UK Edition
Professor Google’s plan to change the classroom forever
Should Google be such a big presence in education and should we trust it with pupil's data?
With schools closed for most, the nation's pupils are now attempting to keep up with their studies at home.
Teachers have been preparing different materials and ways that pupils can do some work virtually. For some, adapting to online learning has proven a challenge.
“My son doesn’t like it,” says Dee Cooper, a parent from the Highlands. “He doesn’t even have social media, but on this, he didn’t have a choice. He didn’t have the option to say he wanted a traditional teacher.”
Others are slightly less adverse. For teachers, at least, such tools provided by Google have become a saviour, a way to connect with their pupils at a time when they cannot see them in person.
Much of this is run through Google Classroom, an online area where teachers can place students in virtual classes, set assignments and be able to upload content for their lessons.
Classroom then links together with Google Docs, where pupils can write their essays and share them privately with their teachers, Google Calendar and Hangouts, where video classes can be scheduled and run, and Google Forms, where teachers can set quizzes.
“I can't imagine teaching without it,” Rachel Dunne, a primary school teacher from London, explains. Part of the draw for her is how robust the suite of systems are. After all, she’s heard stories of other smaller-scale platforms crashing as millions of students shift to learning from home.
But, Dunne says, “during this crisis, Google’s system hasn't crashed once”.
Google has been eyeing the education technology market, predicted to be $341bn by 2025, since 2014 when it launched G Suite for Education. Investments in the sector surpassed $8bn in venture capital funding in 2018.
With 90 million users and 40 million students and teachers using its Chromebook laptops, Google’s Classroom app has topped the app store charts in recent weeks as children were sent home. In the UK, it is currently listed as the most-downloaded free education app on Apple devices.
The major prize for Google is gaining young users as they will define what is used in universities and the office of the future.
“There is a generational divide between allegiances to tools in the workplace, based on experience,” says Nicholas McQuire, vice president of enterprise research at analysts CCS Insight.
“Someone aged 35 and above may be particularly attached to Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel and Office 365. However many employers are now catering to those who are versed in Gmail, Google Docs and Google sheets.
“Individuals aged 35 and below are heavily allied to Google tools because they used them in university and they would have to train themselves on Excel.”
Many headteachers and IT departments for universities and colleges will want to know whether students’ data are going to become fodder for Google’s advertising machine.
Google’s G Suite for education falls under its cloud business and, for the most part, if a school or college pays for Google’s services they own the data, which is stored in a separate data centre from Google's free products.
Google has strict policies about protecting its education customers’ data much like it would a bank or another of the five million businesses that pay for its G Suite tool, including Airbus which is in the highly regulated travel industry.
The company says it does “not collect or use student data for advertising purposes or to create advertising profiles”.
“This applies even outside of the G Suite for Education tools: for example, your child will not see ads while searching on Google when signed in to their G Suite for Education account,” a spokesman said.
But, still, there are parents who are not convinced their children should be using the system. “To me it feels like they can look at every aspect of an individual child,” Cooper says. An essay, she says, provides a real glimpse into how a child thinks and having this logged online in any form is worrying.
“It feels like a web of finding out how you can influence and how you can sell to a group of people who are coming through and are going to be the next bunch of taxpayers.”
Such concerns are, for many tired and stressed out parents, something to deal with further down the line, though. For them, right now, juggling home working and childcare, there are other, more pressing issues. Not least, getting their children at all interested in learning.
After all, for many who use it, “the Google Classroom is great,” enthuses Jillian Smith, a secondary school teacher in London. But, she says, “I just can’t get the kids to log on”.