Assigning Boom Cards™ to Students

Today we’ll be talking about the ways for assigning Boom Cards for your students to play.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to first read about ways to use Boom Cards for distance learning and how to create Classrooms and student accounts on Boom Learning.

The most important thing to know about assigning Boom Cards is that you have to decide whether you need to generate reports on student progress or not.

So we’ll talk more about that below.

Assigning Boom Cards to Students

There are mainly two kinds of assignments you can create with Boom Cards: with progress reports and without.

We’ll start with the latter.

Boom Cards: using Fast Pins

Do you want your kiddos to play the games without any hassle (no sign-ups, no sign-ins, no password, etc),? If so, using Fast Pins is the way to go.

You just need to generate a link from within your Boom Library and share that link with your students.

Now, this link will not keep track of student progress, so you won’t know if they played it, what they got right or wrong, etc.

Don’t worry, they will know if they got it right or wrong because of instant feedback, but there will be no reports about their performance.

Before sharing how you can generate Fast Pins, let me sum up what they do or don’t do.

Fast Pins:

• play with NO need to sign in.
• can be played by an unlimited number of students at the same time on different devices. As long as they are ALL YOUR students, you can share FastPins with them.
• are unlimited. You can create Fast Pins for as many Boom decks as you’d like. Any kind of Boom membership lets you create Fast Pins, even the free Boom membership.
• can be shared through any online way you choose to communicate with your students or parents, e.g. via emails, Google Classroom, SeeSaw, Microsoft Teams, etc. NOTE: the games will not play “within” those communication platforms. When students click on the Fast Pin link, they are redirected to the Boom Learning website.
• do NOT keep track of student progress.
• expire after 5 or 14 days, depending on the membership you have. But you can always generate a new one. You can even generate a new code before it expires.

How to generate Fast Pins:

1. Go to your Boom Library.
2. Find the deck you want your students to play.
3. Click on the blue Action button, then click on Fast Pin.
4. On the pop-up window, click on the blue Generate Pin button.
5. Copy the link and share that link with students.
6. If you need to reset the link (generate a new link for the same deck), wait one hour and repeat the steps above.

Assigning cards to students via Classroom

Assigning cards to classes and students, through the Boom Library or the “Classes” tab in your Boom account, will allow Boom to track student progress and let it generate progress reports for you.

Progress reports let you see how many times students played a deck, what answers they got right or wrong, which decks they played, and more.

Now in order to assign Boom Cards this way, you’d need first to have set up Classroom and Student Accounts.

The free Boom membership allows you to create one classroom and up to five student profiles.

But if you’d like or want to have individual reports for more than 5 students, you’d need a paid Boom membership. To find out what’s the best membership for you, click here.

Assigning to all students in a Class

There are two ways to assign a deck to a complete Class.

From the Library tab

1. Go to your Boom Library.
2. Find the deck you want your students to play.
3. Click on the blue Action button, then click on Assign.
4. On the pop-up window, check the box next to the Class you want to assign the deck to.
5. That’s it.

From the Classes tab

1. Go to your Boom Classes tab.
2. Select the Class you want to assign the deck(s) to.
3. On the Class window, click on the Assignments tab.
4. Click on the blue “Assign More Decks” button.
5. Find the deck(s) you want to assign. You can use the Search bar if you have a lot of decks in your Library. Check the box next to the deck you want to assign.
6. That’s it.

Assigning to one student in a Class

Maybe you’d like one student within a Class to work on a deck, but not all students to work on that deck. That’s great for differentiation, for example.

So here’s how you can assign deck(s) to a specific student instead of assigning to the whole class.

1. Go to your Boom Classes tab.
2. Select the Class where the student is.
3. On the Class window, click on the Students tab.
4. Click on the blue drop-down menu next to the student card.
5. Click on Assign. From the decks in the window, select the decks you want that student to work on. Here too you can use the Search bar to find the deck you’re looking for.
6. Check the deck(s) and that’s it.

So those are the ways to assign Boom Cards for your kiddos to play while keeping track of their performance.

Now, they can sign in two main ways:

1. By heading to the Boom Learning website, and signing in with their Boom username and password. If you use Google Classroom, you can connect it with Boom so that your students can sign in with their Google Classroom login info.
2. You can generate a HyperPlay link that will direct your students to a specific deck they need to play. With a HyperPlay link, Boom will track their progress. Kiddos will need to sign in.

How to generate a HyperPlay link:

1. Go to your Boom Library.
2. Find the deck you want your students to play.
3. Click on the blue Action button, then click on HyperPlay link.
4. On the pop-up window, copy the link so you can share it with your students.
5. Share the link with your students through your LMS of choice, e.g. Seesaw, MSTeams, Google Classroom, and even email.

And that’s all about assigning Boom Cards!

If you have any questions, the first place to check is Boom Learning’s Knowledge Base and Boom Learning’s YouTube channel.

You can also leave me a comment below.

Thank you so much for stopping by!

Merci!

Lucy

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