There is no question that Google provides some very innovative tools for supporting content creation, collaboration, and presentation through their google suite (docs, sheets, slides, etc.) Google Classroom is the service offers to schools to organize these tools for educational proposes. In a way it can act as a content or learning management system for use by teachers to engage with learners online. It may be used to support structure and collect homework, lead blended classrooms, or for fully online courses. It is free, and teachers can play with it without a subscription or even an active class. Google offers free training and certification for teachers wanting to hone their ability to use the platform.

Many schools have adopted the service and use it to support teaching and learning. However, some parents, teachers, students, and administrators have taken issue with this as the default and are concerned about the datafication of education and Google’s larger interest in having people adopt their tools for future use. Questions about data ownership and access, how student data is being used for the training of big data systems, and vendor lock on often come up.

Therefore it is important to be critical of how Google is finding its way into the classroom and how dependent teachers and students may become on its availability. I urge to consider the following critiques: