#437 – Creating Student Groups with Grouper

#437 — Creating Student Groups with Grouper

AVID Open Access
7 min

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by Otter.ai. Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

 

Paul Beckermann 0:00 Welcome to Tech Talk for teachers. I’m your host, Paul Beckermann.

Transition Music 0:09 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 0:16 The topic of today’s episode is creating student groups with Grouper. Group work is a powerful way to get students engaging with content in a collaborative manner. We can have students number off or cluster students sitting close to them, but we often want to be more thoughtful about how we organize student groups. This can take valuable time.

That’s where today’s tool comes in. It’s called Grouper, and it’s designed specifically to help you quickly and thoughtfully create customized groups of students for your classroom. Here’s how it works.

First, set up an account at grouper.school. You can sign up with Google, Clever, or your email. If you use Google Classroom or roster using Clever, choosing those options will allow you to easily and automatically import your rosters into Grouper. Otherwise, you can sign up using email and set up your classes manually. Setting up classes manually is quick and easy as well.

Simply click the “New Class” button and either copy-paste in a list of students from a roster or spreadsheet, or type them in.

Once you have student names entered into the roster, you can add what Grouper calls attributes. This is where a lot of the power of the program comes in. These include things like role, “do not group with” designations, study buddies, strong leader, introvert or extrovert, gender, English language proficiency, primary language, math or ELA proficiencies, and Lexile or reading levels. You can even create your own categories.

Whichever option you choose, drop-down lists appear in the columns to allow you to quickly choose an attribute description for each student based on that category. For example, under the “Do Not group with” option, you’ll see a list of all the students in the class. Simply click the names of students who should not be grouped with that selected student, and that will be recorded. Similarly for something like math proficiency, you’ll see whatever levels you’ve entered, perhaps “does not meet,” “partially meets,” “meets,” and “exceeds.” Again, select the level for each student.

If you have a spreadsheet already created of test results, you can even import those into Grouper, provided the names are listed on the left in the rows and the categories are listed along the top in the columns. Grouper will automatically match the data on the spreadsheet to the names in your class. The integrated AI does a really nice job of matching up the names, even if they’re not perfect matches, like Nicholas instead of Nick.

When the data has been imported, you can also double-check to make sure that all the names match, and you can even decide to eliminate some of the columns of information if you decide you do not want them included in the import. Having these attributes set up really gives Grouper much of its power and allows you to set up groups based on those criteria.

Once your classes and attributes have been set up, you’re ready to make your groups. You can create random groups or groups based on those attributes.

To make a quick random group, you can click on the option for either group size or number of groups. If you click on “five groups,” for example, it will quickly place your students into five random groups. Similarly, if you click the “four students per group” option, it will create groups with no more than four students in each group.

Each student is represented by a cartoon avatar, which can be changed if you wish. If you don’t like the groups it created, you can either hit the shuffle button to create a new random grouping, or you can drag and drop students from one group to another. If a student is absent, you can click the three dots by the avatar and mark the student as absent, and then that student will be removed from the active groups for the day.

If you want more control over the group makeup, you can manually create them, or you can have them automatically created based on attributes that you choose.

The attributes are listed on the right side menu, and each has an option for spreading out or clustering by attribute. Spreading out makes heterogeneous groups based on that criteria, and clustering makes the groups more homogeneous. For instance, you could make the groups heterogeneous by gender and homogeneous by ELA proficiency.

Even with this approach, you can still drag and drop students to fine-tune the results. “Do not group with” designations will keep these students in separate groups unless you override them. This process allows you to create customized groups quickly and easily with a few clicks of the mouse.

There are a few other nice features available as well. You can name each group, and AI will even try to help you with this. For instance, if you name the first group, Group 1, AI will automatically fill the other groups as Group 2, 3, 4, and so on. If you begin naming groups by color, the AI will assign colors to the other groups. Of course, any of these suggestions can be overridden manually.

You can also choose to lock groups that you like and then randomize the rest of them. That’s a great option if you have a specific group of students you want to meet for intervention work while the other students are randomly grouped to work on something else.

And there is an undo and redo button as well. Once you have the groups set up the way you want them, click the “Go Live” button to display a student-friendly view of the groups. If you update any of the groups, those changes will immediately show up on the “Go Live” page.

One other cool feature is the rotate button. Clicking this shifts students to the next group on the list. This is a great option for rotating students during station rotation work.

If you’d rather display the groups in another way, there are a few additional options as well. You can export the groups as text, an image, or as a PDF. This allows you to use results in other ways, perhaps as an image in a slideshow.

Overall, Grouper is a time-saving way to build and modify groups of students in your classroom.

With the free version, you can have up to 40 students per class, and groups are saved for seven days. The free version also lets you sort by up to two student attributes. The Pro version allows for additional options like unlimited attributes, smartboard tools like timers and virtual dice, and the ability to save groups forever.

To learn more about today’s topic and explore other free resources, visit AvidOpenAccess.org.

And, of course, be sure to join Rena Winston and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we’re joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening, take care, and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.