Team Allocation Links are the easiest way to allocate students to multiple, evenly sized teams, and are particularly useful when setting up Kialo for large groups of students.
Team Allocation Links randomly assign students to teams. If you prefer to determine yourself which students are assigned to which teams, don’t use Team Allocations Links – instead, create the teams manually and invite students to them.
Important Notes Regarding Team Allocation Links
Before using Team Allocation Links, we strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with the following Kialo terms and functions:
- How a Kialo team works, including how to create one and invite users to it (see About Teams).
- Creating a discussion and how to invite users to it.
- How roles in Kialo discussions work. Usually, your students will have the Writer role, and any additional teaching staff the Admin role.
Warning: When setting up Team Allocation Links it’s easy to unintentionally make a mistake, especially regarding team and discussion permissions. Please read this article carefully to avoid ending up with a large number of incorrectly configured teams and discussions which then have to be manually deleted. For this reason, the ability to create Team Allocation Links is disabled by default – please contact support mentioning your Kialo Edu username, role, and institution to have it enabled for your account. We are happy to answer any questions you may have.
When a Team Allocation Link is set up, the template team is cloned the specified amount of times and a link for students to follow (the Team Allocation Link) is created. Students join their team by clicking the Team Allocation Link.
Cloned teams will inherit the team members, team name, team avatar, and background image from the template team. Make sure all of these are set up as desired before creating a Team Allocation Link – after the Team Allocation Link has been created any changes to the template team will not affect the cloned teams.
You can choose whether the discussions that the template team is a member of are also cloned for all cloned teams. Doing so gives each cloned team their own identical discussions to work in.
If you disable a Team Allocation Link, it cannot be re-enabled. You will have to create a new Team Allocation Link, which will create a new set of teams for students. Disabling the Team Allocation Link will not affect the teams created when it was enabled or remove the students that have already joined these teams. However, if you need to add any more students to the teams, you will need to do so manually.
When a student that has already joined a team by clicking a Team Allocation Link clicks it again, they will navigate directly to their team. This might come in handy when writing assignments. Alternatively, you can instruct students to go to their teams page and click their team.
The Guide to Using Kialo with Large Groups gives useful guidance and information that will be helpful in determining how many students per team you want – and, therefore, how many teams to create.
Walkthrough: How to Use Team Allocation Links without Additional Teaching Staff
In order to have all the permissions in cloned discussions and teams correctly configured, please follow the steps below.
If you want your students to have one or more discussions to work on in their teams immediately after clicking the Team Allocation Link, follow optional steps 3 and 6. More identical discussions for all your teams can always be added later by using the Clone and Invite Wizard.
- Decide how many teams to create for your students.
- Create the template team and set the team name, background image and avatar.
- (Optional) Create the initial discussion(s) for the student teams.
- Invite the template team as Writers (or the role students should have) to it.
- On the members page of the template team, enable the Team Allocation Link.
- Set the number of teams to be created. The number of teams cannot be changed once the Team Allocation Link has been created.
- (Optional) Check the checkbox ‘Clone the discussions that this team is a member of, for each cloned team’.
- Click ‘Enable and clone teams’.
- Communicate the Team Allocation Link, shown on the template team’s members page, to your students.
The easiest way to access students’ discussions is to click on ‘Teams’ in My Kialo, select a team, and then the discussion you want to look at from the team portal.
Walkthrough: Using Team Allocation Links with Additional Teaching Staff
Use this walkthrough if there is additional teaching staff who should have access to all student teams and discussions. In order to have all the permissions in cloned discussions and teams correctly configured, please follow the steps below.
If you want your students to have one or more discussions to work on in their teams immediately after clicking the Team Allocation Link, follow optional steps 4 and 7. More identical discussions for all your teams can always be added later by using the Clone and Invite Wizard.
- Decide how many teams to create for your students.
- Create a team for your teaching staff and invite them to it with the Member role by using their email addresses.
- Create and set up the template team.
- Set the team name, background image, and avatar, and invite teaching staff to the template team with the Member role by using their email addresses.
- Make sure the above settings are correct. All clones will inherit the template team’s setup.
- (Optional) Create the initial discussion(s) for the student teams.
- Invite the teaching staff team created in step 2 to the discussion, with the Admin role.
- Invite the template team created in step 3 to the discussion, with the Writer role (or the role students should have).
- On the members page of the template team created in step 3, enable the Team Allocation Link.
- Set the number of teams to be created. The number of teams cannot be changed once the Team Allocation Link has been created.
- (Optional) Check the checkbox ‘Clone the discussions that this team is a member of, for each cloned team’.
- Click ‘Enable and clone teams’.
- Communicate the Team Allocation Link, shown on the template team’s members page, to your students.
If you’ve followed these steps correctly, teaching staff should have permissions to access all discussions and teams. If not, you’ll have to add them to each cloned team/discussion individually.
The easiest way to access students’ discussions is to click on ‘Teams’ in My Kialo, select a team, and then the discussion you want to look at from the team portal.
Further Reading
Kialo has many features and tools that are useful when working with large groups of students. Further reading relevant to working with large groups of students:
