Announcing Ed100 Groups

I’m excited to announce Ed100 Groups, a new feature that helps you use Ed100 together with others in your school, PTA, college class, site council, student group or community organization.

Anyone can create a group. It’s free. No permission required. Try it!

Click “Groups” at the top of any page on Ed100 to get started.

Why Groups?

When something changes at a school in a way that helps kids learn, the story may be about an individual. When a school system changes, that’s a different kind of story.

Change beyond a single classroom or school requires alignment. And alignment requires dialogue — among educators, parents, students, and community members. To borrow from Hamilton, change requires people who are prepared to be “in the room where it happens.”

Ed100 Groups is designed to help communities create those well-informed conditions — on purpose.

How to create an Ed100 Group

Sign in to Ed100. (Everything works better if you do that first.)

Click Groups at the top of any page. (If you are already a member of one or more groups, you'll see them here.)

If you aren’t signed in, you’ll be prompted to do so. (By signing up with Ed100 you agree to receive emails from us — typically one informative message per week.)

Click Create new group.

Give your group a name and write a description for it. Add a Group URL extension — it will be the durable web address where your group leaderboard will “live” on Ed100.

As an organizer of the group, you can change some of the group settings and create a message that will be visible only to members of the group. You can change all of this later (except for the group URL address.)

How to invite people

After creating your group, you’ll generate invitation links.

You can decide how open or restrictive each invitation should be. For example, it could be:

• Open to anyone with the link
• Time-limited
• Restricted to specific email addresses. (Helpful if you are assigning Ed100 as part of a course or closed group.)

You can create additional invitation codes later. You don’t have to get it perfect the first time! Here’s what the invitation options look like:

When you click Create Invite you’ll see a list of your active and expired invitations. Expired links appear greyed out:

Click the invitation link to copy it, then paste it into an email, text, syllabus, website, or anywhere else.

It’s just a URL — share it however you like.

Share your invitation link any way you want

For example, send your invitation link to people in an email, or in a text message. Or both. You could embed it in your school’s PTA page, or your PTA council’s web page. You could put it in a syllabus. You could create a QR code for your invitation link and use it in a presentation. Bottom line, you can send the invitation code any way you want — it’s just a URL.

Here’s a sample message you could copy and paste:

Celebrating progress

Members of any Ed100 Group can see the progress each member of the group has made toward earning their graduate certificate. The interactive report lists every lesson in Ed100, organized by chapter and color-coded to show how many members have passed the quiz for each lesson. Here’s what it looks like:

In the Lesson Progress section:

• Click a lesson box to see its title.
• Click again to jump to the lesson and take (or re-take) the quiz.

In the Leaderboard section:

• Click a member’s name to view their progress.
• A crown indicates an Ed100 Graduate.

We hope school communities will check in regularly to celebrate progress toward graduation.

How to share leadership

When you initially create a group, you are the one and only organizer of the group, with permission to edit the group settings and invite people. To share that role with someone else, make sure they have accepted an invitation to join the group, then designate them as an organizer. Here’s how:

• Click the Ed100 Groups menu at the top of any page of Ed100.
• On the right-hand side, under Actions, click the drop arrow. Choose Edit.
• In the list of Members, select a person and change the setting to Organizer.

Organizers can create new invitations for the group, edit the description of the group, change its name, remove members, and delete the group. Generally, it’s a good idea to have two organizers, but not tons of them.

More to know

How do tickets work on Ed100?

Each quiz that you pass in Ed100 earns a ticket. You can see your own tickets under the View Lessons menu when using Ed100 on a big screen, or go to your personal profile page. On your personal profile page you can also see quizzes that you need to re-take to pass.

Tickets for lessons that you pass are reflected on the leaderboards of groups that you join. (It only shows the ones you passed — any that you got wrong are for your eyes only.) Colors on the leaderboard indicate whether each ticket was earned in the current school year or in a previous one.

Toward the end of each school year we hold a drawing, then we reset the Leaderboard for the year ahead. Many users earn tickets over the course of months, often overlapping a school year on the way to graduating. For purposes of the drawing and the leaderboard, each ticket counts for the school year in which it is earned. Each new school year, you can re-take quizzes and earn new tickets if you want to.

What does it mean to be an Ed100 Graduate?

The Ed100 Graduate Certificate

When you pass the quiz for every lesson on Ed100, you become an Ed100 Graduate. Similar to a college diploma, this is a permanent status — once you become an Ed100 Graduate, you will always be an Ed100 Graduate. You don’t have to pass all of the quizzes within a single school year.

To download and print your certificate, visit your Profile page on Ed100. We would love to help celebrate your accomplishment on social media. Take a selfie with it and send it to us!

Can you be a member of more than one Ed100 User Group?

Yes! It can make sense to be part of multiple Ed100 Groups, especially if you are an organizer or leader. For example, a leader of a PTA Council might help create Ed100 Groups for several PTA units. An educator might find it practical to create multiple Ed100 groups for different cohorts of students. A student organization might create leaderboards for different cohort years or regions.

Can you change your Username on Ed100?

Yes, it’s in your Profile. Change your Nickname to change how you are identified in your Ed100 Groups.

Can you view Ed100 user groups that you aren’t a member of?

If you happen to know the URL of an Ed100 group that you aren’t a member of, there are a few things you can see: The group’s public description, aggregate lesson completion stats for the group as a whole, and the Nickname(s) of the group’s organizer(s). For individual-level info you have to be a member of the group.