GoGuardian Help

At the beginning of the year you will not see any classes when you sign into GoGuardain. However, you will notice a red number by Pending this is where you will have to go to accept your classes.

You simply need to click on accept to move them to your active classes. For most teachers you will just go here and accept all of your classes. If you are a specials/related arts teacher, you might want to selectively activate classes as the cycle starts and then archive after the cycle is over.

Basics of the Home Screen

Most of the time you will just be going into your class and doing what you need to do from there. However, there is quite a bit you can do just off the home screen. You can start classes from here (if you are not using a schedule. There are standard time slots and you can select custom.

You can also do some basic settings from here. Most of these you will not regularly do. However, if you have non-year long classes you can archive from here.

The Classroom Tabs

When you go into each class, you are first presented with a page to start a session (if you have a schedule setup you will go into that session if it is running). You have a choice of a duration for the class and a specific scene you would like to start it with. It also gives you a log of current and past sessions. Note that you can also exclude students from the session before it starts by clicking the link above the Start Session button.

The students section lets you see what students are in the class. For auto-populated classes, you don't have to do much here. If you are setting up your own class, you would add students here. Recordings are where you will find the GoGuardian recordings of calls you have made to your students. Teachers allows you to add other teachers to the class for monitoring. This is helpful if you have a student teacher or co-teach. just be careful to follow FERPA guidelines.

Setting has two important items that can be useful. In the Info tab you can fill out the basics about your class and change around the color that is displayed with the class on the home screen. Note that you can also set a default scene here. This default scene is then automatically applied if you are using a schedule

The Scheduling tab is where you can setup a recurring weekly schedule so that your GoGuardian sessions start automatically. This is hand ysince you then don't forget to start the session each day.

You'll notice that after creating the schedule it shows the schedule and an option to add another schedule. You can add a two-hour delay or early dismissal schedule, which makes things a little messy. You can't name each schedule and see them separately. You see them by day. There is a toggle switch to turn them off and on.

You can change it from each individual class by going to the schedule and either turning off that day (Tuesday if it is a Tuesday) or by turning off your main schedule and turning on your alternate schedule.

However, you can do multiple classes quicker by going to the calendar. If all you are going to do is cancel your session you can select cancel all sessions or cancel them individually.

Sessions

Screens Tab

The first tab you come into is the screens tab. It shows student's screens. It should be noted that it shows the active tab of whatever they are working on. If they have YouTube running in another tab and are working on a Google Doc you will not see YouTube on the screen. However, there is a list of tabs below the "screen" that shows you all open tabs. You will see it there. GoGuardian does not "see" or monitor Android apps or the School edition of Minecraft. It will also show you if the student is offline or inactive.

You have the ability to set off task alerts. You need to tell GoGuardian what subject you are teaching. It will alert you if GoGuardian thinks they are off task. Depending on what you are working on this can give quite a few false positives.

By selecting the check box next to a student's name or multiple names you can make an announcement, and open a tab for them. Lock their device. Unlock their device. Exclude them from a session. Set a scene for them that is different than the classes. Present your screen to them.

Timeline Tab

There is another way of monitoring students called Timeline. Sometimes this is a more effective way of monitoring if you are doing other things. This shows students with colors representing websites. If all students are supposed to be working in Schoology or Google Docs, then you can tell when someone goes somewhere else by the change in color.

Scenes

Scenes are where you can control what students can and can't access. You have the choice of having an allowed list. Here students can ONLY go to the websites you have allowed. The other option is a blocked list. Here students can go ANYWHERE except for sites that are blocked by you or the firewall. As mentioned earlier, some sites are blocked by the school's firewall and these can not be allowed by a Schoology Scene.