Classes and circles

Watch: Classes and circles

1 min 24 s · presented by Jason, Mandarin Temple's AI tutor

Captions are part of the picture, under Jason. The full transcript is below.

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1. 0:00Hi, I’m Jason, Mandarin Temple’s AI tutor. Here’s how your school’s classes work, shown in a demonstration school with two classes already running.
2. 0:12Classes lists every class in your school, with its level, its teacher and its students, and Open takes you inside.
3. 0:21Each class has its own join code, and anyone who joins with it counts as one of your school’s students.
4. 0:27You can create a class yourself, as your teachers can: select Create a class, then choose a name, a level and who can find it.
5. 0:37Each new class uses fifty credits from your school’s balance, or from your own if the school’s has run out.
6. 0:45Inside a class you see its members, and you can invite students by email.
7. 0:51An invited student gets a link by email, and nothing changes on their account until they accept.
8. 0:58Moderators are other adult teachers at your school, who can take a message or a post out of the room.
9. 1:04They can’t remove or mute anyone, set work or see progress, and this school has no second teacher to appoint yet.
10. 1:13That’s classes: each one belongs to your school, and its teacher, or you, decides who joins and who moderates.

Open the video guide on its own page, with its key moments

What an institution circle has

• Roster — Everyone in the class with their progress at a glance.
• Assignments — Homework pointing at real content, with completion measured from the learner’s own checkpoints.
• Timeline — A shared feed of class activity.
• Leaderboard — A class ranking. Optional in practice — use your judgement about the group.
• Messaging — Between members of the circle, and nobody outside it.
• The Learning Lab — Each learner’s seven-facet profile, subject to their own plan.
• Moderators — Other teachers at your school, appointed to take messages and posts out of the room.

Owner, moderator, member

The owner is the teacher whose class it is. A moderator is another adult teacher at your school — a senior teacher, an assistant with a teacher account, a second teacher on the same cohort — appointed by the class’s teacher or the school’s administrator, from the Moderators section on the class’s page. A member is a student.

A moderator can take a message or a post out of the room, and sees what was taken down. They cannot remove or mute anyone, set work, or see progress or the Learning Lab, and they are not counted as a student. If they leave the school, the role ends with it.

How to organise them

Mirror how you actually teach rather than how the timetable is written. The useful test: who needs to see this group together? If nobody looks at a grouping as a unit, it should not be a circle.

• By teaching group — The default and usually right — the set of students one teacher sees each week.
• By level, if you set by ability — Assignments land better when everyone in a circle is at a similar band.
• Not one per student — A circle of one gives you nothing a learner profile does not, and the group figures never appear.
• Not one giant circle — A whole year group in one circle means every assignment goes to everyone and the roster is unreadable.

Private or public

Private is the default and right for a managed cohort — invisible unless you are in it, and you add people.

Public means listed, so learners can find it. They still join with the class’s link or an email invitation — there is no ask-and-approve step inside a class. It is the shape for an open enrichment class or a holiday programme, not for a timetabled one.

Circles are unlimited

Nothing caps the number of classes. Students and teacher seats are what a school buys — see students, seats and limits — so splitting a cohort into six circles costs nothing.