Naperville Central to Pilot Google Classroom this School Year

A report in the student newspaper at Naperville Central High School in Illinois says a few dozen teachers will pilot Google Classroom instead of using Instructure Canvas as a digital hub for teaching and learning.

Central’s CTE Agriscience teacher Sean Rauen was one of 40 teachers selected to pilot Classroom. Ella Mitch reported that the main reason administrators had for the potential switch is to improve technology consistency across grade levels.

Students at different levels use different hubs: elementary students in the district use Seesaw, and junior high students might use Canvas but differently from the way high schoolers use it, according to Assistant Principal of Curriculum and Instruction Steve Jeretina. Google Classroom “creates a little bit more consistency as you move from one level to the next,” she quoted him as saying.

The Rise of Google Classroom: When School Stopped Ending at 3 P.M.

Google Classroom is essentially a lightweight layer over Google Workspace (Docs, Drive, Slides, Forms, and Meet). Rather than acting as an exhaustive, all-in-one institutional database, its primary purpose is to simplify distribution, organization, and communication.

Its core philosophy is “simplicity, frictionless sharing, and minimal setup time.”

File management via Google Drive is automatic, and real-time collaboration is available through Docs and Slides. The interface is clean, intuitive, and learnable by both students and teachers in minutes.

As a communication hub, it provides fast class announcements, direct student-teacher comment threads, and easy parent/guardian summary emails.

However, its native gradebook customization is limited. For example, complex weighted categories or mastery-based grading aren’t regularly available, and there’s minimal built-in assessment analytics.

Instructure Canvas, on the other hand, was built as a full-featured, enterprise-grade learning management system (LMS). For deep pedagogical structuring, multi-tiered grading policies, institutional data analytics, and third-party software integration, this is the platform.

Of course, all those capabilities bring a much steeper learning curve. Furthermore, its modular course design, with robust organization using modules, prerequisites, unlock dates, and page branching that allow teachers to structure complete learning pathways, can lead to serious bloat and clutter if courses aren’t structured with care and forethought.

But Canvas gives teachers powerful rubric integration, SpeedGrader for rich annotation feedback, item banks, and flexible, weighted gradebooks. In addition, Canvas generally provides better integration with industry-standard technology, such as institutional student information systems (SIS) and detailed student engagement analytics.

But even that adds a great deal of administrative overhead that can create work for school personnel that doesn’t directly affect student growth.

Algebra I Homework Assignment

Let’s say a teacher in algebra I at Naperville Central would want to assign a simole problem for homework:

Plot the y-intercept and one other integer point for the equation

In Canvas, the teacher creates an Assignment or a New Quiz. Depending on whether she wants automated grading or manual review, she typically chooses between two primary native approaches:

1. Automated Hot Spot / Coordinate Check: Canvas Quizzes → Add Hot Spot Question → Define Target Area around (0, 3) & (1, 1) → Auto-Scores
2. Manual Annotation / Student Submission: Canvas Assignment → Online File Upload / Student Annotation → Student Draws Line → SpeedGrader Review

If using the second approach, the teacher, using SpeedGrader, flips through submissions with a single keystroke, views the student’s drawn line, adds quick rubric marks or numeric points, and submits feedback. Either method would take about five minutes, including uploading the grid image, drawing a hotspot circle, and setting the point value.

Using Google Classroom, one of a few approached can be imagined:

1. Build the Template in Google Slides
2. Decompose the Question and Use Google Forms
3. Use an Add-On (Desmos, Pear Assessment’s “Graph on a Grid”)

For the first approach, the teacher could create a new Google Slide and delete the default text boxes. Then, small circular shapes filled in red would be inserted to serve as coordinate points. She would then insert a line segment with double arrows. Students will drag a point to , a second point to or , and snap the line across them. After attaching the Google Slide and setting the permission dropdown to “Make a copy for each student,” she can assign due date and points.

While Google Slides cannot auto-score vector positions, the grading interface allows the teacher to cycle through student submissions with arrow keys. The target line (y-intercept with negative slope ) creates an immediate visual signature that can be verified in two or three seconds per student.

For the second option, the teacher would decompose the question into multiple-choice or simple text-entry interactions and create a Quiz in Google Forms. She would assign it via Classroom with Grade Importing enabled, and Classroom would import the numerical score directly into the gradebook upon submission. For example:

1. Identify the y-intercept of → Auto-graded Short Answer:
2. If you move 1 unit right from the y-intercept, what is the next coordinate point? → Auto-graded Short Answer:
3. Which of the four graphs below correctly plots ? → Auto-graded Multiple Choice: Graph B

An automated assessment with dynamic graph validation could also be used for option 3 through a third-party tool that has been integrated with Classroom, such as Desmos. If available, students would use an embedded Desmos card where they place two movable points to plot the line. The computation layer checks if student points satisfy and passes a completion/correctness flag back to Classroom.

If teachers want maximum instructional value with zero external tools, option 1 (Google Slides) is the way to go. It enforces the physical act of plotting and is fast to grade visually. If 100% hands-off overnight auto-scoring is needed, a Pear Assessment or Desmos Add-on can be used if it’s available; if not, teachers can decompose the graph into key coordinate checks via a Google Forms Quiz.

From the student’s perspective, Canvas would have students clicking coordinate points directly on the grid image. This is a bit simpler, as interactions go, than dragging point tokens and line handles to snap across and , as in the first Classroom approach, typing coordinate values into text boxes and selecting graph radio button, as in the second Classroom approach, or using an interactive vector drawing tool or graphing pen on a scratchpad, as in the third.

But we await the results of the pilot. It comes down to what teachers want in a teaching and learning hub. If they value frictionless auto-grading natively, Canvas New Quizzes (Hot Spot) or Google Classroom option 2 (Google Forms decomposed questions) requires almost zero grading time after class. If they value authentic graphing mechanics without extra add-on licenses, Google Slides (option 1) or Canvas Student Annotation gives students an authentic tactile plotting experience with negligible grading friction (a rapid visual pass via SpeedGrader or Classroom Grader).