Teacher Roles in SLS

In order to create groups, the roles of teachers must be taken into consideration when placing teachers who will monitor the groups.

•Owner: able to manage group information, all teachers, students (from their own school), assignments and announcements. Owner is also able to remove students from other schools.

•Co-Teacher: able to manage students (from their own school), assignments and announcements. Co-Teacher is also able to view all other students.

•Liaison Teacher: able to manage students (from their own school) only.

Ways to create groups

There are a few ways in which teachers can create groups in SLS.

Method 1:

The first method mentioned in the slides will be placing all students in that level as a group and so on. In this method, there will be a main group of teachers who can be "Owners" or "Co-teachers". This group will be responsible for disseminating lessons as requested by teachers or teachers-IC's of certain programmes. This method might be easy to send information to students but difficult to monitor. The reason is : SLS will be sending out the lesson in batches of 100's. Therefore, in doing so, students get mixed in one batch of students. Students from different classes will end up in different batches. It makes monitoring of students' work more challenging. Teacher-IC's will have to do sorting from 2 or more separate folders depending on the cohort size of level students. Furthermore, teachers in this group will be flooded with lessons from P1 to P6 and the Home page will end up looking more cluttered.

Method 2:

Method 2 is a fine tuning of Method 1 in the sense that all students are placed in respective levels. The only difference is that sub-groups are created to differentiate the different classes in the group. However, the Home page does not show the different classes. Each separate class will be shown as that level only. It makes locating a particular class more difficult unless filename is changed to each particular class which is very time consuming for the "Owner" of the lesson to have to change the filename for each particular class for the whole school. If the filename is the same for all classes, the only way to locate the class is by going into the "Monitor" tab or drop-down list to check the students in the classses. Also, "Owners" and "Co-teachers" in the teachers' group will be getting many other lessons from other teachers should they choose the group created to send other non-related lessons. "Owner" of this kind of grouping might want to consider placing teachers in the level group as "Liaison teachers" rather than "Co-teachers".

Method 3:

Method 3 uses the creation of a class on its own and placing teachers in that class group. By creating a group by classes rather than by levels, this allows better and easier monitoring just by looking at the title filename on the Home page. In Method 3, only teachers placed in that class group will be able to monitor the progress by their students.