Teaching to a screen takes away what a room tells a teacher for nothing. Who arrived, who is following, who has a question and will not interrupt to ask it. Class mode carries those signals to the teacher instead, and the hour below runs from the preparation through the lesson to the replay a student opens afterwards.
Before the class starts
Preparation happens outside the teaching hour and takes a few minutes. You put the session on the schedule so students have a fixed place to arrive at. You look over the contact list for the group you are teaching and add anyone missing from it. If you plan to check understanding mid-lesson, you write the poll or quiz questions now, while the lesson plan is still in front of you.
- Decide in advance where the class will split into groups, and how many students per group
- Open anything you intend to share on screen before the hour begins
The first few minutes
Open the room a little early. Students who arrive wait at the door, and you admit them one at a time or wave the group through. Each student who joins is entered on the attendance record while that happens. There is no register to read aloud and no participant list to photograph for counting later. By the time you greet the class, the roster on your screen already shows who made it.
While you teach
The teaching controls sit together in one dock. An action taken mid-sentence costs a click. Raise hand builds an ordered queue on your side of the screen, and you call on students in the order they signalled, which takes the negotiation out of turn-taking. A student who would rather not interrupt can send a private help signal, and it reaches you without the rest of the class seeing it.
Start a poll when you want a quick read on the room. Everyone answers, the spread appears, and you decide from that whether to move on or work the point again. A quiz does the harder version of the same job: a short set of questions after a concept, answered live, with the results in front of you before the lesson goes further. The shared whiteboard and notes are there for the moments a problem needs working through together on one page.
None of that needs explaining to the class. They work out the queue in the first lesson, and after that it runs without you narrating it.
Splitting the class
Open a breakout when the work suits small groups. Students move into their groups, you hand each group the task and the time it has, and you move between rooms to listen and answer questions. From inside a group you can nudge, correct, or leave them to it. Closing the breakout brings everyone back to the main room together and you pick the lesson up with the whole class.
Bring them back before the energy in the groups runs out rather than after.
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