There is no one-size-fits-all model when it comes to instruction. Because students have a wide range of learning styles and abilities, educators need a way to differentiate instruction to effectively engage their students. In the physical classroom, teachers are able to group students using seating charts, based on student ability levels or project groups with similar levels of understanding.
GoGuardian Teacher™ recently released a new student grouping feature so teachers can better differentiate instruction and engage students in the digital classroom. Now you can group your students, customize how your students are displayed, and easily interact with a group of students at once online. In this blog, we will cover a few different ways you can use the new student grouping feature in GoGuardian Teacher. To get step-by-step instructions, click here.
Customize Groups
To group students, click the “student groups” button. You can either choose the randomize option or make your own custom groups. Some of the most common ways you can group your students is based on:
- Assignment
- Mastery or competence level
- Hybrid grouping: Group students based on whether students are learning in-person or remotely
- Off-task behavior: Group students based on how focused they are in class
- Co-teacher coverage: Divide students based on which instructor will be working with them
Customize how students are displayed
Once you’ve grouped students, you can customize how your students are displayed. You can move groups to the top of your screen view, you can move groups down, and you can even collapse a group to hide those students’ screens. This may be the most exciting part of student grouping because it helps teachers more effectively focus their attention on the students who need more guidance during class.
Example: Grouping based on off-task behavior
Imagine that you have 15 students in your class. You have:
- Group A: 5 students who stay focused and don’t need to be monitored
- Group B: 5 students who are generally focused but need occasional monitoring
- Group C: 5 students who regularly go off-task and need consistent monitoring
Once you’ve created these groups in GoGuardian Teacher, you can choose how these groups are displayed on your screen. Here are some examples:
- Since the students in Group C often get distracted and need consistent monitoring, you can move this group to the top of your screen to make monitoring easy.
- Since the students in Group B are generally on-task but need occasional monitoring, you can move this group directly below Group C and scroll down to monitor this group occasionally.
- Since the students in Group A will stay on-task, you can move this group to the bottom of your screen or even collapse this group, hiding their thumbnails. You can always un-collapse (expand) the group to view these students’ screens.
Interact with groups of students
Once you’ve grouped your students, you can interact with the groups by using commands. You can open tabs for the entire group, initiate a call with the group (if you have GoGuardian Teacher’s video conferencing), exclude the group from the session, and more. Although you cannot apply different scenes to different student groups yet, we are working on this functionality and hope to release it sometime later this school year!
Now with student grouping in GoGuardian Teacher, teachers have flexibility to sort students into groups, optimizing how you monitor and facilitate instruction during class. For more information about student grouping in GoGuardian Teacher and the step-by-step instructions, click here.
Have suggestions for how to improve GoGuardian Teacher or the new Video Conferencing features? Join our product feedback forum to see the suggestions others have made, upvote the ones you like, or submit your own suggestions! You can get status updates on the things you suggested or upvoted so you can track how your feedback is helping us improve GoGuardian Teacher!
