1. What are Custom Groups?
Custom groups are groups of students that teachers, school, and district admins build within TalkingPoints for organizational purposes. School staff can create groups for reading levels, bus numbers, lunch tables, and more.
2. What’s the difference between a class and a group?
a. A class is a student roster assigned to the teacher from the student information system (SIS). A group is a group of students organized by a staff member within TalkingPoints and is independent of the SIS.
b. Staff can add students that currently exist in their classes into groups.
3. What’s the difference between a ‘teacher group’ and a ‘school group?’
Teacher groups are designed for teachers to create groups of students from their own rostered students for their own use. School groups are for the admin to create groups of students from rostered (SIS) classes across the school and share with staff members for collaborative use. Teacher groups can only have one staff member assigned to them whereas school groups can have multiple staff members assigned to them. ‘All groups’ include both teacher and school groups.
4. What does ‘Legacy’ mean?
‘Legacy’ is a label that flags a group that was created in a teacher’s free account, prior to when their school partnered with TalkingPoints. These contacts and groups are completely separate data from the school.
What can users expect to do with legacy groups?
a. If the teacher still needs access to the Legacy group, it is best to create a new group using the students rostered to the school to fully integrate the group into your account.
b. If the teacher no longer needs access to a Legacy Group, they can archive it or delete it.
c. Having a student in a Legacy Group and a group integrated with the school can cause duplication of the student in their account. If this is an issue for the family, they can leave the legacy group themselves or ask the owning teacher to remove them from the Legacy group.
5. What are permissions and what do they have to do with Custom Groups?
Roles within TalkingPoints are made up of a defined set of permissions that relate to functionality at the district, school, or teacher level. TalkingPoints currently offers a suite of base roles for your convenience including District Admin, District Viewer, School Admin, Technical School Admin, School Viewer, Teacher, and Non-Rostered staff member. Each role has specific capabilities. See the following overview of permissions per role:
If you are part of a district-wide TalkingPoints setup, your district may assign you a custom role with either more limited or expanded permissions.
6. Can I add staff members to groups to communicate with?
Staff messaging is currently not a feature we support, but we do have a workaround to add staff members to groups to facilitate communication. The staff members need to download the Family app or enable SMS text. In order to add staff members to groups, the district will need to first adjust configurations for that school to allow staff to manually add students/contacts to the school.
7. What is the process of including staff members who do not have a home school in a staff group?
It does not make a difference whether the staff member works at multiple schools or not. As long as the staff member is a part of the staff roster, typically as a Non-Rostered Staff member, the teacher can add them as a student, and then add the member to their staff group.
8. Can I share my group with a co-teacher?
Co-teachers cannot be added to teacher groups created by teachers or non-rostered staff. However, if a school administrator creates a school group, multiple teachers and staff can be added to that group and have access to all students in that group.
9. If there are multiple staff members in a School Group, does it become a co-teacher experience or does the group function individually for each teacher?
If multiple teachers are attached to a school group it will create a TalkingPoints co-teacher experience. While co-teachers will default to seeing their own conversation with the family, and will only receive notifications when the family responds to them, they can use the "View chat as" feature to see both the announcements and direct messages that other co-teachers have sent to the family they share.
10. Why can one teacher add a particular student to their group and another can’t?
a. One teacher may be able to add a particular student because they have access to that student, or they are non-rostered staff, which means that they have access to all grade-level classes. On the other hand, the other teacher may only be able to add existing students from their current class roster to their group.
b. If a teacher only has access to students in their class rosters, they can reach out to the school admin to add a particular student to their class roster, and then to a group.
11. Can I add students outside my class to my group?
Teachers can only add students from outside their class rosters to their teacher group if the district has allowed staff to manually add students or contacts to the school.
12. Can I transfer the ownership of my group to another teacher?
Ownership of groups currently cannot be transferred to another teacher.
13. Can groups be sorted by home language?
a. Groups currently cannot be sorted by language, only by first and last name.
b. School admins can filter by language to message classes and groups.