Lead your students through an engaging Science Lesson using Teach mode.
Now that your Subject is set up and your students are ready, it's time to teach your first Lesson in Stile. (If this doesn't sound right, go back to Getting Started Pt 2!) Teach mode allows you to present your screen to the students while providing you with the right tools to help guide the flow of the session.
By the end of this article, you will know how to control each part of the Lesson, watch your students work in real-time, and review their responses anonymously. We recommend you have your own choice of Lesson open in Stile Classroom during this tutorial. Alternatively, you can use your existing copy of the sample Lesson from Part 2 of this series, or get a fresh copy of the sample Lesson here.
Note: This article is part of a 4-part series designed to help you use Stile Classroom for the very first time. You'll find links to other articles peppered throughout. These links will open in new tabs, so you can explore more of Stile without losing your place in this series!
Follow along step-by-step, or you can click on a section below to jump straight to it:
- Switch to Teach mode;
- Control videos and interactive content;
- Prompt live discussion with polls and brainstorms;
- See student work appear in real-time;
- Review student responses anonymously;
- Direct your students to submit their work.
Switch to Teach mode
Part 2 of the Getting Started series focused on Prepare mode, to get you and your Lesson ready for your students. In Part 3, we'll explore Teach mode. This is the presentation mode in Stile Classroom and works well when used with a classroom projector/smartboard or a video conferencing app.
Click into the Lesson you intend to teach (or the sample Lesson) and near the top right corner of the screen, switch the green toggle from Prepare to Teach. A few changes in view are immediately noticeable, including the content editing tools disappearing and a new Class overview just above the cover photo. The overview tells you how many students have started the Lesson and how many have submitted it.
Control videos and interactive content
Among Stile's interactive widgets are the live Poll and the collaborative Brainstorm. These widgets include controls that are available only to teachers, so you can control the flow of the Lesson and prevent students from answering early.
In this example, the poll is asking a question relevant to the video students just watched (either at their own pace or at the front of the room from your screen). If you want your students to watch the entire video before answering, you can toggle Voting to Closed. Keep results hidden from your students until after everyone's answered to prevent bias, and then toggle the switch to Visible.
Prompt live discussion with polls and brainstorms
These polls and brainstorms are designed to encourage some lively discussion among your students. Once they have responded, you can either click to reveal names of those who responded or call on students to discuss their responses. This is to help hook them into the Lesson and make them curious for more.
Click on the response option that you'd like to discuss to reveal who voted for it. You could use this information in a few ways, such as calling on a student to discuss their answer, or if the students' responses make up a fairly even split, you could break students into groups with representatives from each response to discuss how they made their choice.
Use the Pause button at the top of the screen if you want to grab your students' attention even more and prevent them from jumping ahead in the Lesson.
See student work appear in real-time
Live feedback goes both ways in Stile Classroom. Your students can receive instant feedback from you, and at the same time, you get instant updates about how your students are progressing.
In the example above, the Show responses tool has been enabled on Question 8, and you can see that a student selects the third option. This is an excellent way to make sure your students are on track for achieving their learning goals. If it becomes clear that too many students are missing the mark on the question, you can get their attention and address the misconceptions before they continue. You can also see that the number of students who have responded to the question updates at the same time.
Each question has this Class overview. Hover your mouse over the overview to reveal a list of who has and has not responded to the question.
The progress bars on the left side of the screen fill up in real time as students attempt the questions. You can use this to make sure students are on track and not jumping ahead. Click on a question number to jump directly to it on the page.
Review student responses anonymously
After giving your students some time to work on a set of questions, you may want to pause and discuss their answers. When you click the Show responses option on an open-ended question, such as a Written response widget, the students' names are hidden by default. This allows you to compare student answers to the model answer and prompt discussion with your students, without introducing any bias that comes from knowing who wrote the answer.
When you are not presenting to the room, or if you want to give a student kudos for an excellent response, you can click the Show names button to reveal the student's name.
Direct your students to submit their work
Whether you complete the Lesson at school or let your students finish up from home, they can submit their work once they are satisfied with it.
At the bottom of the page (as the student sees it) is a blue button that says I'm finished, show my teacher. When they click that, their page will refresh and a note will appear at the top of their work which marks the time and date at which they submitted the Lesson.
On your screen in Teach mode, your Class overview at the top of the page will update to indicate which students have submitted the work.
It's okay if they don't submit the work - you can collect it from them, too. We'll address that in the next part of the series. It's time to mark your students' work and give them some helpful feedback!
Continue on to Pt 4: Use data and insights to provide quick, targeted feedback
or go back to Pt 2: Log in, organize Lessons, and add students