Using Google in the Classroom

My current job is a day to day substitute teacher, so I do not communicate through google with students. I do however have children in the school system. My needing to know what I am saying when I tell kids "Open up google classroom and watch the video, submit the assignment by the end of the class period" is what led me to taking this course. My daughter who is in 2nd grade knows her gmail info from school, but doesn't use it for much yet. My 6th grade son uses it a lot. All assignments are listed in their google classroom, and many times when there is a substitute, this is where students are told to go. Through this my son can do work at home when he is sick, and even chat with the teacher. I have even had students in class chat with the teacher when I was subbing because they needed some information that I was unable to provide. The teacher was able to respond to the student in real time during class to get everything figured out. Its pretty amazing how that works, because I don't have contact information for teachers usually. My two children who are in highschool use a lot more of the google tools. They have their email filtered so that it's only on occasion they will get an email to their inbox. This is how they share a lot of their assignments and are able to go back and see when things have been submitted or graded if an error occurs. I also like how students can do group work. Although, I have seen how that can go badly too: Once in a 5th grade classroom the students were working in groups of 5 to complete a power point project. Each student had to do 2-3 slides themselves, but since it was a group project shared through google all students had access to all of the slides. So there was a lot of "He changed my text color" "She changed my font" going on. But I do like that the teacher can see what all is being done and can address those issues for group projects as time goes on. I mainly took this course because I am so lost when it comes to all that the kids are doing through these google apps and I wanted to get caught up so that I can at least be close to the same page in knowing what my children are doing and getting into while using them.