Kira has a built-in feature called Live Classroom. You can learn more about it in our dedicated Live Classroom article.
After getting Live Classroom turned on, the next step is figuring out how you’ll integrate it into your teaching practice.
What does Live Classroom do?
Live Classroom allows the teacher to start a Live Session. Invited students join and view their assigned lesson, but are made to follow along with the teacher at the same pace - they cannot stray from the step the teacher has brought them to.
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.
What can it look like to teach with Live Classroom?
Let’s imagine a class where students are going to be using Kira for the duration of a class period or lesson (sample lesson here). The teacher might structure their lesson to begin with a Warm Up/Do Now/Brainstarter activity, as shown below. At this point, the teacher may not be using Live Classroom yet but might be using the ‘Access Lock’ option in a course.
Learn more about Assigning and Locking work, or learn more about customizing resources to fit your classroom.
Students will enter and complete the brainstarter. In this example, it’s posed as an interactive question on Kira, but it could just as easily be text asking students to respond in their notebooks.
From here, the teacher might remove all locks and begin a Live Session by clicking the play button in the top corner. They can assign this to students in a class by sharing a link or by giving a code, and can make it mandatory with a toggle.
Students will then be on the same view as the teacher, who can move to reviewing the agenda, which has been set to ‘progressive reveal’ in its question settings, allowing for a better presentation experience.
From there, while still running a Live Session, the teacher can navigate to the next step that contains a Read and Chat. While still in live classroom, the teacher might direct students to popcorn read the text aloud, and then direct them when to begin their chat activity. The chat prepares students to have a classroom discussion, so all students feel prepared to share. The teacher can use the next step to display as the class has a live, real-time discussion.
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In the Live Session, the teacher can then move on to the next step where they will be presenting information with just a few check-for-understanding questions for students to complete. As they present, students can take notes in a notebook as directed.
Then, the teacher can end the session to allow students to work independently, where they will watch an interactive video on their own and complete a short project before returning to a fresh live session at the end of class to present what they have done.
How will you use Live Classroom?
There are many ways to use this feature, just as there are many ways to teach with Kira! We are excited to see what you’ll do with it.
Doing something cool with Kira? Make sure to let our team know; we want to hear about it!