Organizing Students into Groups on Kialo

This guide will explain how to split a large class into smaller groups using Kialo’s teams feature, create a sample discussion, clone that sample discussion into the appropriate number required, and invite each group of students into their own cloned discussion. For more information on why and when it’s useful to split classes into smaller groups, see Using Kialo with Large Groups of Students.

  1. Decide on the number of teams you want. Each team can have as many or as few students as you like, and each team will have their own discussion. (For guidance on how many students you should have in each discussion, see Recommended Group Sizes.)
  2. Create the necessary number of teams required on Kialo and add the students to the teams. You can do this three different ways, depending on your requirements:
    • If you do not require a specific composition for your teams (ie. you’re happy for students to be randomly distributed evenly across the teams): Use Team Allocation Links to automatically create the desired amount of teams and sort students evenly into these teams as they join. This option is the least laborious and requires little time. (Team Allocation Links are disabled by default to prevent abuse – contact support quoting your username and institution to have them enabled.)
    • If you require a specific composition for your teams, and are confident your students will follow joining instructions: Create each team manually, and generate a Team Invite Link for each team. Compose a list of which students should be in each team. In your LMS or via email, share the list of teams and Team Invite Links along with which students should join each team. Students can follow the links to join their assigned team.
    • If you require a specific composition for your teams, and do not think your students will follow instructions to join the correct teams: Create each team manually, and invite the students to each team using their username or email address. This option is the most straightforward but can be time-consuming with a large number of students.
  3. Create the discussion you would like each team to have a copy of, adding starter claims if applicable.
  4. In the ‘Own’ section of My Kialo, navigate to the discussion you have created (it should appear as the most recent card).
  5. Click the ‘…’ on the discussion card and select ‘Clone and Invite Wizard’. (The Clone and Invite Wizard is disabled by default to prevent abuse – contact support quoting your username and institution to have it enabled.)
  6. In the first section, ‘Invite each to their own cloned discussion’, click ‘Pick Teams’. This will open up an interface which should contain all of the teams you created in step 2. Select all appropriate teams (you will need to click ‘Pick Teams’ again to select the next team).
    Tip – if you plan on using these teams again for future discussions, it is useful to copy this field and save it for future use. Next time, you can then simply paste the list into this field.
  7. Select the role you wish to invite your students as. If you’re unsure, the default option to ‘Invite as Writer’ is likely to be adequate.
  8. Optionally, if there is someone you’d like to invite to all of the discussions you’re creating other than yourself, such as another teacher or teaching assistants, enter their username(s) in ‘Invite each to all cloned discussions’ and select the appropriate role.
  9. Click ‘Start Cloning’.
  10. Once the Clone and Invite Wizard is complete (usually within a few minutes), return to the ‘Own’ section of My Kialo and confirm the discussions have been created. You can also navigate to the Teams page to verify that each team has been invited to each discussion.

Whenever you want to create a new discussion to invite your student groups to, simply repeat steps 3-9. If you want to reorganize your students into new teams, repeat step 2.

For more information on using Kialo with large classes, see Using Kialo with Large Groups of Students. For further help with using Kialo in class generally, see our collection of guides to Using Kialo in Class.

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