When students access Google Classroom to view files or complete assignments they need to log into their personal GAFE account. Different students on the the same devices each different class period!
In my classroom students have iPads, Samsung Galaxy Tabs, Netbooks, Chromebooks, Laptops, or iMac desktop computers to choose from to do work that requires technology. Some of my devices are old enough that they are glitchy at best and downright frustrating to do anything other than surfing the net. We had some troubles when first using GAFE for a Slides activity. I found a work-around for accessing and editing Slides on Android Tablets.
Our most recent problem has to do with our devices being shared. On any given day students from one class will access their GAFE accounts then students in the next class will need to access their GAFE accounts. Seems pretty straightforward, sign out of the previous student’s account then sign in to yours. Yeah, that’s too simple. Day after day I get students coming to me saying that they can’t login to their account because it won’t log out of the previous student’s account. I try it and they’re right, Safari on the iPads as well as Safari or Chrome on the iMacs will not log out of one user’s account to log into another user.
Well, I found a workaround and it’s one I mentioned in my Problems with Tech post. It seems that iPad browsers, and/or older browsers on computers that can’t be updated anymore, have problems loading Google Drive as well as other current google pages such as slides.google.com, classroom.google.com, etc.
But all my devices, old and not so old, will access blogger.com! That’s the secret!
Blogger.com doesn’t just get my students onto Google’s services but also consistently allows students to logout of a previous user’s account and log into their account! Works like a charm every time. Google, please don’t change this!
Update: On Wednesday, Jan 13, a student came to me saying that every time he would log out of blogger.com and use his account it would return to the previous account. I checked it and it was indeed not working! My perfect, works-every-time fix wasn’t working on one of the new Samsung Galaxy Tabs S2!!
After several failed attempts, I tried switching the Android account the student was on – the Google tools account – to the other Android account – the restricted one – and my blogger.com fix worked! We were able to log out of the previous student’s (a different student btw) account to the current student’s account! These glitches never end!!!!
