Discussion Differentiation

[emilycraddock]

I work as a digital learning specialist for my district.

One of the teachers that I work with is trying to set up discussions with mixed group of kids from various sections.  She created groups and assigned kids to those groups, but doing that creates a whole new area in the "courses and groups" section, which the kids have access to.  She doesn't really want the students to know that they are in different groups for the discussion, just to assign it to them based on

Is there a way to set up groups solely for the purpose of differentiating assignments and discussions (so that it doesn't create a seperate group page)?

Is the only way to do this to type in individual student names in the "assign to" section?

What is the best practice for differentiating assignments and/or discussions in a K-12 environment?

[kona · Accepted solution]

emilycraddock​, I'm not sure about best practices, but you are correct that if you use "Groups" to group students then Canvas will create a separate group area in the Course - What are Student Groups?

I'm not sure of the specific purpose for what you're trying to do, but if the goal is to have different sets of students participate in a discussion without seeing what the other student sets are discussing (and you do not want to use "groups" in Canvas) then the only way I can think to achieve this is to have a different discussion for each set of students - How do I assign a Graded Discussion to an individual student or course section?. You would then use the differentiate feature so that only specific students would have access to/see each discussion. Definitely not ideal... but it would work.