I doubt Google Classroom itself is the problem at all, that's pretty rock-solid in my experience.

But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.

Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.

But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.

Is this a state school? Government rules [1] say:

> School governing bodies and local authorities cannot charge for:

> [...]

> education provided during school hours (including the supply of any materials, books, instruments or other equipment)

[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5af99c8ae5274...

Makes me wonder if you could point an agent at a school Google Classroom and get it to clean up all this stuff. It's roughly a storage platform, and those do accumulate cruft. An agent can go deep, actually understand the pieces, fix permissions, delete corrupted stuff that is also probably defunct, etc.

My kid has some mild attention issues, keeping track of assignments is only made more difficult by Google classrooms. Some assignments are in Google Classrooms, some are there but only placeholders as there was a handout, some aren't in there at all.

> I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.

It's good that schools are teaching kids how the real world works :)

Teachers have been teaching kids to read and write for 5000 years.

But I suppose education is a business and they need to keep inventing new "methods".