Posted on June 15, 2016
By Traci Cothran
“Kids these days don’t know how good they have it.” It’s an old adage, but I swear these days it really is true. Long gone are the days of Wite-Out, word processors, having to visit the library to see if a book for class is available, and walking five miles through snow (barefoot!) to get to school.
The Google Classroom integration with Gale products only provides more fodder for this truism – as it makes life much more manageable for students. Middle-grade students on up use Google Classroom to seamlessly to connect from home – or any other location via cellphone or tablet – to view classroom assignments, post their homework documents (in Word, Prezi or other software), and much more. Kids can also access e-learning texts this way, along with reference databases from their library’s collection, and our Gale databases can easily be highlighted, cut and pasted, and cited, then uploaded to the student’s Google Drive account. Easy-peasy! Sure, my daughter still has print text books, but they are no longer the primary guide to classroom activities – teachers can (and do) easily use multiple sources for lessons. It’s a Brave New World out there in education.
Perhaps the best part about Google Classroom is how effortless and easy it is for students. Logging into Google takes maybe fifteen seconds, then after authentication, access the Classroom tool and any papers and instructions teachers provide, along with viewing prior assignments. There’s no more waiting until the next day to check on details of an assignment or “hand-in a paper” – that can be done anywhere, at any time.
It seems the only thing this partnership hasn’t solved yet is a way to make my student manage her time better, so I guess we’ll keep working on that the old-fashioned way …
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About the Author
Traci Cothran is a manager in Gale’s Database Program and a history buff, so she can often be found watching videos from the early 1900s in Gale’s World History In Context.
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We need more inigshts like this in this thread.