In addition to adding student names to your classroom one at a time, you can also create a new classroom from a CSV (comma separated value) file. If you are working from Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet software, you can choose .csv when saving your file to create a csv file. The file does not need to be in any specific column format and should contain at least the students' names, preferably with the first and last name in separate columns.
To use this tool, login to the Teacher Control Center and click the Manage -> Classrooms. At the bottom of this page click the "Create New Classroom" button and choose "Import from CSV".
Step 1) Select the CSV file to upload. If your CSV file contains column headers, check the box to skip the first row of the file. In most cases your CSV file columns will be separated by commas, but if you know that a different delimiter has been used, you can specify this here. When you are done, click the blue "Next" button.
Step 2) The first few lines from the CSV file are displayed here as a preview, and the columns are labeled "A", "B", "C", etc.
If you want to use your own student ids, change the setting to "Yes" to choose which column contains the student id. When you check "Yes", the "Choose" button is revealed. Click this button to enable the column selector buttons, then click the column header to mark this column as the student id column. Next, click the blue "Done" button. If you don't want to use your own student ids, they will be automatically generated.
Next you will select the columns that contain the students first and last names. The process is the same: first click the "Choose" button, then click the column button that maps to this column. First name is required, last name is optional.
When you've finished mapping columns, click the blue "Next" button to continue.
Step 3) You can optionally select applications in this step to automatically set up activities. Simply click each application that you want to use for the classroom. You can edit activities after the classroom is created to customize content level and specifications. Activities will initialize with your default content level (you can set this in My Account -> Preferences) and the recommended specification. If you want to manually set up activities later, simply click Next to go to the next step.
Step 4) In this step you'll give your classroom a name (required) and review the entire list of students that will be created. The classroom name defaults to the name of the CSV file but you can edit it here. If you need to make changes, click the "Back" button (beside Finish). When you're ready to create the class, click the "Finish" button.
To see the full process in action, play the video below:
Potential Problems:
If you are using custom student ids, they must be unique among all students in your entire group - including students in archived classrooms. If the student id is already used, the classroom will not be able to be created.
If the file you upload cannot be parsed, it may not be a CSV file or may be improperly formatted. You cannot upload an Excel (xls, xlsx) file using this tool, but you can export a CSV file from Excel.
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