Using Groups to Invite Students to Classroom

[enjay]

Slightly cross-posting my other thread, but does anyone use Google Groups to invite students to join Classrooms? We have Salamander and GADS set up, so our SIMS class lists are all replicated across to Groups in Google Apps, and teachers would like to use these group lists to invite students to join a particular Classroom. The problem we are having is the groups as created by GADS have the wrong 'access permissions', and members do not have the permission to view the group's member list, which means teachers can't use these groups to invite students.

 

So - my other thread is asking for a way to change these groups in bulk, but I thought I'd also ask how other schools are inviting students to join groups.

[rogerdnixon]

We use Teacher Dashboard - this creates all the groups for us with the correct permissions - really very good - but not free. GAM is the manual way to go.

[enjay]

Teacher Dashboard does look good, but given the cost difference we opted for Salamander and GADS. GAM looks reasonable, but I would need to remember to re-run it every time we create new AD groups, and as some of those come out of the timetable, I wouldn't necessarily know they had been created.

[rogerdnixon]

You could run a GAM script as a scheduled task to automate it - would need a suitable data sources as a csv file to work - scheduled msi report perhaps?

[enjay]

To update everyone on this, Salamander are truly awesome.

 

Someone from Salamander saw this thread, and sent me a PM saying they could change it. Less than a day later, and before Google have even accepted there is a problem, Salamander had written, tested and deployed a new version which corrects this! So, Salamander can now be used to manage Groups which teachers can use to invite to classes in Google Classroom.

[mats]

In case anybody is searching for google classroom tips, here are mine (apols for any thread hijacking)

 

- you need to be a member of a group in order to invite a groups members into a classroom.

- groups are administered from both the admin console (admin.google.com) and the groups console (groups.google.com). To create groups and assign permissions, you need the admin console. To accept / reject join requests, it's the groups console. I think some functionality overlaps. There is no logic or order to this.

 

I've yet to demo it to staff but classroom does look quite good.

[kirup]

Hi Enjay

 

We are also using salamander and GADS setup , currently our teachers unable to invite student email group and but able to invite individual students, can i know what was the fix to solve this issue

[skell]

From what I understand, the teacher needs to be listed as "Managed by" in AD. You can then set up GADS to look at this attribute to set the owner. Once the teacher is the owner of the group, they can see the group and invite everyone at the same time.

[enjay]

Hi Enjay

 

We are also using salamander and GADS setup , currently our teachers unable to invite student email group and but able to invite individual students, can i know what was the fix to solve this issue

 

Are the teachers in the AD group along with the students? Also, check the permissions of the group in the Google Dashboard. You can only invite groups which you are a member of and where you have permissions to view the members' email addresses.