When you have a Boom Learning account, not only can you use Boom Cards, but you can also track student progress. In order to do that, students need to sign in using a profile you create for them. And today, I’ll be sharing all about creating classrooms and student accounts.
Boom Cards: Creating Classrooms and Student Accounts
Before starting, let me talk briefly about Boom accounts. They have 4 membership options, including a free one.
The Starter membership, which is free, allows you to create one classroom and 5 student profiles. That works perfectly for homeschoolers, some tutors, and even classroom teachers (if you’d only need to track the progress of a few students).
In order to create more than one classroom and/or more than 5 student profiles, you’d need to get one of their paid memberships. You can read more about Boom memberships and choose the right one for you here.
My suggestion is to try out creating a classroom and a student profile with your free Boom account to see how useful it is and then later decide if having accounts for all your students would be worth the membership.
So, just follow the steps here.
1. After signing into your Boom Learning account, click on the “Classes” tab at the top of the page.
2. Click on “New Classroom”, or “Import a Google Classroom” if you use it. In this tutorial, I’ll be creating a regular classroom.
3. Then, you can edit the name, the username and the password of the classroom. You’d use this information if you wanted to sign the whole class at the same time.
4. Next, let’s add students to the classroom. You can add them one by one, or click on “Add many students” to add names in bulk. After clicking “Okay”, you’ll see your student profiles on the screen. Don’t worry about their avatars because they’ll be able to choose a new one the first time they log in to play.
5. Now, change their usernames to easier and more memorable words. For example, instead of “denise-297”, I’d use “denise2020”.
To change the username, click on the it and type in the username you’d like. On the image below, you’d click onver “carlos-967” and then change it to something else.
NOTE: maybe another teacher has already selected the username you’d like to use. In that case, Boom will not accept yours because each username is unique.
6. You can create one password for all students to use (click on the blue “Set Passwords” button) or create one password for each student (click on the blue drop-down menu next to each student profile and click on “Password”).
6a. You can also choose to use “Picture Passwords” if they are easier for your kiddos to remember. When following step 6, check the “Use picture passwords for this classroom” box. Again, you can select a classroom picture password, or individual picture passwords.
7. After going through the steps above and making sure all the usernames and passwords are good to go, you can “Print Roster/QR” to file for your future reference or to send out to students or students’ parents/guardians so they can log into Boom. You may or may not include the password and QR code.
8. Finally, click on “Lock” classroom to prevent students from creating new accounts or changing their student names. They can still change their usernames, passwords, and avatars.
And that’s pretty much it for creating classroom and student accounts in Boom Learning.
You can repeat the process to create more classrooms.
You can also add students, remove students, transfer students from one classroom to another, and more.
We’ll come back to “Classes” when we talk about assigning Boom Cards to students.
Read: List of FREE French Boom Cards
Read: Using Boom Cards for Distance Learning
Boom Cards: Creating Classrooms and Student Accounts | FAQs
Here are some common questions related to Boom Cards classrooms and student accounts.
Do students or parents need to sign up for a Boom Learning account?
No. Students and parents don’t need to create Boom accounts.
Teachers should create student accounts from within their teacher accounts the way it was described in this post.
How many classrooms can I have?
That depends on the kind of Boom membership you have.
The free Starter membership allows teachers to create one classroom with up to 5 students.
If you need more classrooms or more student accounts, you’d need to have one of the paid memberships. Learn more about memberships and choose the right one for your needs HERE.
What can I use the other Boom Classrooms for?
Well, if you’re a Core French teacher, you might want to create a Boom Classroom for each of the different grades/groups you teach.
Or maybe you teach a mixed Grade 1/2 class, so you could create two Boom Classrooms, one for each group of students. That would allow you to differentiate your teaching by assigning different decks to each Boom Classroom.
And you could use each Boom Classroom to differentiate the activities within the same group of students. For example, you could create a Boom Classroom for at level, below level, and above level students.
What do I do if my students lost/forgot their usernames and passwords?
You can always reset and change student usernames and passwords from the “Classes” tab in your Boom account.
I have a question, but the answer is not here. What do I do?
Well, first of all check out Boom Learning’s Knowledge Base where you’ll find answers to most of your questions related to Boom Learning and Boom Cards.
If you don’t find the answer in the Knowledge Base, email Boom: help (at) boomlearning.com
You can, of course, email me and I’ll do my best to assist you: lucy (at) forfrenchimmersion.com
Thank you so much for reading this post about creating classrooms and Boom Cards!
Merci!
Lucy
Read: FREE Vocabulary Sheets: Les lexiques
Read: French Phonics Wheels
