all the classes they are enrolled on and can also create a new team for communicating with peers but they cannot create classes in the same way as a tutor can.

Microsoft Teams has communication front and centre with a ‘chat’ tab for instant messaging other students and staff and you can also @mention people to include them in the conversation. There is an ‘assignments’ tab showing all upcoming assignments and a ‘calendar’ tab showing the users calendar and any meeting invites (video meetings are also done from within Teams). There is also a ‘files’ tab giving access to any class documents stored in Teams (really stored in SharePoint though) and also shortcuts to the users own OneDrive containing their own files.

SUMMARY

In my experience both of these services work perfectly on mobile devices and both Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams have mobile apps available for free for both Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Microsoft Teams also has a desktop app for both Windows and Mac while Google Classroom is web-based only for desktops.

Google Classroom works seamlessly with it’s other services such as Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Calendar, YouTube and Gmail although unlike Microsoft Teams these services do all open up as separate apps or browser tabs making them feel like separate services sometimes.

Microsoft Teams feels like a slightly more integrated experience as there is one app (either the webapp or downloadable desktop application linked to in the bottom of the screen) and all communication, chat, video meetings, classes, assignments, calendar and files can all be accessed or edited from within the one app (unlike Google’s G-Suite where all these integrations actually open up new browser tabs with separate services.

Microsoft services may also be more recognisable to some students and tutors who are used to using Outlook or Microsoft Word but for me the minimal learning curve required to pick up Google Docs (over Word) or Gmail (over Outlook) make this a non-issue.

Google Classroom does allow for communication with parents which is something that can also be done with Microsoft 365 as Microsoft has far more complex enterprise level security settings available to it but this can be a frustrating mess at times and the simplicity of G-Suite for admins makes it preferable in my books if you don’t need the additional complex requirements.

From a Systems Admin point of view if you don’t want or need the additional enterprise levels that you get with a Microsoft 365 account then Google’s G-Suite for Education is by far the easier to setup and use. The available Google account types are far less confusing than the multiple options provided by Microsoft too and despite the seemingly disparate nature of some of Google’s services they do all work together quite seamlessly with apps and services that the students are probably already using (such as Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive).

I am using both for work at the moment and although we as yet haven’t started using Microsoft Teams fully in an educational capacity it has impressed me so far and I’m looking forward to seeing whether it will overtake Google Classroom here in our estimations and its usefulness when we do!