Class conversations

Class conversations are automatically created group messages based on your official class rosters. You can use them to message all students in a class, all guardians, or both together. Because they’re tied to your roster, membership stays up to date automatically.

Activation

Class conversations become active when a teacher sends the first message.

• Students and guardians cannot start the conversation.

• The class conversation is not displayed until it’s activated.

• When started, members can participate based on settings.

Member management

Membership is fully roster-based. You can’t manually add or remove participants within a class conversation. If changes are needed, update your official class roster—those updates will sync automatically into messaging.

Conversation types

Each class can include up to three separate conversations. You can use any or all of them.

Members and conversation controls

Conversation details become available after you send the first message. Before that, the member list is hidden.

When the conversation is active, you can select the info icon to review participants and manage settings. From there, you can turn replies on or off, enable or disable reactions, and mute individual participants. Replies are turned off by default when a conversation starts, but can be updated at any time.

Group and direct messaging

You can also create smaller conversations with students and guardians from your roster.

• Group messages place selected participants in a shared conversation, which you can optionally name, such as Project Group A. If no name is added, the conversation will display participant names.

• Individual messages let you send the same message to multiple people while keeping each reply separate. This is useful for contacting multiple guardians privately.

These conversations are displayed in Direct Messages, not Classes, because they’re new direct or group threads initiated by the teacher.

Attachments

You can include file attachments in your messages, with a limit of 10 MB per file and one file per message. Supported file types include common image formats, such as JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, and HEIC, and documents such as PDF, DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX.

To help keep messaging safe, images are scanned using Google Cloud Vision, and all files are checked for viruses before they become available in chat. If a file is flagged as unsafe, it will be blocked, and a message indicating that the attachment was not allowed will be displayed.