Built around the rule you actually care about
Every teacher has a short mental list of pairs who cannot sit together. That list is the real constraint on a classroom seating plan, and it is the thing most free chart tools ignore entirely — they will happily draw you a lovely grid and then let you put the two loudest students side by side.
Here you add those pairs first. Auto-arrange treats them as hard rules and seats the most constrained students first, so the difficult combinations get resolved while there are still free desks to work with. If you move someone by hand into a group that breaks a rule, the affected table and rule turn red, and the rule names the pair, so a mistake is visible immediately rather than on Monday morning.
Setting up your room
- Desk groups is the number of clusters or table groups in your room. For rows, treat each row as a group and set the seats to the row length.
- Seats each is how many students fit in one group. Four is the common default for cluster seating; pairs work well when you want less cross-talk.
- Print the chart and keep a copy on your desk. It is far more useful to a cover teacher than a plan that only exists on your laptop.
How often to change the plan
A seating plan is not meant to last the year. Most teachers rearrange each term, after an assessment, or whenever a group stops working. The reason plans get left in place too long is usually that redoing them is tedious — which is exactly the part this tool removes. Your class list stays saved in the browser, so a rearrangement is one click of auto-arrange plus a couple of manual tweaks. If you want a genuinely fresh mix, use the random seating chart generator, which shuffles the whole class while still respecting your keep-apart rules.
Accessibility and practical needs come first
Before you optimise anything else, place the students who need a specific position: a student who needs to be near the front to see or hear, a student who needs an aisle for mobility, a student who works better close to your desk. Seat those students manually and lock their seats, then run auto-arrange for the rest. Getting those placements right matters more than any balance the tool can calculate.
Local mode keeps student names on your device
Student names are sensitive data, and schools rightly ask where they go. In the free local mode, your class list stays in this browser and is not uploaded, so no account or third-party copy is created. An optional Event Pass creates a cloud copy only when the user chooses that service; schools should approve that processing before using it for student data. Keep the plan local and print or save a PDF when cloud processing is not appropriate.