Organising sessions into classrooms

You’re running Signal with more than one class and your sessions list is getting hard to navigate.

When to use it: When you run sessions with the same class over time and want them kept together.

Classrooms keep sessions together, usually one classroom per class. Your classrooms are listed under Classrooms in the side menu, and opening one shows every session in it.

Create a classroom

You can start a new classroom from any of these:

• The side menu: select the + button next to the Classrooms heading (New classroom).
• The Classrooms page: select the Classrooms heading in the side menu, then choose Create Classroom.
• The Sessions page: open the All classrooms menu beside the filters and choose Create classroom.

Then fill in the Create a classroom drawer:

1. Enter a Classroom name (up to 80 characters).
2. To change its icon and colour, select the button to the left of the name.
3. Add a Description if you like. Students see it when they view the classroom, and Nurture AI uses it when it writes content for the classroom’s sessions.
4. Open Audience and say who the class is: a Topic, such as Biology, and a Level, such as “Year 10, mixed ability”. Nurture AI uses them to pitch the questions it writes, its feedback and its marking at your students. Both are optional.
5. To guide the AI further, open AI settings and add AI context: finer detail such as what the class already knows, their reading level and the tone you’d like. Nurture AI uses it for every session in the classroom.
6. Choose Create classroom.

Students don’t see the audience or the AI context. To change them later, open the classroom, choose its three dots menu and choose Edit. If you create a session in a classroom that has no audience yet, the create drawer offers Add who this classroom is for, and what you enter there is saved to the classroom.

The new classroom opens, ready for its first session.

Choose a classroom while creating a session

Every new session has a Classroom field, just under the session name. Leave it on No classroom, pick one of your classrooms, or choose Create classroom at the bottom of the list to make one there and then. A classroom you make this way is selected for the session straight away.

If you start a session from inside a classroom, that classroom is already chosen.

This is usually the better habit. The classroom gets made at the moment you’d otherwise have skipped it, and the session lands in the right place without a second trip.

Move a session into a classroom later

1. Find the session on your dashboard, the Sessions page or in a classroom.
2. Open the three dots menu on its card and choose Edit. (Inside the session, use the three dots menu and choose Edit session details.)
3. Change the Classroom field. Choose No classroom to take it out of a classroom.
4. Choose Save.

When you Duplicate a session, the copy goes into the same classroom by default, and you can pick a different one before you create it.

General: sessions that aren’t in a classroom

General sits at the top of your Classrooms list in the side menu. It isn’t a classroom you create. It simply shows every session that isn’t in a classroom, so it’s the quickest place to find sessions you still need to sort.

If you use Canvas or Teams

You don’t need to do any of this for sessions you create through Canvas or Microsoft Teams:

• Canvas: a classroom is made automatically for the Canvas course you’re using Signal in, and every session you create in that course is filed into it.
• Teams: when you set a Signal assessment as a Teams assignment, it’s filed into a classroom for that class automatically.

Name classrooms after classes, not topics

The most useful setup is one classroom per class you teach. Topics change every few weeks; the class you teach stays the same all year. A classroom called 8B Maths stays useful in November. A classroom called Index laws doesn’t.

Do it as you go

You can move sessions between classrooms at any time, but sorting as you go is still the easy way. Choosing the classroom while you create each session takes a second, and it saves working out later which test or Test 2 belonged to which class. Canvas and Teams users get it for free.

Share it and fill it

Once a classroom is set up, you can:

• share it with co-teachers so a colleague can help run it and its sessions,
• add your class list so every student shows on the Students tab before they join, and
• add curriculum documents so Signal’s AI draws on the material the class works from.

What it sets up later

Keeping each class’s sessions in its own classroom is what gives you class-level insight across those sessions. See how classrooms work. If your sessions aren’t in a classroom, there is nothing to compare.