Google Classroom allows teachers to post for daily lessons and assignments. It also allows teachers to be able to communicate with students easily outside of class. Students are able to stay connected and know where to find all information and resources easily in a streamlined manner for all of their classes.
1. Looking up the technologies, analytics tools, and services used by your competitors and industry leaders. 2. Checking what has changed technology-wise on the website of your competitor, since you've noticed an improvement in their rankings or other website improvements. You can even set up alerts to receive emails every time a new change was made to the technology of the website you're interested in (usually your top competitors').
Student-teacher communication - I love using Classroom for this because my students can always go back and check what was on Classroom by looking through the stream. This way they don't have to go dig through emails to find what they're looking for.
Posting to multiple classes - I can post the same announcement or assignment to multiple classes at once without having to repeat the process or send separate emails.
Streamlining grading - when students turn work in on Classroom, it all goes to one place and then when I'm grading I can open their documents directly from Classroom or my Drive folder. This way, I'm not looking through emails and Google Doc shared files for their assignment.
We were considering changing a hosting provider because we were not happy with the speed of our website. So, we used SimilarTech to look up which hosting providers our competitors and some other faster websites were using, to help us make an informed choice.
When the company was considering a new live chat vendor, we also used SimilarTech to see what software some of the best websites on the web are using.
Given the tasks SimilarTech was designed for, I don't really think there are any issues with it. It's hard to think of a situation where I couldn't get the information I needed from SimilarTech.
Testing is particularly important in online learning, and Google Classroom falls far short of other learning management systems in this regard. Security is also a concern: while account control is reasonable for the account used with Google Classroom, the person controlling a particular account is often able to, for example, forward or download proprietary materials.
Simple design and seamless integration with Google tools and drive, but missing some key features. However, since it is limited in overall functions and ability to truly personalize / customize, it is quite user friendly and easy to set up and get going, other than sending out the code to your course or dropping students in via their gmail account. Users of Google Forms and sites will find the layout similar in design.
Since this platform is provided by Google, the technical support is better than any others, and we are not required to bother about the space constraints for adding the contents. If we have a good uninterrupted internet facility we can access Google Classroom without any delay or lag. They have app support in both Android and iPhone.
It was relatively easy to implement due to the simplicity of the platform. Even our more technology challenged teachers found it easy to get started with Google Classroom.
I haven't tested or evaluated another digital classroom website or application. I feel like Google Classroom is convenient for many reasons such as compatibility to Google docs, slides, etc. I also love the ability to link to YouTube and other sites. I don't know if there would be a site that is easier to maneuver.
Overall SimilarTech had a positive impact, as it saves a lot of time (days) when it comes to research of the competition and new up-and-coming technologies for our website.
Moreover, it helps to monitor updates on the websites of the industry leaders, and to keep up with tech.
