You know Zoom, yet soon you will hear about Google Classroom

Few people who have access to computers have not heard of Zoom. Much like Excel, it is not the tool for the job, most of the time.

People use Excel as a database program, to the point where Microsoft has been forced to add database features to it; while having a much better tool for the Process, Microsoft Access.

The issue can be broadly broken down in categories, habit and training.

If companies trained their people on Access -and insisted on it- or they would learn out of their own initiative; Access would be one of the most used tools at the office.

Instead, as many of us know, even specialized government agencies keep very sensitive database information in spreadsheets meant to do calculations, not store data (see news article here)

In 2020, something similar is happening with Zoom -and a few other video conferencing platforms-, people are not using them for conferences, but to teach classes.

Those of us attending online classes, be it school, training, or helping others join their school Zoom meetings, know only too well how inadequate Zoom is for the teacher or speaker to play videos, audio files, or use a blackboard; as a matter of fact, most people use a PowerPoint presentation and write on it, while sharing their desktop.

This, is not how Zoom is supposed to be used, and even more important, it is not the right tool for the job.

Usually the attendee needs to receive an URL wit the invitation, create an event on a personal calendar to remember the meeting, if there are assignments to be turned in, the due date also needs to be manually added to the personal calendar.

Then, the host will probably send an email, to a manually created email list, which usually becomes obsolete within days of its creating -I still get emails from a class I quit months ago- and then the host will receive emails back from all the participants; if there is knowledge to be extracted from the emails, the other participants will not benefit from it; or, if one of the participants has a question regarding a missed class, everybody who attended the class has to waste time reading an email that does not help them at all.

Sounds familiar?

Well, Google Classrooms is the tool for the job. I will not go into details on how it works, yet I guess by now you can imagine it solves all the issues I have underlined in the paragraphs above.

The teacher/host creates a classroom, adds dates, a calendar is created, adds material to the classroom, asigments, due dates, meeting dates, and then adds the participants; who have access to all of it and get automatic updates and reminders in a calendar share by the whole class.

There is a real blackboard, videoconferencing, a message board that can be moderated to contain only useful information, and it is about 10% of the price of Zoom, depending on the entity that wishes to use it, and some other factors.

You can see a nice YouTube video of Google Classroom here.

Excel, Access, Microsoft, Google, Google Classroom, YouTube are not involved or consulted on the writing of this article and they are not sponsors.