How to Use GoGuardian Teacher to Its Fullest Potential

Unlocking the full potential of student-teacher interactions is more important than ever. With GoGuardian Teacher, educators can forge meaningful connections with students while maximizing instructional time. By seamlessly integrating technology into the classroom, GoGuardian Teacher empowers teachers to keep students focused and facilitates communication.

Let’s look at several ways GoGuardian Teacher helps educators connect with students while saving instructional time in the classroom. You’ll also see why nine out of 10 Curriculum and Instructional Specialists who use GoGuardian believe our products help enable a positive and productive teacher-student relationship.*

Keep students focused

It can be challenging to know what students are doing on their devices and whether they are engaged in the lesson, are off-task, or need help. GoGuardian Teacher provides educators with a view into student online activity and tools that help eliminate distractions and guide exploration and focus.

Drag and Drop – Teachers can organize their students within a live GoGuardian Teacher session in a way that better aligns with their seating chart or the task at hand. By rearranging student tiles, educators can prioritize students who need additional support or categorize students for differentiated instruction. 

Screens view – With a real time view into student activity, teachers can quickly identify those who are struggling or ready to move on.

Off-Task alerts – AI helps detect when students go off-task relative to the classroom subject and alerts educators with a visual cue, helping better identify off-task behavior and quickly redirect students back to the assignment.

Commands – Teacher “commands” enable educators to remotely open tabs to helpful resources, close irrelevant tabs, and lock screens to help them maintain focus. 

Screen sharing – With the ability to share a screen with students’ devices and the option to lock their devices to the presentation, teachers can prevent them from browsing the web and ensure the class synchronously follows along with the lesson.‍

Deliver instruction without disruption

Chat – While some students are comfortable raising their hand to speak in front of the class, others are shy about speaking up. GoGuardian Teacher users see increased participation among shy students when using the chat feature. With chat, teachers can speak with students privately to answer questions, offer guidance, or redirect their attention. They can also leverage the chat feature to connect 1-1 with a student after deploying a Student Check-In – a quick “How are you feeling?” poll that can be launched within a live session, and gives insight into students’ emotional states.  

Announcements – The announcement feature makes it easy to deliver instruction to the whole class. This is a great way to ask students to turn their eyes up front or remind them of the time left to do the assignment, without disrupting any quiet focus time.

Spend less time monitoring, and more time engaging

Scenes – By setting browsing rules for students and choosing which websites are allowed or blocked during a classroom session, educators can feel confident students are staying on-task. With Scenes, teachers will spend less time monitoring screens and more time instructing and interacting with students face-to-face.

Reporting – Detailed reports on student browsing history free up more class time for teaching and interacting with students. After class, educators can view the reports to check for engagement and whether students were practicing good digital citizenship.

Save instructional time

GoGuardian Teacher is specifically designed to cut down on transition time and help maximize instructional time in the classroom. Instructors who use GoGuardian Teacher in the classroom say it saves them over seven minutes on average PER class period. By getting this time back, educators will be able to redirect some of their focus to meet students’ Learning needs.

Open tab – Start class with a set of auto-open tabs for students, or remotely open tabs on student devices as needed to cut down on transition time and get the whole class on the same page quickly. Teachers can even sync Google Classroom resources to seamlessly distribute Classwork or use Pear Deck Instant Share to deliver Pear Deck presentations within a live GoGuardian Teacher session. On average, each teacher who uses GoGuardian Teacher’s Open Tab feature saves 24 hours of instructional time** in a school year.

Student groups – Using the student grouping feature in GoGuardian Teacher enables educators to create personalized Learning environments for groups of students with access to resources that are specific to their Learning needs. 

Integrations – Integrations with Google Classroom, Clever, and Classlink allow teachers to use existing rosters to simplify classroom setup and roster maintenance. Teach confidently knowing class rosters are automatically updating.

Email reports – Email individual student reports to easily keep parents and administrators better informed about students’ attendance and engagement with just the click of a button.

Schedule Sessions - Schedule sessions to run at specific times and dates so lessons start on time, every time, both digitally and physically in the classroom.

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Students can still benefit from face-to-face interactions while diving into 21st century Learning, and teachers can harness these tools to make teaching and classroom management easier and more efficient.

Note: This piece was originally published May 27, 2021. It has been updated as of June 9, 2023.