About Google and Degoogling in schools
About Google and Degoogling in schools
Here in Italy, often schools, the educative relationship betwenn teachers and students is kept through google classroom. Once I've worked in a school that had both solutions: Moodle (the usability is very very scarce) and Google classroom.
During the years I've developped an increasing grudge toward Google, because in the very beginning I've had pinned a lot of hopes in this company, naively thinking that it could have changed the world for the better (don't be evil, a multibillion company who choose this as a motto! I was hopeful and impressed): I was very naive.
Now I would like to know if there are systems (because Google classroom works very fine, I have to admit) that works equally fine or even better that are disappeared under the magnitude of this monopolistic leviathan.
Could someone help me?
No recommendations, but you could also try posting in [email protected]
Subscribed. I've been trying to degoogle myself for a while, but it's so damn difficult.
What's the problem with Moodle or Canvas? A lot of universities use one of these and usability-wise, they are fine.
google classroom is neat, clean and monstrously easy to use. Moodle isnt', at least the inteface implemented in my school wasn't. Correcting an essay on moodle was a utterly uncomfrotable.
https://www.clever.com/ is used to handle single sign on and providing a dashboard for hundreds of other education apps/services. It can be used to build a solution with FAR more functionality than what Google offers, but it's $$$ to do that and requires someone with some technical skill and UX experience to do well.
Could be that there is a law against storing data outside of the EU that might pertain to your school situation, so you might have a right violated. Though fighting that is quite a bit of work. You'd want to escalate things with your school first, but in order to do so be knowledgeable on the issue which requires a big time investment and in the end if your school doesn't care they are probably gonna bet on you not seeking legal recourse. Which is such a ginormous amount of work they could be right depending on the resources you have.
That's not to say its a battle not worth having, but its quite the battle if the school doesn't care, because they can just stonewall and its up to you to overcome it.
As an alternative I unfortunately don't know of any except a self hosted moodle solution which is a hefty amount of work for the school and might be reason enough for them to deflect or stonewall on the issue. So I wouldn't go into that with them, let them do their own research on alternatives maybe they can come up with something since they have different resources and connections than you do.
Public school in general are place out of time and out place. The majority of people, the princpals do not have a clue about anyting pertaining these fields. Most of the teachers don't feel the privacy issue as a major problem and often talk to each other and with students via what's app. It is a mess, a big one. No strategy, no plan whatsoever. Not even the need to learn and become slightly litterate about this matter. what's look cool and American, siliconish valley is right and felt as modern.