Let’s face it, there is a lot going on and a lot to keep track of when your students are on their laptops and you are trying to monitor them through an active session in Securly Classroom (not to mention actually trying to teach.)
One way to help bring a little order to things and make your life a little easier is to utilize the Groups function in Securly Classroom. You can simply use groups to organize the view of your students and put them in an order that easier for you to track. However, you can also use Groups to quickly differentiate with the teacher tools like Stie Lock, Web Links and Web Link Collections.
Creating Groups
To create groups you need to be running a session and then find the button that looks like a Ska band photo in the upper right of your screen. Click the carrot next to Skankin’ Pickle and you will see a dropdown with a button Add Group.
Click that carrot and it will open a window with all of your students and a place to create a group name. Give your first group a name and then select the students you want to include in the group by clicking on them. When you’re finished selecting people, click the save button. This will create your first group.
You’ll notice that the group goes active once you click save and that the group will be at the top of your view. Everyone not in the group will be displayed below and outside your new group.
You can add another group by going back up to Reel Big Fish and clicking on the carrot again and following the same process as when you created the first group. This time the students already in a group will have little salmon-colored boxes with their group name.
Classroom will remember these groups so you can use them again in the future. It is also good to know that students don’t see what groups they are in.
You can edit the group name and members only when the groups are running by clicking on the three dots in the corner of the groups space and choosing edit (this is also where you delete the group.) There is another way to easily change groups (keep reading.)
Using Groups During a Session
There is currently no way to have the groups launch with the start of a class but it only takes a few click to get them going once you have them set up.
Once a class is up and running, just click the carrot next to Less Than Jake and choose Display Groups. This launches all the groups at once. Currently, groups is kind of a solid-state thing where all groups are on or all groups are off and there isn’t a way to turn on one group or a selection of the groups (but I did put in a request for that.)
A Couple of Cool Thangs
My favorite feature of groups is that you can easily change who is in the groups by dragging and dropping the student card into which ever group you want them in. This is a quick way to rearrange who is in which group.
Drag and drop might seem kind of like a gimic, but the fluid movement of students between groups supports easy management for classroom scenarios like moving students from a more restricted Site Lock group to a group without Site Lock as they complete a task, test or project.
Speaking of rearranging, if you want to control the order in which the groups appear, they are sorted alphanumerically. As a result, you can create names with numbers at the beginning to get them to appear in the order you prefer.
Lastly, one big benefit of using groups is that it makes it easy to differentiate with your teacher tools (things like Screen share and Site Lock) by allowing you to click the toggle in the upper left of the group and then apply those teacher tools just to that group (e.g. – Push out a URL or Site Lock just for that group) with one click.
One other thing to keep in mind is that Groups only works in classes with 48 or fewer students (so for those of you with block classes, you might have to find a different way to make sense of the chaos.)
Also I’m not saying you have to, but you totally should name your groups after your favorite bands!