Google Classroom without Gmail?

[boomish]

We have a new Google Classroom setup & running & so far it's going well, it's been well received, sign in is tricky for the pupils but everyone is getting used to it, one thing thats annoying is the Gmail option, we don't want to use the internal Gmail, but the option is built in to a lot of the interface, so a teacher/student can click to email not realising this doesn't work. Anyone else using Google classroom this way , got any tips ? I can't see any other setup options in the admin console.

[edmokeski]

Really? We're having a total nightmare with Classroom. Files posted to a class or submitted with an assignment are mostly not opening, except in random cases when suddenly they decide to cooperate. There's a whole thread about it here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-education/hV5WNYJ5_ak

We're not using GMail and have no intention to. Doesn't seem to seriously disadvantage us. E-mail notifications flow through to our e-mail system just fine. The contact links on the middle page of Classroom don't work on the desktop or in the browser, but in the iOS app they work fine b/c they just open a message in the Mail app. We use our MIS to e-mail set groups, so the contact options in Classroom are a bit redundant for us anyhow. I'm very interested to hear that you're having a positive experience thus far, and not having the problem opening files that we keep encountering! Are you using it exclusively on the desktop, rather than tablets?

[boomish]

I just asked a few of the teachers and they said yes it's been working fine, they are using laptops & iPad's however I don't think any of them have used images or PDF's yet, (I did say it's new:) mostly they have posted documents. Our issue currently is a new iPad setup, how students sign into Google Classroom accounts on all the iPads, we only have 30 so they float from class to class within 2 year groups.

We had the option to use the mail within Google apps but we have to route our existing staff mail through Google, I didn't want to do this, this is setup thing that is managed by Atomwide, maybe I should ask them if we have a staff only option, so can your students email their teachers through Classroom?

[edmokeski]

I'm not our GAfE or e-mail admin, so I don't totally know the setup, but I know our mail is hosted Exchange via 365, and notifications generated by Classroom and other GAfE apps do arrive in our inboxes fine.

We tried using Drive last year with shared class sets and it was a bit of a pain. No doubt in part because it's quite a few steps to sign out, we found pupils often left themselves signed in. The next class would get the set, and then save things into Drive and thus into the previous user's folder. Perhaps someone here has a better setup for managing class sets? I know some people have gone for a generic user-per-shared-iPad approach to using Drive. Not sure how that would go when trying to use Classroom, though.

 

We use GAPS for SSO w/ GAfE, which simplifies the sign-in. Last year we used GADS, which meant an extra step in sign-in that was a bit annoying. (Basically, GAPS hands Google hashed passwords so users authenticate against Google. GADS means that users give Google their username, Google sees the domain they're in and passes them to you to authenticate, making it appear to them that they're signing in twice.) I think the signing out issue is the biggest one we had, really, because the iOS apps are really designed for 1:1 deployment.

[Edu-IT]

Is there an app for iOS whereby you can upload things from other apps, such as Keynote? iMovie?

[edmokeski]

Drive? If you have Drive installed, you can use "Open In..." from within other apps. If you choose to open in Drive, it uploads it. Ditto OneDrive, I think. Never tried the other cloud services' apps.

[RLR]

Really? We're having a total nightmare with Classroom. Files posted to a class or submitted with an assignment are mostly not opening, except in random cases when suddenly they decide to cooperate. There's a whole thread about it here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-education/hV5WNYJ5_ak

We're not using GMail and have no intention to. Doesn't seem to seriously disadvantage us. E-mail notifications flow through to our e-mail system just fine. The contact links on the middle page of Classroom don't work on the desktop or in the browser, but in the iOS app they work fine b/c they just open a message in the Mail app. We use our MIS to e-mail set groups, so the contact options in Classroom are a bit redundant for us anyhow. I'm very interested to hear that you're having a positive experience thus far, and not having the problem opening files that we keep encountering! Are you using it exclusively on the desktop, rather than tablets?

 

This issue was resolved in the latest Google Drive update. We had this issue with a few students at our school but now works fine.

 

Google Classrooms is really taking off in our school. We are all google here now so we have mail setup for google as well as GAFE/GADS/GAPS. Some staff are using Hapara and some staff are using Google Classroms. Classrooms was only introduced this year and already a lot of staff using it. I think we will probably get rid of Hapara next year.

[edmokeski]

Yes, the latest updates seem to have everything working. We're still have trouble with ePubs, but otherwise Classroom is great. Starting to recover some lost momentum.