GoGuardian, headquartered in Los Angeles, offers GoGuardian Teacher, a classroom management and digital learning environment application featuring activity timeline, screen viewer, and other features.
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Whereby
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Norwegian company appear.in offers their flagship video conferencing platform to small teams, both in a free edition hosting up to 4 guests simultaneously in a session or a paid edition that supports up to 12 simultaneous meeting guests, among other features.
GoGuardian Teacher is great for a teacher who needs a way to monitor student activities and work time on a laptop. It is easy to set up, simple to use and helps to keep students accountable when online in class. It integrates with Google Classroom which is a big help. It is more powerful for teachers experienced in using tech in the classroom. The archiving ability is great but the UX needs to improve.
If you cannot use another more common solution on the market or are looking for an alternative to the known solutions, it is a great alternative. If you have other tools already, and just want to test [them], that's fine, but I think the better-known ones have a better chance of using, knowing, and the learning curve will be shorter.
The paid version may have dial-in. But I have always used the free version. Dial-in is typically required for an "official" multi-purpose teleconference platform.
I did have some trouble with larger groups (5+) when it was Appear.in but almost always use it for small 1-on-1 or 3 person meetings.
For a technology-heavy school, it is a necessary and good tool for managing classroom use of laptops. It is easy to set up and use. Helps track time on task and internet usage. Another source of data when speaking to parents about student work and activity. Can help plan and manage work time when you have limited devices.
We are using a larger tool suite that already includes video conferencing instead of our older approach of using different apps from different vendors. appear.in has a simple but great set of features but its pricing scheme is not as scalable as we really need in a 500+ employee company.
The support is great. On the rare occasion that I've had to reach out to support they have been very quick to respond and extremely helpful. I've also had teachers reach out directly to support themselves. Most of the time I don't even know that a teacher has reached out to support until after the fact. They always seem satisfied.
Never had to contact support, so we cannot give a rating for their overall support. When we noticed the audio was not always great quality, we simply educated our users to mute the mic and use the in-room conference phone which is connected via a dedicated VOIP link and had much better voice quality. The video performance varied by locations network speed and found it got much worse when the room size increased to over 4 connections.
I have used Hapara in a previous school district. GoGuardian is more user-friendly and easier to setup. I do think GoGuardian has some room on improving the ease of finding some areas of the program, but once you know the path to get there it is quick.
For me it was Zoom, Google Meet vs. Whereby. For me, the main idea was to make it easier for the clients (non-technical people) to join and starting to have a talk. For Zoom, it was too much, even for myself, and Google Meet always needs a calendar integration, but with Whereby you can just share the URL whenever and people would remember your URL which is nice.
We have been able to identify inappropriate websites that students have discovered. For example anonymous proxies, movie streaming, etc. Through this software, we have been able to identify the students and in turn block the websites.
We have been able to identify which students have been using other user's accounts. This was an unintended side effect of the software. If a teacher knows that a student is using a Chromebook but the student is not showing up in the software, we are easily able to deduce that the user must be using another student's account.
