Classroom Teams greatly facilitates the creation of groups of students in classroom environments, despite it can be used in any other situation, both homogeneous and heterogeneous, and considering characteristics that each creator, usually a teacher or academic coordinator, can customize. It is useful to ensure that the groups are balanced, in accordance with the objective of the task and up to date. It also improves the relationship between the people in the "Team" and the collective in general, increasing confidence in the environment and promoting class cohesion.
Its complete integration as a Moodle plug-in allows the use of student data stored in Moodle as particular characteristics of each student for the creation of groups. In addition, the groups created can be directly replicated in a Moodle course, allowing the teacher to benefit from all the collaborative options that the platform offers for their work groups.
The Classroom Teams tool could create and manage teaching groups, which can be used to facilitate group work, discussion and collaboration among students. Currently there are some group related tools, which allows you to make random groupings by dividing a class into groups or number of people per group.
Eurecat Academy’s automatic group creation tool offers some unique features:
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Creation of teams by several features, including size of the teams, type of student, grades or course completion, etc.
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Creation of homogeneous teams (groups containing people with the same characteristics) or heterogeneous (groups with different characteristics).
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Creation of new random groups considering past groupings
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Creation of groups considering incompatibilities among members
The tool offers the teacher the possibility to display the created group on a full screen to be used in classroom activities. The created groups could be saved ad Moodle group to be used for further collaboration of the teams.
The tool allows the grouping students together based on various factors, such as their learning abilities, interests, or specific learning goals, to facilitate effective teaching and learning strategies, promote collaboration among students, and cater to individual needs.
Classroom groups can take different forms, depending on the educational objectives and the teaching approach employed by the instructor. Some common types of classroom groups include:
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Ability-based groups: Students are grouped based on their academic abilities or skill levels. This allows teachers to differentiate instruction and provide appropriate materials and activities for students at different proficiency levels.
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Heterogeneous groups: Students with diverse abilities, backgrounds, and learning styles are mixed together in groups. This approach encourages cooperation, peer learning, and social interaction among students with varied strengths and weaknesses.
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Homogeneous groups: Students with similar abilities or characteristics are grouped together. This grouping can be beneficial for targeting specific instructional needs or addressing common challenges faced by a particular group of students.
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Cooperative learning groups: Students are organized into small groups to work collaboratively on academic tasks or projects. This approach fosters teamwork, communication skills, and shared responsibility among students.
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Interest-based groups: Students are grouped based on their individual interests or passions. This approach aims to enhance engagement and motivation by allowing students to explore topics that align with their personal interests.
The purpose of classroom groups is to create an inclusive and supportive learning environment that maximizes student learning outcomes. By tailoring instruction and promoting collaboration within these groups, educators can address the diverse needs of students and facilitate their overall academic and social development.
At Eurecat Academy, we bring together a multidisciplinary team of experts with a passion for improving people’s competencies. Our team's expertise ranges from instructional design to technical development to offer solutions that optimize our partners' training activities. Eurecat Academy is the training department of Eurecat Technology Centre (www.eurecat.org).
Eurecat is a research and technology centre headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, that provides advanced technology, innovation, and training services to over 1,500 companies and organizations. Eurecat is considered one of the leading European research and technology centres, being the second largest private non-profit organisation in Southern Europe.
Eurecat Academy collaborates with public and private training and labour organizations in a very broad business spectrum as a full-fledged training, content creation, and education consultancy services provider. Eurecat Academy boasts a specialized innovation group that focuses on improving knowledge transfer and evaluation processes through innovative ICT interfaces, adaptive and motivational methodologies, learning analytics and personal training environments. We combine technological and pedagogical knowledge and professional experience to create high-performance training activities, tools and resources, and to develop educational plans and training itineraries.
Our overall purpose is to offer solutions with the ability to generate a positive impact on individuals and entities, providing them with effective tools to optimize their training activities. We aspire for everyone to unleash their maximum potential and contribute to personal and professional progress, for their own well-being and their contribution to social development.
Although this plugin is a free version, our company will store some data for the proper functioning and maintenance of the plugin. These data will be username, email and URL of the platform where the plugin will be deployed.
The plugin's stay has a temporary duration, and by accepting the privacy settings you will be giving the opportunity to be sent information about the duration of the plugin, as well as other products of the company. In no case, the information will be destined to third parties or purposes that are not informative about this plugin or other plugins of the company.
If you have any questions, doubts or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
- Log in to your Moodle site as an admin and go to Site administration > Plugins > Install plugins.
- Upload the ZIP file with the plugin code. You should only be prompted to add extra details if your plugin type is not automatically detected.
- Check the plugin validation report and finish the installation.
The plugin can also be installed by putting the contents of this directory to
{your/moodle/dirroot}/local/classroom_teams
Afterwards, log in to your Moodle site as an admin and go to Site administration > Notifications to complete the installation.
Alternatively, you can run
$ php admin/cli/upgrade.php
to complete the installation from the command line.
2023 Aina Palacios, Laia Subirats, Magali Lescano, Alvaro Martin, JuanCarlo Castillo, Santi Fort
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.