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Navigate 2 - Tools for Deciding on an LMS

Answer: Which LMS is best? How does the selected LMS meet the needs of all stakeholders, including administrators, students, teachers and faculty, instructional technology, development, support, and parents? How does the selected LMS align with the initiatives, growth, and technological needs of your organization?

I believe that the best LMS option for my classes would be Google Classroom, followed by open source Moodle, with all it's cool plugins, as an alternate. I know that Classroom was not really listed in the module, but it is listed by PCMag as one of the leading LMS for 2018. Classroom meets the needs of all stakeholders involved in my personal situation.

 We are are GSuite for Education district, with every employee and student having a GSuite account. Among the plethora of benefits is single sign-on for all users' apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive (document storage), apps for creating content (Docs, Slides, Sheets, Forms), and Classroom. We are also almost 1:1 district-wide with Chromebooks, which makes this a no-brainer.

 Stakeholder benefits:

  • Administrators can quickly and easily manage users, set roles, and define access from the administrative console.
  • County-level administrators are Instructional Techs that are Google Certified Educators, Google Certified Trainers, or Google Certified Innovators, meaning we have in-house support and professional development in addition to the vast Google Support Forums.
  • Students have single sign-on to all Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc) as well as Drive for storage and to Classroom for accessing and interacting with coursework. Joining classes is easy, and all classes are formatted with a universal, easy-to-navigate layout. Students can submit work and materials directly from their Google Drive.
  • Teachers/Faculty can manage all classes in one place, with student work submissions being automatically arranged in the teacher's Google Drive. Co-teaching classes (SpEd, Gifted, etc) is an easy feature.
  • Parents can opt-in to receive email summaries of student progress. These include missing work, upcoming work, and class activities (announcements, questions posted by teachers, etc.) Parents set the frequency of these messages.
  • Google's Support Forums and feedback for development are wonderful resources. Feedback usually receives a very quick response.
LMS Alignment:
  • Classroom aligns with our districts initiative to go 1:1 with Chromebooks. (We'll officially be 1:1 across the district next year). Implementation of these devices have been a part of the district's technology plan for the past several years.
  • Classroom shows infinite potential for implementation K12 in our district. Teachers are becoming Google Certified and participating in in-district PD to become Google "gurus" and in their individual classrooms and their buildings. With GSuite apps being pushed down as far as K-2, students in our district are growing up in a Google ecosystem. This is the technology they know.
  • The fact that our student devices (and many of the recently replaced teacher devices) are all based on Google's Chrome OS, Classroom definitely meets the technology needs of our district.
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