How A Teacher-Made Student Grouping App Works And Why I’m Looking For External Testers
It’s 4:15 on a Tuesday, dismissal just ended, and my coffee’s been cold for 20 minutes. I’m staring at my whiteboard, where I’ve scrawled my 4th grade class roster in blue marker, crossing out names and rewriting groupings for the upcoming ecosystem diorama project. I’ve been at this for 25 minutes already, and I still haven’t gotten it right. The three chatty kids keep ending up together, one quiet girl who struggles with math keeps getting left in groups without anyone who can help her, and I still haven’t worked around the fact that Javi and Leo can’t sit within three feet of each other without turning into a wrestling match.
This isn’t a one-time thing. Every time we do group work, I go through this. I’ve tried the spreadsheet method, random popsicle sticks, even letting kids pick their own groups (that’s even worse – half the class ends up without a group, and the groups that do form are just all friends who don’t get any work done). The existing online tools I’ve tried only do random grouping or sort by ability, none of them let you add all those little specific notes you have about your kids that make grouping actually work. So I complained about it to my brother over Thanksgiving dinner – he’s a freelance coder – and he said, “Let’s build one that actually does what you need.”
For three months, we chipped away at it every weekend, after I finished grading and lesson plans. I added every feature I’ve ever wished for when putting groups together. First, you can tag each kid with whatever you want – reading level, IEP accommodations, strengths like “good at drawing” or “strong writer,” even things like “needs a partner who reminds them to stay on task.” Then you add your constraints: must put these two kids together (because they work well and one needs extra support), cannot put these two kids together (because they feed off each other’s chaos), need at least one kid with a specific strength in each group. Hit a button, and it spits out groups in 10 seconds. If you don’t like the first round, you can shuffle again, or drag and drop to move a kid manually if you want.
I’ve been teaching long enough to know that grouping isn’t just an administrative chore to check off your to-do list. It’s the foundation of whether the group activity will actually help kids learn and feel like they belong. I learned that the hard way my second year teaching, when I put three kids who all struggled with attention and impulse control in the same group for a social studies project. I spent the entire three weeks of the project stopping arguments, redirecting off-task behavior, and none of them ended up learning half what they were supposed to. Another year, I put a shy new student in a group where she didn’t know anyone, and she didn’t speak a single word during any of the work sessions. Bad grouping doesn’t just make your day harder – it leaves kids out, and it derails learning for everyone.
Most edtech tools skip all that messy human stuff, because the people building them haven’t spent a decade adjusting groups at 4:30 after school. They build for what districts say they want, not what actual classroom teachers need every day. That’s why after testing it with three other 4th grade teachers at my school, fixing the big bugs and adding the small features they asked for (like being able to save your tags and constraints for next time, which was the first request anyone made), we’re ready for more people to use it. We’re looking for external testers who are current K-8 classroom teachers to try it out and give us honest feedback.
What do we need from testers? Just that you use it for your own group work a couple of times over the next two or three months, and fill out a short 5-question survey to tell us what works, what doesn’t, and what’s missing. That’s it. There’s no fee, it’s free forever for testers, no mandatory webinars, no fine print. If you try it and hate it, you don’t have to do anything else. We just need real feedback from people who actually have to sort student groups on a regular basis.
Last week I used it to make groups for our biography presentation project, and it took me two minutes. I used the extra 23 minutes I would have spent rearranging names to cut out construction paper for the diorama project and respond to three parent emails that had been sitting in my inbox. It wasn’t perfect – one group still ended up with three kids who all wanted to do the art part and no one who wanted to write the notes, so I just swapped one kid and it was fine. But that’s the point: it does the heavy lifting, and you still get to make the final call as the teacher who knows your kids best.
I’m not trying to build the next big edtech platform. I’m a full-time 4th grade teacher who got sick of wasting time on a task that should be easy. Right now, this is just a side project to make something that works for me and other teachers like me. I don’t know exactly what people will love or hate about it, and that’s why we need external testers. Every teacher has little different things they need from grouping, and the only way to make it something that works for most of us is to get it out there and get real feedback from real classrooms.
If you’re a teacher who’s ever spent half an hour after school moving names around on a piece of paper trying to get groups just right, I’d love for you to try it. You can sign up through the link in my bio, and just let me know what you think. Good or bad, all feedback helps. Right now, I’m just excited to see what other teachers make of it.
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