Frontline Professional Growth allows a teacher/educational specialist to organize and keep track of all the parts of their yearly evaluation (observations, SGOs, documentation log, Professional Development Plan), and Professional Development Workshops. Our district has been able to adjust the use of Frontline Professional Growth to fit our Professional Development goals as well as our evaluation systems. Frontline Professional Growth also has a Forms section so we have all of our request forms in a paperless environment. Overall, the system does a good job of helping the teacher and supervisor/administration manage the evaluation and professional development requirements for our State.
- During the pandemic, the college needs a fast and easy solution to conduct Google Classroom. The integration with Google Accounts and Google Meet allows the university to run and access the Classroom on a large scale. - The teacher wants to conduct some exams in third-party software like Moodle. But we have not found any plugin for this famous open-source learning platform. The exam system in Google Classroom is so poor that it doesn't even fully screen the test when students are writing their exams.
Student-teacher communication - I love using Classroom for this because my students can always go back and check what was on Classroom by looking through the stream. This way they don't have to go dig through emails to find what they're looking for.
Posting to multiple classes - I can post the same announcement or assignment to multiple classes at once without having to repeat the process or send separate emails.
Streamlining grading - when students turn work in on Classroom, it all goes to one place and then when I'm grading I can open their documents directly from Classroom or my Drive folder. This way, I'm not looking through emails and Google Doc shared files for their assignment.
The configuration and startup of Frontline Professional Growth is time-consuming. I wish this was easier to get going.
Creating forms is difficult and the form editor is hard to navigate and use. You cannot create a form yourself. That has to be created and entered into your system by Frontline, which takes more time, especially if it is an easy form you want to create.
There needs to be a better way to save forms you are completing and being able to go right back to them at a later date. I have had teachers lose what they were doing when saving a draft and then have to start all over.
Notifications on forms at individual levels only go out once a day, sometime around 2am. This should be instantaneous, notifying individuals as the form comes in.
Although usually in the discussion with other LMS apps such as Schoology and Canvas, Google Classroom doesn't possess as in-depth of a platform. There is no ability to set individual learning paths, pace student work with completion settings, or embed other apps directly into teacher-created assignments.
The assignment creation options are limited. Teachers can only choose from creating an assignment (usually a link with directions), a material (usually a doc/slide/website, etc), a question, and a quiz.
With gamification taking on a new lens in education, there really isn't any way to use gamification elements with Google Classroom. There isn't any way to create Individual learning paths, or use badges and micro-credentials within Classroom. Outside programs would have to be used.
Testing is particularly important in online learning, and Google Classroom falls far short of other learning management systems in this regard. Security is also a concern: while account control is reasonable for the account used with Google Classroom, the person controlling a particular account is often able to, for example, forward or download proprietary materials.
This is only a product I would recommend to a humanities teacher. Math and science teachers cannot use this product the same way that I can as an English teacher. It is great for word process and for reading, but unable to handle the demands of math and science. Therefore, I would highly recommend this product to English or Social Studies teachers, but NOT math or science teachers
Overall, Frontline Professional Growth manages observations, SGOs, documentation logs, and Professional Development Plans. In addition to these evaluation pieces, it allows our district to manage our Professional Development Workshops (in-house), Professional Development requests (for out-of-district), and many online request forms. The only real negative is that some of the menus are a bit cumbersome, and it takes several steps to get around the system.
Since this platform is provided by Google, the technical support is better than any others, and we are not required to bother about the space constraints for adding the contents. If we have a good uninterrupted internet facility we can access Google Classroom without any delay or lag. They have app support in both Android and iPhone.
It was relatively easy to implement due to the simplicity of the platform. Even our more technology challenged teachers found it easy to get started with Google Classroom.
Frontline Professional Growth isn't an LMS. This is something more used on the back end to manage and track staff information regarding professional learning, workshops, and hours. This does a good job in a number of areas, but does have a learning curve and does take a good amount of time to get up and running. There are features that I wish were easier to use.
Skyward and Google Classroom are completely different programs that are used for completely different things. The only comparable areas are communication with students. Skyward does so through the class rosters and message center and Google Classroom does so through the classrooms for each student and their teacher, but each is unique in their own way.
