This article walks through what Live Classroom does, how to start and run a session as a teacher, and what students see and can do while a session is live.
What is Live Classroom?
Live Classroom lets a teacher drive a lesson in real time while students follow along automatically on their own devices. You control the pace — advancing steps, moving between lessons in a course, pausing for discussion, and pulling everyone's attention to a specific part of the screen — and students stay in sync without needing to keep up on their own.
Students aren't just watching, though. They can still type in code editors, answer quiz questions, and interact with anything on the current step. If a student scrolls away to look ahead or back, one click brings them right back to where you are.
Starting a live session
You can start a live session from any resource in Kira:
Lesson sessions — run a single lesson live, step by step.
Course sessions — navigate across multiple lessons within a course without ending the session, so you're not restarting live mode every time you move to a new lesson.
Getting students into the session
Kira offers a few ways for students to join, so you can pick whatever's fastest for your class:
Join code — share a simple 6-character code for students to enter.
Shareable link — post or send a link that drops students straight in.
Dashboard notification — students see a notification on their Kira dashboard.
Auto-redirect — if you start the session for a specific class, students in that class are redirected in automatically.
What students see and can do
Once a student joins, their view locks to whatever step you're currently on. They'll see a persistent banner letting them know they're in a live session, and the navigation rail is greyed out so they can't jump ahead or fall behind on their own.
Within the current step, students can still:
Type and edit in code editors
Answer quiz questions
Interact with any other step-level content
The only thing locked is step-to-step navigation — that stays in your hands as the teacher.
Follow Teacher
Students can freely scroll within the current step at their own pace — for example, to re-read something above where you are. If they've scrolled away, a single click on Follow Teacher re-syncs their view to your position. This is a one-time snap, not continuous tracking, so it won't fight them while they're reading.
Your pacing controls
As the teacher, you get a persistent control bar for driving the session:
Next / Previous — move one step at a time.
Next lesson / Previous lesson — move between lessons within a course session.
Pause — freeze the session, for example to open up discussion.
Resume — pick the session back up after a pause.
End Live — close out the session for everyone.
Focus On Me
Need to point everyone at one specific thing without changing steps? Click Focus On Me to instantly jump every connected student's viewport to the topmost element you're currently looking at. It's the fastest way to say "look here" without losing your place.
Managing your students
A live student list shows you exactly who's in the session, including a live connected count and whether each student is currently online or has simply joined. If you need to remove a student — say, if they joined the wrong session — you can do so with one click and a confirmation step to prevent accidental removals.
Ending a session
When you click End Live, students see a calm transition screen before returning to free navigation — no jarring cutoff. Once the session ends, the join code and shareable link are automatically invalidated, so they can't be reused.
Quick recap
Start a live session from any lesson or course.
Share a join code, link, or let students auto-join from their dashboard.
Guide the class with Next, Previous, Pause, and Resume.
Use Focus On Me to direct attention without changing steps.
Students use Follow Teacher to re-sync if they scroll away.
End Live wraps things up gracefully and invalidates the session.
Have questions about running your first Live Classroom session? Reach out to Kira Support and we're happy to help.