School Houses
School Houses are a great way to foster a greater sense of community and create shared goals for students across several grades in your school. These big teams of students from different classes or grades tally all the Experience Points students earn to create a leaderboard of Houses.
Learn more about:
- Creating Houses
- Resetting Houses Experience Points
- Editing and updating Houses
- House Experience Points and leaderboard
Creating Houses
The very first step before leveraging this tool to foster stronger relationships between your students is … creating Houses! We recommend splitting your students into Houses before you start the creation process. The easiest way to create your Houses is with a CSV or XLSX file but, if you prefer, you can manually create your Houses and add your students directly in Classcraft.
Creating Houses via a CSV or XLSX file
To start, you’ll need our template! Download the appropriate template here:
Once you’ve assigned a House to all your students in your template, it’s time to create your Houses. To do so:
- On your dashboard, select Houses in the side navigation
- Click Import Houses
- Drag your file to the gray upload box or select it
- Review the list of students and, if needed, download the error report (you can fix errors in your file and re-upload it if you want)
- Click Next
- If you’re creating new houses, select crests for your new Houses
- Click Create Houses to confirm
You can repeat this process as often as needed: if students are already assigned to a House, you can use this method to reassign them to a different House.
Creating Houses manually
To manually create a House and add students:
- On your dashboard, select Houses in the side navigation
- Click Create a House
- Enter a name for your House
- Select a crest
- If you want, select the starting Experience Points value (we recommend leaving this at 0)
- Click the Add students button
- Search for students to add to your House (you can use names, tags or grades)
- Tick the checkbox of all students you want to add to this house
- Click Add
- Click Create House to confirm
Resetting Houses Experience Points
Houses start accruing Experience Points as soon as you create them and Experience Points are automatically modified when your students earn or lose them. To make sure everyone start on the same foot, when you're done creating your all of your Houses or at any point during the school year, you might want to reset their Experience Points.
To reset Experience Points for all your houses at once:
- On your dashboard, select Houses in the side navigation
- Click the Reset all Houses XP button
- Click Reset XP to confirm
If you need to reset only one House's Experience Points or to change it, consider instead editing the House.
Editing and updating Houses
You can change a House’s name, crest, Experience Points value, and roster by editing it. To do so:
- On your dashboard, select Houses in the side navigation
- On the list, find the House you want to edit
- Click the More options (...) button
- Select Edit House
Here, you can:
- Edit the House’s name in the text field
- Change the crest by clicking on the image
- Enter a new Experience Points total amount
- Add or remove students
When you’re done, click on Save changes.
Updating Houses with a file
If you want to move students from one House to another, you can also import an updated CSV or XLSX file. Make sure it contains the latest information related to your Houses and update it as if you were creating new Houses.
If you’re not creating new Houses, once you review the student list your Houses will be automatically updated when you click Continue. Otherwise, you’ll need to select crests for your newly-created Houses as usual.
Manually adding students to a House
You can still add manually students to any House without using an updated document:
- On your dashboard, select Houses in the side navigation
- On the list, find the House you want to edit
- Click the More options (...) button
- Select Edit House
- Click the Add students button
- Select your student(s) in the list and click Add
- When you're done editing the House click Save changes
Manually removing students from a House
You can manually remove students from any House without using an updated document:
- On your dashboard, select Houses in the side navigation
- On the list, find the House you want to edit
- Click the More options (...) button
- Select Edit House
- On the student list, find the student you want to remove
- Click the X button at the end of their line
- When you're done, click Save changes
If you want to remove all the students from a House without deleting the House:
- On your dashboard, select Houses in the side navigation
- Find the House you want to remove students from
- Click the More options (...) button
- Select Remove all students
- Click Remove students to confirm
Either way, when you remove a student from a House, it has no effect on the House’s or student’s Experience Points.
House Experience Points and leaderboard
All Experience Points students earn are added to their House’s total Experience Points, whether these points come from completing Quests, their good behavior in class, or from class tools. Similarly, all Experience Points lost by students (such as when a teacher corrects a mistake) are removed from the House's total.
The House’s total Experience Points is the total of all Experience Points earned and lost by all the students in a House since the last reset.
Removing a student from a House does not affect the student’s or the House’s Experience Points as once they’re acquired, they’re acquired (unless a teacher manually removes Experience Points from a student).
All Houses are part of the leaderboard where they’re listed according to the Experience Points they earned so far. You can see this leaderboard by:
- Clicking on Houses in the sidebar navigation
- Clicking the View leaderboard button in the top part of the screen
Teachers can view the House Leaderboard by:
- Clicking on the Schoolwide use tab on their teacher homepage
- Selecting Houses
- Clicking View leaderboard
Students can view the House Leaderboard by:
- Viewing their character dashboard
- Clicking on their House name