Create and Manage Classes

You can have more than one class set up in Magma. In fact, you can even create your own classes if you want to. And it’s really easy to add classes and switch between them simply using the drop-down menu on the left-hand side here.

You’ll see that I’ve got four classes already. But if I go on to More Classes, I could either create a brand-new class or join existing ones in my school. As you can see here, we use the Wonde integration in our school. At the top are the four classes I’ve already joined, and then underneath are all the different classes, year groups, pastoral groups - all of those groups have been pulled from your MIS via Wonde.

Joining a new class is as simple as tapping the plus button and following it. That will then be added to your list of classes to jump to at any time. Or if you want to create your own custom class, perhaps for an intervention group that you regularly see, you can simply tap onto the New Class button up here. Then you give your class a name, and you can choose a year group you’re working with. This can be more than one year group if you want it to be.

You can then add students from your school’s database by either searching for their name or tapping on them in the list. Obviously, I’ve blurred out the student names here, but I’m going to put four of them into this small intervention class.

Now, once you’ve got your class created - either by using Wonde or by creating your own bespoke class - you can then go in and change a few different settings. Here I’m working in my small teal class with four students, because it’s fewer names to blur. At the top, I can then print out the QR codes to get my whole class to log in. It’s as simple as cutting these out, distributing them to my students, and now they can all log into their accounts in Magma.

But there are more things that we can do with our classes as well, which are real time-savers. If I go on to Settings now, I have the option to share my class with colleagues in my school. Perhaps I co-teach a class or perhaps we’re sharing across year groups. I can simply select my colleagues and then share that class with them, and they’ll receive an invite to follow it as well. That means we can both share assignments, get data, all for those same groups of students. And of course, we can rename the class and change all those things here if we want to.

The last thing I want to show you quickly is if we go back to the pupils in this class, we can press the little three dots - the options button - on the right-hand side of their row. From here, we can customise the experience for different students by choosing support settings. Here I can choose what language the translation feature should go to. For example, if I’ve got an EAL student, I can choose their native language here and then Magma will automatically translate between English and their chosen language. We can also do things like adjusting the font size down here and other settings to make the experience better for all of our users.

Ah, but Jacob, hang on, hang on - we’re not using Wonde at the moment. How do I make a class? What a strange question - it’s almost like I predicted someone was going to ask that!

Don’t worry, I’ll help you out. If you aren’t using Wonde, you can still create classes and add students manually. On this account, we’re not linked to Wonde at all. I’m going to go back onto Classes on the left-hand side here. I’ll press the New Class button in the corner, just like before, and give it a name and choose a year group. So far, this is the same as we had with Wonde, but now when you’ve created that class, we have different ways of importing our students.

They can either sign up on their own device and type in the large code on the screen, or if we have a whole class list, we can send that to Magma and they’ll create all the accounts for us. Or, if it’s just one or two students, we can manually enrol them here. And then of course we can go through all the different personalisation settings we had before - languages, font size, and we can even print a QR code for the whole class.

So no matter whether you’re using Wonde or not, you can still create and manage all of your classes just like this in Magma.