Say 👋 hello to BusyBee, your AI-powered learning & teaching companion for Buzz. Learn more!
Groups allow you to organize learners into smaller teams within a course. You can use groups to:
- Create subsets of students by performance.
- Create group-specific activity settings.
- Send group messages from the Clipboard and assign group activities, tasks, or badges from the Clipboard.
- Filter your list views in screens like the Gradebook to review the progress of grouped students.
Groups are organized inside groupings, which act as containers for related groups.
How groupings and groups work
A grouping is a collection of groups.
A group is a subset of a grouping to which students can be assigned.
A course can contain multiple groupings, and each grouping can contain multiple groups. If allowed by a grouping is configured, students can belong to one or more groups within it.
Example:
| Grouping | Groups |
|---|---|
| Project teams | Team 1, Team 2, Team 3 |
| Reading level | Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced |
| Debate groups | Affirmative, Negative |
Create new groupings and groups
When you create new groupings, Buzz helps you generate groups and assign group members.
- Open the People tool, click Tools, and select Manage groupings.
You can also create and manage groups in the Editor using Tools > Manage groupings.
- Click Add grouping.
- Enter a Group prefix; each group that is generated uses this prefix and a number to indicate that they’re part of this Grouping (e.g., Reading level 1, Reading level 2).
- Choose your Group creation method.
- If you choose Fixed number of groups, specify the number of groups.
- If you choose Target number of students per group, specify the number of students per group and Buzz generates the necessary number of groups.
- Choose the desired Group assignment method from the dropdown list.
- Click Generate.
- If you click Cancel, you can manually create and edit groups.
Buzz generates the groups and assigns students using your configurations where you can edit them. When you're done, click Save.
Group assignment
When creating groupings, Buzz offers the following methods of automatic Group assignment.
| Group assignment option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Random | Randomly assigns students to groups. |
| Round Robin | Assigns the first student in the list to the first group, the second student to the second group, and so on. |
| Alphabetical | Assigns students to groups alphabetically by first name. |
| Homogeneous by perfomance | Students with similar scores are grouped together. |
| Heterogeneous by performance | Each group has a mix of high and low scores. |
| Heterogeneous by performance - Top/Bottom | Groups the highest and lowest scores together. |
| Heterogeneuos by performance - 1st Q/3rd Q; 2nd Q/4th Q | Groups high scores and low scores together using quartiles.
|
Manage groupings and groups
To access, create, edit, and manage existing groupings and groups, open the People tool, click Tools, and select Manage groupings.
From this screen, you can:
- Select the Grouping you want to edit.
- Click Copy grouping to duplicate a grouping.
- Click Delete grouping to remove a grouping.
- Click Add grouping to create a new grouping.
Edit groupings and groups
Once a grouping is created, you can:
- Edit the grouping Name.
- Choose whether each student can be assigned to only one group or multiple groups within a grouping.
- Add Groups to the grouping.
- Edit group names or remove groups from the grouping.
- Choose which scores to show with Score display options:
- Select Show course % to show course performance (default for new groupings).
- Select Show activity % and choose a specific activity's score.
- Clear All students from the assigned groups.
- Automatically Generate groups to update the group configurations and Group assignment.
- Move students between groups by checking the box that aligns with the student and the group you want to place them in.
View course scores or activity scores in a grouping
In a Buzz grouping, you can review the students' course scores or their scores for a specific activity.
Open the vertical menu in the toolbar:
- Select Show course % to view course performance (default).
- Select Show activity % to view performance on a specific activity.
