Back-to-School Best Practices: Setting your GoGuardian Teacher Account Up for Success

As a new school year begins, it’s once again time to spark curious minds by creating an engaging, enriching Learning environment for your students. In order to do that, however, you must have the right tools at your disposal. With GoGuardian Teacher, you have the power to revolutionize education by making the experience captivating and immersive for learners.

To ensure you’re ready, we’ve put together a list of tips that will help you kick-start a wonderful and productive year full of new discoveries.

For Super Users

• Manually sync Google Admin Console: Keep student OUs up to date by syncing your Google Admin Console. This ensures new learners are added and graduated students are removed.
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• Update user accounts: Add new staff members manually or leverage our integrations with Clever or Classlink for a streamlined process. Archive any accounts from last year that are no longer needed.
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• Enable sessions for specific times of day: If your school schedule was modified during the summer break, remember to revisit it and allow GoGuardian Teacher sessions during school hours.
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• Audit additional teacher settings: Customize GoGuardian Teacher to fit your school's requirements. Select settings such as displaying session information to students and others.
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• Create quick lists: Create, manage, and share quick lists, which are collections of URLs teachers can allow or block when creating scenes.
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• Promote GoGuardian Teacher training: Encourage teachers to watch our engaging back-to-school webinars, where they can enhance their skills and earn valuable professional development credits.

For teachers

Set up your classrooms

• Archive old classrooms: Remove classes that have ended or are no longer needed.
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• Set up classrooms: Manually create a new class, import from Google Classroom, or verify that your administrator has automatically synced your Clever or ClassLink rosters. You can also easily merge or organize your classroom cards right from your dashboard.
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• Enroll students: Add students to your newly created (manual) classrooms.
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• Add co-teachers: Collaborate effectively by adding teachers or helpers who can assist with classroom management and monitoring during live sessions.
  

Set up and optimize Sessions

• Schedule sessions: Set up sessions to run automatically based on your school’s rotating calendar.
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• Create Scenes: Build custom web-filtering rules to keep students focused and aligned with your learning objectives. Save time by selecting a default Scene to apply automatically at the start of every session.
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• Create Student Groups: Easily sort your students into groups for differentiated instruction. You can even save time by selecting a default group and group-level Scenes to automatically sort your students the moment your session starts.

Managing your classroom

• Monitor with Screens & Timelines: Get a live look at active student browsing during class, and use the detailed Timeline view during or after your session to review their exact site history.
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• Manage Student Browsing: Use dashboard shortcuts to open or close student tabs, rearrange their tab order, or force-focus their screens on a specific active assignment.
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• Utilize Teacher Commands: Take direct action to guide student behavior. You can instantly lock screens to capture attention, take screenshots for accountability, exclude absent students to clean up your view, or use screen annotations to visually guide student attention.
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• Communicate with Students: Stay connected by sending Announcements to share reminders or open a private, one-on-one Teacher Chat to offer individual support and behavioral redirection.
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• Troubleshoot Common Interruptions: Know how to handle a student appearing offline or resolve competing scene conflicts instantly to keep your live session running smoothly.
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• Unblock Sites on the Fly: Understand how to temporarily bypass school-level web blocks during class so your students can access essential lesson materials.

Reviewing Reports and Insights

• Review & Email Reports: View an individual student's activity report to assess their engagement, and email it out directly to share progress.

Also, be sure to download our back-to-school checklists for GoGuardian Admin, GoGuardian Teacher, GoGuardian Beacon, GoGuardian Hall Pass, GoGuardian Discover, and Org Management.

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Note: This blog was originally published on 7/21/23. It was updated 7/20/26.