The new school year is here, and it’s game on for teachers! Amid all the excitement and challenges back-to-school brings, Lightspeed Classroom Management is here to help—empowering you with the visibility and control you need to keep students focused and engaged.
Whether you’ve used Lightspeed Classroom Management before or this is your first year, here are five key features that will give you a jump start on effectively managing your digital classroom and set expectations for a successful school year.
1. Adjust student tiles to match seating charts
It’s that first day of school, and you are probably directing your students to a pre-arranged seating chart that will help you get to know them and promote engagement these first few weeks of school. Did you know that you can also mimic this seating chart in Lightspeed Classroom Management?
From within your class, you can easily drag and drop student tiles into an order that matches your seating chart. Creating this online and offline alignment will be helpful those first few days as you get to know your new students and will make class management more effective throughout the year. And, as with your in-class seating arrangement, you can reorganize your digital arrangement at any time during the year.
2. Easily merge classes for seamless monitoring
Due to roster syncing, at times teachers will find multiple sessions created for a single class. With Lightspeed Classroom Management, you can quickly combine multiple classes and sections to easily monitor and manage students attending the same class – saving time and enabling you to do your job more efficiently.
3. Conveniently explore multiple student screen views
Managing your class in-person and online at the same time can seem daunting with a sea of faces in front of you and rows of thumbnails on your screen. However, Lightspeed Classroom Management makes this process a breeze with a convenient slider that allows you to smoothly move between different screen-viewing options.
You’ll be able to quickly switch from a view of all the screens in a class—glancing from student to student—to a zoomed-in view on just a single screen or a subset of screens, making it easy to manage the class at-large while also enabling individual redirection as needed.
4. Efficiently manage your classroom internet policies
It’s crucial that teachers have control over when and where students can surf on their devices. The Web Rules feature makes it simple for you to manage your classroom internet policies by creating a list of allowed websites as well as those that are blocked.
5. Instant messaging
Sometimes teachers may want to check in on a student—or give them a little nudge to refocus—without disrupting the entire class. Lightspeed Classroom Management allows you to send either a custom message of choose from a list of predefined messages, such as “Are you done?” or “Do you need help?”, to an individual student, a group of students, or even the whole class.
Teachers also often use this feature for messages like “Please come see me at my desk” to give their students privacy from their classmates. This real-time communication tool allows you to keep students focused and on-task while minimizing disruption and offering a more private way to check in on students during class time.
Take advantage of these tools and more to save time and increase student engagement. For greater control over your digital classrooms and real-time visibility of student activity, check out more Lightspeed Classroom Management features.