Teacher Assist (TA) is one of GAT Labs’ family of tools — and it allows Teachers working in Google Workspace to view and monitor students’ online activity (and screens) in real-time.
Using Teacher Assist, Google Workspace Admins and Teachers can set up the work environment for their Google Classrooms and deploy a set of rules while having full visibility over every student’s online activity.
**Prerequisite: Teacher Assist works on top of GAT Shield.
Students must be signed into the Google Classroom using their Google Workspace accounts, and have Shield deployed.
**Availability: Teacher Assist can be enabled during the Trial period. It’s an optional product in the Vigilant Plan for Education and included in the Vigilant Plus Plan for Education. Educational pricing structure.
Teacher Assist is intended for Google Classroom Teachers and Super Admins of the educational domain.
What is Teacher Assist? #
A simple synchronous tool built for Google Classroom to help teachers manage the virtual behavior of their online classes while interacting with their Classroom students in real time.
With the Teacher Assist Dashboard, controlling the behavioral complex of the virtual class is narrowed down to the teacher’s fingertips.
Non-Google Admin User #
Teacher Assist can only be used by Google Classroom Teachers and domain admins.
How does it work? #
Teacher Assist works on the backend of the GAT Shield Extension.
The Shield Extension allows Teachers in Google Classroom to view and access Students’ browsers in real time.
The application consists of a frontend and a backend — The frontend communicates by REST (HTTP with the backend GAT Shield). The backend is responsible for all business logic and has many modules that control the Teacher Assist tool.
Sections of Teacher Assist #
The leftmost panel displays additional modes for the teacher to control the virtual teaching environment:
- Teacher section
- Dashboard
- Courses
- Classroom insight
- Attendance Report
- Settings
- Principal
- Report
- Attendance Report
- Live Classes
- Admin section
- Administration
- YouTube
- Extension Deployment
- Help section
- Teacher Assist guide
Teacher Section #
Dashboard view #
The Dashboard will show a list of all the Last sessions – the name and date of each session.
Additionally, under each session’s action menu, the following options can be selected to be able to audit past sessions:
- Download Report
- Send Report by Email
- Show Attendance List
- Show Screenshot List
- Site Access Control History
On the right side, the details of the very last session can be found.
Courses view #
The Courses card view is where the teacher has access to all their Courses, Google Classrooms, and Teacher Assist Groups, in one place.
By default, only Active courses are shown it can be simply changed to see all courses (including Archived ones).
This section can be filtered by the Teacher, Owner, Classroom name, and type of the Course, either Google Classroom or TA Group.
Here, the Owner or Teacher will see Courses associated with the teacher denoted by:
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- Course Name: Name of the class
- Number of Teachers: Number of teachers associated with the class.
- Number of Students: Number of students in each class
- Course Created date
- Course Description: Description of the class
- Current Owner: Class owner
- Last Session Date
- Last Classroom Activity
From the available options displayed on the bottom of each Course card, a teacher can:
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- Start session – start a session for a virtual teaching class
- Classroom insight – access a modular view of the Classroom insight scope (ONLY available in the Google Classrooms cards)
- Edit classroom settings – prepare the virtual set-up with Classroom settings (ONLY available in the Google Classrooms cards)
- Refresh Membership – refresh the membership of the classrooms (ONLY available in the Google Classrooms cards)
- Show absence notes
- Delete TA Group – ONLY available in the TA Group cards.
Classroom insights view #
This view is accessed by selecting ‘classroom insights’ from the left side panel.
This will present you with a blank dashboard where you can enter the class name for insights.
Once the class is selected, insights will be displayed granularly, presenting both teacher and student scopes.
Teachers can navigate through these insights using the following tabs:
-
- People: People involved in this class, whether teachers or students.
- Classwork: Summary of Classwork submissions with avg. class score.
- Grades: Grades corresponding to each student, for each classwork.
- Browsing activity: For each student, browsing is displayed in a granule representing websites visited and time spent on each website. You’ll also see a pie chart encapsulating the data. This data can be filtered for any specific day.
- Site Access Control History: The history logs of the Site Access Control rules applied or removed during the session (kept for 30 days only).
Attendance Report #
The Attendance Report allows the Admin and Teachers to see the attendance sheet.
A log of the previous classroom/group sessions with details of who of the users was presented on the sessions for how long, and who was not active/logged in for the classroom session.
Settings #
The settings part will display the user/teacher information as follows:
- Name
- Domain
- ID
Courses settings allow to change the appearance of the courses from the default Courses card view to a list view that separates Courses into two sections Classrooms and TA Groups.
Session settings such as playing sound on chat messages and showing a message if a student leaves a classroom, while the session is active. Also, enabling automatic upload of the screenshots taken during the session to Teachers Drive.
Reports settings such as sending a report by email after the session ends.
Principal #
Report #
The Report shows a historical view of all the Courses that were conducted in Teacher Assist, both: Classroom and Teacher Assist Groups.
Attendance Report
The Attendance Report gives the Principal a detailed overview of what sessions were run at a particular time.
The report can be filtered by Teacher, Classroom/Group Name, and/or Time Range (e.g.: last 5 sessions, today’s sessions, this week’s sessions, last week’s session, etc.)
The Attendance Report section allows the Principal to see the attendance sheet.
A log of the previous classroom/group sessions with details of who of the users was presented on the sessions for how long, and who was not active/logged in for the classroom session.
Live Classes #
The Live Classes section allows the Principal to view all currently active course sessions that occur in the domain.
It can be also searched by Class name Teacher or Student email address.
Admin Section #
Administration View #
This view displays five tabs:
-
- General: Set a default timer for all classes.
- Sessions: A log of all previous live sessions which can be filtered by session name, teacher email, date, started and ended time, and status.
- Time limits: Set a time limit for Teacher Assist for any days/hours.
- Access Rights: Enable or disable specific access rights for a designated scope, e.g.: all, a particular user, group of users, or org. unit.
- in the area of creating and editing groups, editing groups only, accessing students’ drives, viewing students’ drives, teacher rights, access to reports, principal rights, or all access rights.
- Action Logs: Record of activities conducted in the Teacher Assist tool.
YouTube #
NOTE: YouTube Control is available to all new Shield users and for those who have the new version of Site Access Control enabled automatically when migrating to GAT Shield MV3.
The YouTube Control section allows the Admin to set up “YouTube control” such as base settings of age restrictions, and restrictive mode.
The Admin can also block or allow specific YouTube categories, Channels, Specific Videos as well as Keywords
Start a session #
When a teacher wants to begin a class they can start a session, this will launch the virtual classroom dashboard where the teacher is prompted to confirm the class time period.
Once the time is set, the virtual class will begin.
Top view of the virtual classroom #
Teachers can toggle the below buttons:
-
- See the active timer for the class.
- Exit the classroom session.
- Open the chat window and start the conversation with a particular student or co-teacher
- Set “lock tab” to lock all current tabs for all students.
- Display a search panel to quickly pull up any student in the class.
- Set your preferred display options, such as how many user cards to display per row, set the preview type to active cards or statistics, and sort student cards by email address, first name, or last name.
- Session Tools – settings drop-down button which allows for:
-
-
- Select all students– Select all students in class.
- Clear selection – De-select all students in class.
- Open new tab – Open a tab for all students with a toggle to lock the tab or not.
- Push site collection – Push the selection of predefined sites to all students.
- Close all browsing tabs – Reset all student’s tabs
- Send Classroom Announcement – Send a message to the students.
- Session control – Site access control for allowing or blocking websites.
- Reconnect – Refresh the connection of the session.
- Absence Notes – Add absence notes
- Unpin All Students – reset the pin students option
-
Center view of virtual classroom #
This is the main visual of the class:
-
- Displayed in a granular manner.
- Granules of connected students load up periodically as students connect to the application.
- When a student is pulled up from the search panel, he/she will be displayed first.
- Granules will display either the active tab or the active tab plus browsing stats (depending on the preferences set up under Preview type in the Display options section).
Note: To successfully connect to the virtual class students must be signed into their Chrome account on the Chrome browser whilst being in synchronous mode.
Connected students are marked with a green icon in their respective granules, while disconnected students are marked with a grey icon.
For connected students, the tool will automatically start streaming students’ screens in real-time, while the disconnected students will display info about when these students last attended a virtual class (previous teacher name, email, and class of their virtual classroom).
To interact with a student, select the Green icon to the right of the student’s name:
-
- Student email displayed.
- Open the Tab for the student.
- Distribute the Current Page from this student to all other students.
- Block the Current Page for this student and all other students.
- Browsing History is displayed for this student in terms of title and time.
- Chat allows messaging directly with a student through a chatbox.
- Screenshot allows taking the screenshot of the current students’ browsing tab.
- Maximise Viewing Window option allows viewing students’ browsers in terms of websites and open tabs in a larger window. Tabs can also be closed.
- View Google Drive – Gain direct access to the students’ Drive files.
- Set the lock tab so that the students cannot open any other tab.
- Close All Browsing Tabs – reset the student’s tabs.
- Pin a Student to keep them at the top of the view.
