Why we need Salesforce-Google Classroom Sync: It just makes sense.
Save valuable teacher time by automating data flow between Google Classroom & Salesforce Education Cloud
The winter came and went, and the school year was going as usual. And then, as everything else in the world, the pandemic forced operations to change drastically. All of sudden, my class of 33 kids stopped turning in germ-filled worksheets by hand, and I’d be seeing these wonderful beings as 2-D rectangles on my computer screen.
My school expanded their Google-Suite offerings, and with some hard work and planning by all my colleagues, our school was able to provide incredible instruction and a school experience virtually to our students. My school wasn’t alone - Google Classroom was ubiquitous in usage - gaining over 100 million users by April 2020.
The reality was that with Virtual Learning, there was a lot of repetitive work. Assignments needed to be written and uploaded in every place a student or family member could look online. With our school using a multitude of online learning software, each in its own silo, the data had to be manually entered each time. This was a time consuming process, and inevitably led to data entry errors, understandably leading to many more emails and questions from families at home requesting clarification.
Wouldn’t it save time and reduce errors if the data could be entered in one place and simultaneously entered or updated in another software?
At the same time, as one of the first Salesforce Education Cloud partners, and having built our own student engagement app Student Soapbox on the platform, we see great potential for this new business that Salesforce is putting its weight behind. We’re encouraged by the work Salesforce is doing to understand the benefits for students, teachers, and others in the education community, and the need to eliminate information silos and share information more effectively and efficiently. In doing so, we can serve our students, teachers, and parents much better!
With our unique vantage point, we saw the need to connect Salesforce Education Cloud and Google Classroom. We developed custom Lesson and Materials objects in Salesforce Education Cloud to leverage an add-on that can automatically synchronize data in both systems to reduce the workload for teachers using both systems, thereby increasing accuracy.
Our core functionality to sync People, Lessons, Topics, and Assignments from Google Classroom and Salesforce is available now! But, we’re not done by a long shot. We’re building on that to leverage other functionality to help teachers gain more time for what they really want to do - teach - and help students succeed.