I’m planning this lesson and unit and trying to figure out how to structure the groups, since I am teaching in hybrid model with simultaneous online and in-person students (“simulcast”). It says to “Prepare groups and share character bios with students before the lesson.” for virtual students. What is the best way to do this? Should I email each student individually with their roles prior to the lesson? Or should I form random groups and then share a doc with the roles and have them select it themselves? I want to simulate the in-class activity of passing out random roles to the students as they come into the classroom, but not sure how to make this work online.
Great question; I am planning to do this lesson on Monday too;)
My current thinking is to pre-assign roles for the entire class (online and in person) and write a “sorting hat” type of app in app lab that pulls from spreadsheet with the assigned roles. When they get to class, they log on, type in their email, and see who they are at the convention:). This way, every student gets the same experience whether online or in-person. Thoughts or feedback?
Of course, the easiest thing to do would just be to have the students pick for themselves (takes more time), or just post roles on a powerpoint slide for everyone to follow. If I weren’t doing a sorting hat, I would probably just send them the doc and have them pick once they get to their groups.
I will be preassigning groups, since I need to set up private channels in our LMS for them to communicate on the project throughout the unit.
I like your idea of the sorting hat app, are you going to make that in app lab? I took the profiles doc and split it into 4 separate docs each with 5 roles (one of each). I plan on sharing the docs on classroom then assigning kids to groups on Monday. Still haven’t figured out how to have them pick their role. I might assign according to first letter of their name (“A” is page 1 character, etc.).
Yeah, I was planning to use App Lab to import a .csv into a custom data set to show real world applications of the platform;). I’ll share it if I get around to it (big if at this point😂, but probably more fun than recording lessons, lol).
Here’s a sorter app: Code.org - App Lab
sample inputs are foo and test2@test.org
That is awesome! Thank you so much 
Can you share a copy of the CSV files you used?
Here is the csv for the Character Info data set: CharacterInfo.csv (17.5 KB)
Here is an example for the assignment information: roleAssignments.csv (66 Bytes)
@agrant, I missed a couple entries on the character CSV (app crashes for Marcus and Carla), so I updated it in the attachment above. Please re-import if you downloaded it.
Thank you again! I actually recreated the whole thing last might so it works. Thanks for your help