G Suite For Education: Sharepoint and OneNote equivalents? Set up groups from SIMS?

[Garacesh]

We're looking at potentially moving away from Office 365 to Google, but there's a few snags at current, and they're reasonably big ones..

 

Collaborative work: Currently a few of our departments use OneNote pretty heavily. About the closest thing I've been able to find with GSfE is Sites, but that's not really what we want. Does Google offer an alternative? I think OneNote is growing in popularity specifically because each pupil has their own section of a Notebook and can't vandalise another kid's work.

Related, is that even a thing we should be encouraging? Re: GDPR, should a child not have full control of their own documents and choose to share them with the teacher, rather than modifying a document the teacher owns?

File repository: Sharepoint. We don't care about the actual website part of Sharepoint (which Google Sites seems to replicate), what we want is the open-to-everybody file repository where staff can wang things like past papers, commonly referred to resources etc and the kids can access it.

It goes without saying some kind of access permissions need to be a thing.

I know this could be replicated with OneDrive and sharing files, but staff would have to manually create groups for each of their classes and that would be frustrating and tedious for them, especially when class lists or teachers change.

Class/Group generation: Similarly to the last point, we've been looking at SalamanderSoft for 365 recently and one of the features catching our eye is the ability to export class lists from SIMS and have Office 365 groups created to match. Can anybody recommend similar software for GSfE?

[RLR]

We're looking at potentially moving away from Office 365 to Google, but there's a few snags at current, and they're reasonably big ones..

 

Collaborative work: Currently a few of our departments use OneNote pretty heavily. About the closest thing I've been able to find with GSfE is Sites, but that's not really what we want. Does Google offer an alternative? I think OneNote is growing in popularity specifically because each pupil has their own section of a Notebook and can't vandalise another kid's work.

Related, is that even a thing we should be encouraging? Re: GDPR, should a child not have full control of their own documents and choose to share them with the teacher, rather than modifying a document the teacher owns?

File repository: Sharepoint. We don't care about the actual website part of Sharepoint (which Google Sites seems to replicate), what we want is the open-to-everybody file repository where staff can wang things like past papers, commonly referred to resources etc and the kids can access it.

It goes without saying some kind of access permissions need to be a thing.

I know this could be replicated with OneDrive and sharing files, but staff would have to manually create groups for each of their classes and that would be frustrating and tedious for them, especially when class lists or teachers change.

Class/Group generation: Similarly to the last point, we've been looking at SalamanderSoft for 365 recently and one of the features catching our eye is the ability to export class lists from SIMS and have Office 365 groups created to match. Can anybody recommend similar software for GSfE?

We used GSFE heavily. I don't have any experience with OneNote but all documents in Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Slides etc are collaborative. Google have recently released Google Keep which is for note taking - note sure if this is an alternative to one note.

 

You could use Team Drives for File repository. As GSFE has unlimited space you can create as many Team Drives as you want that can be department specific or an area for all staff/students.

 

You can also use Google Classroom. This creates a folder for each student for each subject/class they take. This can be created by salamander also. Teachers can create their own classes manually.

[Garacesh]

We used GSFE heavily. I don't have any experience with OneNote but all documents in Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Slides etc are collaborative. Google have recently released Google Keep which is for note taking - note sure if this is an alternative to one note.

They are, yeah. The main issue I think our staff will have is that if [Teacher] gives [Pupil] edit access on their document, [Pupil] can edit anything and everything. Yes, Google is pretty good at keeping version histories and it does show you which account made which changes, but I think our staff are still going to see issues with that. With OneNote, a member of staff creates a Notebook, and shares that with [PupilA], [PupilB], [PupilC] etc. The Notebook then automatically creates an area for [PupilA], [PupilB] etc and gives them full control of just that area. The member of staff can create pages and assign tasks, but the pupil can only respond to those in their pre-defined area, which means they can't vandalise the Teacher's work, nor the work done by any other pupil. GSfE's collaborative Docs/Pages/Sheets doesn't seem to have anything like this and lets any user modify any part of the document.

 

This could be gotten around by the teacher simply creating instruction files, sharing them with their pupils, and then the pupils create response files and share them back. But that's going to get messy over the course of a year unless those files can be organised somehow, and it doesn't look like Drive's 'Shared with me' section offers much more than a big ol' list. I guess the staff could make a folder for each of their classes, create a file per pupil in their class, then share those files with the pupils one by one, but that's a lot of admin overhead for something so simple. And with vanilla GSfE, the members of staff would have to make all their own groups too. It's just too much work to plop on top of them for no good reason. Unless we can get a lot of that automated, it's going to be a non-starter.

 

I'll take a look at Team Drives though, that sounds like it might be along the right track.

[fiza]

They are, yeah. The main issue I think our staff will have is that if [Teacher] gives [Pupil] edit access on their document, [Pupil] can edit anything and everything. Yes, Google is pretty good at keeping version histories and it does show you which account made which changes, but I think our staff are still going to see issues with that. With OneNote, a member of staff creates a Notebook, and shares that with [PupilA], [PupilB], [PupilC] etc. The Notebook then automatically creates an area for [PupilA], [PupilB] etc and gives them full control of just that area. The member of staff can create pages and assign tasks, but the pupil can only respond to those in their pre-defined area, which means they can't vandalise the Teacher's work, nor the work done by any other pupil. GSfE's collaborative Docs/Pages/Sheets doesn't seem to have anything like this and lets any user modify any part of the document.

 

This could be gotten around by the teacher simply creating instruction files, sharing them with their pupils, and then the pupils create response files and share them back. But that's going to get messy over the course of a year unless those files can be organised somehow, and it doesn't look like Drive's 'Shared with me' section offers much more than a big ol' list. I guess the staff could make a folder for each of their classes, create a file per pupil in their class, then share those files with the pupils one by one, but that's a lot of admin overhead for something so simple. And with vanilla GSfE, the members of staff would have to make all their own groups too. It's just too much work to plop on top of them for no good reason. Unless we can get a lot of that automated, it's going to be a non-starter.

 

I'll take a look at Team Drives though, that sounds like it might be along the right track.

 

Sounds like you want to be looking at Google Classroom.

[RLR]

They are, yeah. The main issue I think our staff will have is that if [Teacher] gives [Pupil] edit access on their document, [Pupil] can edit anything and everything. Yes, Google is pretty good at keeping version histories and it does show you which account made which changes, but I think our staff are still going to see issues with that. With OneNote, a member of staff creates a Notebook, and shares that with [PupilA], [PupilB], [PupilC] etc. The Notebook then automatically creates an area for [PupilA], [PupilB] etc and gives them full control of just that area. The member of staff can create pages and assign tasks, but the pupil can only respond to those in their pre-defined area, which means they can't vandalise the Teacher's work, nor the work done by any other pupil. GSfE's collaborative Docs/Pages/Sheets doesn't seem to have anything like this and lets any user modify any part of the document.

 

This could be gotten around by the teacher simply creating instruction files, sharing them with their pupils, and then the pupils create response files and share them back. But that's going to get messy over the course of a year unless those files can be organised somehow, and it doesn't look like Drive's 'Shared with me' section offers much more than a big ol' list. I guess the staff could make a folder for each of their classes, create a file per pupil in their class, then share those files with the pupils one by one, but that's a lot of admin overhead for something so simple. And with vanilla GSfE, the members of staff would have to make all their own groups too. It's just too much work to plop on top of them for no good reason. Unless we can get a lot of that automated, it's going to be a non-starter.

 

I'll take a look at Team Drives though, that sounds like it might be along the right track.

 

I think this is where Google Classrooms will benefit you. Teachers can upload work to the class and have a choice of view, edit or have their own copy of the document. Students can then upload their work to the class and get graded by the teacher. As you say, GSFE doesn't allow a particular area on a document to be controlled by a student. Everything you're asking for can be done automatically and teachers don't need to do anything except upload documents/work to their classrooms.

[DarrellR]

Hi

 

If you need assistance or support with this please get in contact with myself on the below, this is what we do and I'm our in house Google specialist. Would also like to hear more about your expertise in Overwatch

 

We're looking at potentially moving away from Office 365 to Google, but there's a few snags at current, and they're reasonably big ones..

 

Collaborative work: Currently a few of our departments use OneNote pretty heavily. About the closest thing I've been able to find with GSfE is Sites, but that's not really what we want. Does Google offer an alternative? I think OneNote is growing in popularity specifically because each pupil has their own section of a Notebook and can't vandalise another kid's work.

Related, is that even a thing we should be encouraging? Re: GDPR, should a child not have full control of their own documents and choose to share them with the teacher, rather than modifying a document the teacher owns?

File repository: Sharepoint. We don't care about the actual website part of Sharepoint (which Google Sites seems to replicate), what we want is the open-to-everybody file repository where staff can wang things like past papers, commonly referred to resources etc and the kids can access it.

It goes without saying some kind of access permissions need to be a thing.

I know this could be replicated with OneDrive and sharing files, but staff would have to manually create groups for each of their classes and that would be frustrating and tedious for them, especially when class lists or teachers change.

Class/Group generation: Similarly to the last point, we've been looking at SalamanderSoft for 365 recently and one of the features catching our eye is the ability to export class lists from SIMS and have Office 365 groups created to match. Can anybody recommend similar software for GSfE?

[ITBadger]

Salamander works really well with G-Suite too so creating and maintaining groups and classrooms is a breeze.

[Garacesh]

Looks like Team Drives is definitely on the right track as a Sharepoint replacement. Seems a bit of a pain that you can't edit permissions by Organisational Unit, only by User, but that's hopefully something a third party solution would help with. Hopefully I can find some time to really have a play with Classroom and try and figure it out.

 

If you need assistance or support with this please get in contact with myself on the below, this is what we do and I'm our in house Google specialist.

Yes, I remember you guys at EDIT.. I just couldn't remember your name

 

I've fired off an email to SalamanderSoft about the potential of a trial, and I'm happy to discuss similar with your team @DarrellR

It looks like no matter who we go with, we're going to need some flavour of third-party tool helping with the back end.