Classroom Groups Manager: Seating Charts in Google Slides

by Avi Megiddo, MYP Design Teacher, Kaohsiung American School

Creating balanced student groups can be a time-consuming task. Whether you're arranging groups for projects, discussions, or daily activities, the process often takes away valuable class time. The Classroom Groups Manager tool streamlines this by automating group creation, seat assignments, and handling problematic pairings. With just a few clicks, you can organize your class efficiently and save past groupings for future reference. This tool allows teachers to create random groups of various sizes, arrange students in a circle, assign names to fixed desk locations, avoid problematic pairings, and more. With just a few clicks, you can manage class groups based on your needs while saving past groupings for future reference.

Video Demo:

Key Features of the Classroom Groups Manager Tool

This tool leverages Google Apps Script to turn Google Slides into a versatile group creator and random student selector. It's designed with teachers in mind and offers several features that make classroom management more streamlined and engaging.

1. Create Random Student Groups

Teachers can generate random pairs, groups of 3, 4, or 5 students, or even custom groups centered around selected students. Whether forming small teams for a project or organizing students for discussion, this tool provides the flexibility to create groups that fit your classroom structure.

2. Bad Pairings and Wildcards

Certain students may not work well together. The Classroom Groups Manager allows you to save these bad pairings, ensuring they are not grouped together. Additionally, the tool prevents bad pairs from becoming the "odd one out" (wildcard) in groupings where the total number of students does not divide evenly into groups.

If a wildcard needs to be created, the system intelligently chooses someone not involved in a bad pairing and allows them to join a group of their choice. Currently, this feature is not active in circle arrangements or groupings around selected students, but works perfectly for fixed desk or standard group arrangements.

3. Random Student Selector

The random student selector ensures all students have an equal chance to participate. It randomly selects a student, highlights their name in fluorescent green, enlarges their desk/rectangle, and keeps track of the last selected student. This ensures more inclusive and balanced class participation, and that no student is called on repeatedly in succession.

4. Visual Group Layouts

The tool visually organizes groups directly onto the Google Slides canvas, providing an instant view of your classroom seating or group assignments. It places students into rectangles, which can be customized to fit your class’s layout. With drag-and-drop functionality, you can adjust the layout on the fly, enabling real-time flexibility.

5. Grouping Around Selected Students

This feature allows you to assign certain students to specific groups (e.g., group leaders or students needing extra support), while the remaining students are evenly distributed among them. This ensures balanced group dynamics and gives teachers strategic control over group composition.

6. Arrange Students in a Circle

For certain classroom activities, like group discussions or icebreakers, you may prefer students to sit in a circle. The tool supports a circle arrangement feature, which automatically spaces students evenly in a circular layout, while taking bad pairings into account to avoid conflicts within groups.

7. Assign Names to Fixed Desks Without Rearranging

The Assign Names to Desks feature respects the current layout and orientation of desks that a teacher has manually arranged on the slide. Whether desks are rotated, repositioned, or grouped in non-traditional ways (such as bean bags, couches, or different seating zones), this feature simply assigns student names to the desks as they are.

This ensures that teachers can maintain their customized classroom environment, allowing for exact positioning based on various learning areas or furniture setups. Unlike other group creation functions that rearrange desks into grids or circles, this feature keeps your specific arrangement intact and focuses only on assigning names.

How to Use the Classroom Groups Manager Tool

Step 1: Add Your Students

You can input student names into the tool’s sidebar in multiple formats:

• Comma-separated: “Ashley, Catherine, Derek, Liz, Milo, Raysen, Alexandra”
• Space-separated: “Ashley Catherine Derek Liz Milo Oliver Raysen Alexandra”
• A combination of both: “Ashley, Catherine Derek, Liz Milo Oliver Raysen, Alexandra”

Step 2: Create Groups

After entering your students’ names, select the group size (e.g., groups of 4) or assign specific students as group leaders. The tool will automatically balance the groups, taking into account any bad pairings you have saved. You can also group students around selected individuals, perfect for strategic group formations.

Step 3: Make a Duplicate Slide for Each Class / Project

For teachers managing multiple classes or needing to create new group configurations over time, duplicating a slide is essential. This ensures that previous groupings are preserved, allowing you to experiment with new arrangements without losing the original layout.

Here’s how to duplicate a slide in Google Slides:

1. Select the Slide: In the left sidebar of Google Slides (where all the slides are listed), find the slide that contains the groups or seating arrangement you want to duplicate.
2. Right-Click the Slide: Right-click on the slide you wish to copy. A drop-down menu will appear.
3. Click "Duplicate Slide": From the drop-down menu, select Duplicate Slide. This will create an exact copy of the slide, which you can now modify as needed.
4. Rename the Slide: Double-click the slide name (usually visible in the notes area or in the sidebar) and rename it according to the class or activity you’re working on (e.g., "Block 2: Science Project Groups").

By duplicating slides, you can create different group configurations for different classes or activities, while keeping a history of past groupings. This is particularly helpful if you want to revisit a previous arrangement or quickly switch between different layouts for various lessons. It also ensures that you don’t lose the initial setup when experimenting with new configurations.

Practical Applications for Teachers

The tool isn’t just for group formation. Here are a few other ways it can be useful in your classrooms:

• Differentiating Instruction: Assign stronger students as group leaders, ensuring every group has a capable peer for guidance.
• Avoiding Conflicts: Use the bad pairings feature to avoid putting certain students together, preventing disruptions or conflicts during group work.
• Creating Varied Groupings: Over time, you can create different configurations by duplicating slides, saving past groupings, and re-using them to keep things fresh.

Using the Add Class Name/Label Feature

Labeling your slides is important for keeping track of different groupings or activities over time. You can easily add class names or labels to your slides to, for example, “Block 2: Science Project Groups”

Or, suppose? you have Reading Discussion Partners:

By duplicating slides and applying unique labels, you can save past groupings for future reference. This means you can easily switch between different configurations and ensure students experience varied group dynamics over time.

The Classroom Groups Manager is designed to offer flexibility in how teachers manage student groups. Here are just a few ways the tool can be used:

• Differentiate Instruction: Assign strong students as group leaders, ensuring each group has guidance from a capable peer.
• Avoid Problematic Pairings: Use the bad pairings feature to avoid placing certain students together, allowing you to prevent known conflicts in group work.
• Create Varied Groupings: Over time, you can create different group configurations and save past groupings by duplicating slides. This ensures good variation and prevents the same students from working together repeatedly.

Manually Adjusting Text for Long Names

Although the tool resizes text automatically based on name length, some longer names may require manual text fitting. To make sure the text fits properly within shapes, you can set the text padding to zero:

• Select the shape containing the student’s name.
• Open the Format Options panel.

Scroll to Text Fitting and set the left, right, top, and bottom padding to zero.

This ensures that even long names fit within the allotted space. Note that as of this writing, the Google Apps Script API does not allow programmatically changing the text fitting/text padding.

Running the Google Apps Script

Running the Google Apps Script shared is safe. Here’s what you can expect during the process:

1. Authorization Request: When you run the script, you will encounter an authorization request. This is a standard procedure for the script to access specific data within your Google account.
2. Clicking “Advanced”: During authorization, you will need to click on “Advanced” to review and understand the script’s permissions.
3. Allowing the Script to Run: You might see a warning about the script being unverified. This is not indicative of any malicious activity. Simply select the option to allow the script to run.

New Look!

If you read this far, this is what the sidebar now looks like (color coded), and with toast notifications (less user clicks requried).

Conclusion

The Classroom Groups Manager in Google Slides simplifies the complex task of managing classroom groups. Whether you're creating groups for discussions, seating arrangements, or projects, this tool provides the flexibility and control needed to organize your class efficiently. With features like bad pairings, random student selection, and grouping around key students, it saves valuable time while hopefully fostering more dynamic and effective student collaboration.

Try it in your classroom and see how it transforms the way you manage student groups!