This is our webinar on closed groups, where you will learn its mains features, advantages and how to use them.
Transcription:
Welcome everybody. My name is Cristina and I'm going to explain you the closed groups in this webinar. Before anything else, for those who don't know TopWorksheets is a platform that allows you to create interactive worksheets for students and when they complete the worksheet and send the result to you. The results are auto-graded, that is one of the advantages of TopWorksheets because it saves you time from correcting them. I don't want to to be explaining what TopWorksheets is, but I want just to tell you the the main advantages that it has: the editor is very easy, you are you are going to see it; you don't need an advanced knowledge of technology to use it and understand it, because it's very intuitive and very easy to use.
Also, you have a lot of tools to make the interactive worksheets look better. And if you don't have time to create new worksheets because you are very busy, we have a huge bank of worksheets created by other teachers that you can always share with your students.
I'm going to explain, step by step, how to create a closed group. We are going to go to TopWorksheets, but before I want to tell you in a few minutes the benefits for the teacher: the closed groups allow you to have a greater control of the assignment task and the student submissions, because you are going to have access to a panel where all the assignments and the submissions are going to be together, and you are going to be able to see everything in just one page.
Now you're going to see all this and you're going to understand it better. Sharing the worksheet with our students is going to be much easier, because you don't need to share various links, just assigning the task would be enough. And the benefits for the students are that they would have their own account, which is very useful because from there they can see the pending tasks they have to do, they can also check their grades and complete worksheets from there. This means that they don't need links, they don't need anything because just completing the worksheet from their own account is going to be enough to submit it to the teacher.
And with this I'm going to go to my TopWorksheets account. So this would be the Discover worksheets section, and we will have to go to My groups to create this closed group. It's very easy, they are created like the open ones, you just have to click on Create new group and the first thing they are going to ask us is the name. For example, we are going to put "Class C", and here the only thing we have to choose is the closed group option and create it. That's all, with this the closed group would be created and you have seen that is very easy. Now, if you don't mind I have to change the group here, because I can show you all the things i want.
So I'm going to go to this one and go to the same point as a moment ago, because the other one is new and I can't show you everything that I want to show you with a new one. So imagine this is the the one we have just created and the next step we have to take is to invite students to join the group. We have two ways: the first one is using a group code and the second one is using the student email.
I'm going to show you this one first, because it's the easiest one. You just have to copy the link and share it with the students. Imagine that I am the student, now we open a new tab and we paste the link that our teacher has just sent us. We paste it and look at what would appear to the student. They will just have to fill the data with the username, the password, the name and the surname, accept the privacy policy and join the group, it's very easy, just have to fill these four fields and their account would be ready and they will have joined to the group.
The second one would be to invite the student by using the email. This is also very easy, you just have to write it down here. For example, I have these three: declare that you have the authorization by clicking here, send the invitations and would be enough. Now imagine that I am a student again, I go to the email of the students, in this case Luis; you can see it here and Luis has received this invitation. It says that your teacher Cristina, that is me, has invited you to join a group in TopWorksheets and they would just have to click and accept the invitation.
The next thing would be to explain you all these sections. The first one is the assignment task here. This is what i just explained to you, that is, everything is in this panel and you can see everything. For example, we have these four worksheets with all the options that we usually choose when we assign a task. Now we are going to see that, for example, this one is a sample: show the grade yes, the score system, the maximum number of times to do that, and this column is the most important and useful in my opinion because it tells you the percentage of the students that have completed the worksheet. In this case, for example, this second one is telling us that one out of four students have submitted the work.
The next one, it tells us that three out of four have completed. It's like you have a greater control of all this work and, of course, you can also always edit the task. For example, if we click on it you can always change the score system or these options: allow students to view the correct answers after submitting the task, we say yes, we save and we change it. You know, as always, we can also embed tasks in our website, in case we have a blogspot or a website. We can also download all the submissions, this is very useful because if we choose this one we can download the three out of four submissions to have them in our computer. When we've downloaded them, we can always print and share them in the class with students.
From here, I want to show you how to assign tasks to a closed group, because it's very. It is almost the same way as the open ones. For example, we have this one and imagine that we want to share this worksheet with a closed group. So we click on it and we assign tasks to the students here, we select the group, in this case remember that would be "Second C" and the score system by default, maximum number of times, for example one, allow students to view the correct answers yes, and we create the task.
We have just created this worksheet. Of course as we have just created it, 0 out of 4 students have a completed it, and that would be done. You have seen that you don't need links because automatically the the worksheet would be in the closed group.
So the next button will be the submissions. Here we have all the submissions that the students have sent to us, all together with the name of the worksheet, the name of the student, the grade that they got, if we have read it and the number of submissions. I only have four worksheets, but if you have 200 you can always filter and search better with all these filters. I also want to show you that you can always export to Excel; you just have to click and it will download automatically in your computer. That would be all in the submissions. For example, imagine that we want to see this one: we just have to click here on the little i symbol and we have access to see the submission of Luis from Second C. We have the same options as always, we can download the PDF, change the answer correction, mark as unread, download the certificate,... and we can see here the the worksheet done.
Okay, the next one would be the students. If you want to keep inviting students, remember that you can write down here their emails or you can share with them the link of the group. In my case, I just have four students. Remember that you can always change here the student name if you don't like the one that they have entered themselves, change their password,... you are going to be always in control of their accounts. You can download all the submissions they. This is one of the most useful options that we have, because if we want all the submissions of one student, we just have to click here and this option will generate a compressed file with all the submissions in PDF format; it's very easy, you will receive an email with the link to download it.
The last one would be the statistics. That is also a very useful section, because it tells you the average grade of the group, the average grade per student and the average grade per worksheet. I think this is very important because here you can see if one worksheet that you made is very difficult for the group or very easy and you can always change the grade of difficulty here.
I think I'm almost finished explaining the closed groups. The last button is this one, that is very important as if you click on it no more students will be able to join the group. You just have to click and the group will be locked. Of course, you can lock and unlock it whenever you want and when it's activated no more students will be able to join.
I'm going to log out and i'm going to enter the student account, so you can see how is a student account. For example, we are going to enter in Luis account so you can see how it's from the inside.
Okay, so this is the account. It's very simple, it's very easy to use. They just have two buttons: pending tasks and my groups. In pending tasks they have all the worksheets they have pending and ready to complete. Here they have the name of the group, because, for example, here Luis has two groups: Second C and Class B. Also, the duration and the most important thing is that they can complete the task from here. So just entering their account they can see all the pending tasks they have and do them clicking from here and they don't need links, they just have to enter and everything would be here.
And if they click on My groups, for example, we have two groups: Second C and Class B, and can alaways join another group with the codes. Imagine that more than one teacher in your school uses TopWorksheets and the students have different groups, different tasks, etc. If we enter in Second C, from here the students can see only the pending tasks of that specific group and the grade they got in the worksheets that they have done. For example, this has four pending tasks and one done, and the one that has been completed he got a 10 out of 10.
This would be basically the student account, it is very easy to use, very intuitive and very tidy.
I want also to show you a last thing if you don't mind. I want to show you that we have just launched this program, because you have seen that I have the gold premium plan, and you also can have it for free for one month if you invite other colleagues and other teachers or friends of yours that you think that would like to try TopWorksheets. For example, if you have a colleague in your school that you think that would be interested, you just have to copy the invitation link and share it with them, and if they register, you and the teacher you have invited would have a free month of the premium plan. I think that it is a great opportunity to try the premium plan for free. And if that teacher paid for a month, you get a second free month.
Remember that what I just shown you about closed groups is free, just with your free account would be enough.
See you in in the next webinar, thank you.