Utilizing Groups is a great way to bring students together and provide them with more opportunities in your classroom environment. Pronto’s Groups feature allows you to place students in specific groups for a variety of purposes. Even better, students are not limited to a single group, which means you can reassign students according to their changing needs or the specific actions taking place in the classroom environment.
Are you using Groups to your full advantage? Consider some of these strategies you might use as you segment your students.
Put students in groups to work on specific projects.
Group projects don’t have to be the bane of your students’ existence, especially when you make communication and collaboration for them as easy as possible. Using Groups for student group projects can offer several important advantages.
Students can easily get in touch with one another.
They don’t have to worry about exchanging email addresses or phone numbers since they can connect directly through the app. As an added advantage, students can quickly get in contact with group members who weren’t present when groups were assigned or who have a hard time making it to after-class meetings, which means that everyone can easily collaborate.
Students can keep a project in one place and it is easily accessible.
Students won’t have to worry about losing track of project information, from who’s supposed to take care of a specific component of the project to what information others have already put together since it will all be contained within the app.
You can track student contributions with ease.
Keeping up with student contributions to group work can pose an ongoing challenge. While you want your students to work together, you also do not want to punish the entire group for the actions of one student who failed to follow through on his responsibilities. With student collaboration taking place through Groups, you can keep an eye on what students have contributed to the project.
Place students in tutoring groups to help them address any problems they might have.
Tutoring groups are a great way to help students learn and grow. When you put together tutoring groups, you can put all the students who are having trouble with a specific project in the same group at the same time, where they all have access to the same information. These tutoring groups can offer several advantages.
You can easily communicate with all the students that you know are having problems with a specific concept at once.
You won’t have to worry about missing a student as you send out vital resources, including tutoring videos and handouts since they’ll all be part of the same group and you can easily push out that information to all of them at the same time.
Students can help one another.
Sometimes, a different perspective can make a huge difference in the way students perceive specific information. With specific tutoring groups, they can ask questions of one another, share information, and improve learning across the board, which may make it easier for some students to address any challenges they might have.
You can use general threads for classroom announcements and communications.
In addition to your small groups within the classroom, you can create general threads for classroom announcements or specific purposes. Sometimes, you may want to send out new information to the entire class at once. You may want to send out specific handouts that students need–or copies of the information that you’ve put out in class. You may want to make an announcement in Pronto that will let students know that classes are canceled for the day, which will avoid students showing up when they don’t have to.
Use read receipts to your advantage.
As part of those general communications, you can turn on read receipts to let you see which students have interacted with the announcement. Since you can easily see which students have read a specific communication or announcement, both within specific groups and outside them, you can see how much effort your students are really putting in, which can help you better determine how to distribute grades, extra credit points, and additional opportunities.
Are you looking for a communication solution that can help both you and your students? Pronto can help. With everything from Groups to Announcements and even video calls, Pronto helps improve student connection to the classroom no matter where they are. Contact us today for a free demonstration of how Pronto can benefit your classroom.