We’ve added a whole new side to TeachVid: Live Sessions !!

A Live Session is a time-limited competition based on a TeachVid resource, where students score points on the Live Session scoreboard based on the number and accuracy of their interactions.

Live Sessions are a great way of injecting some excitement and an element of competition into a TeachVid video resource, either in class or at home 🙂

There are 2 types of Live Sessions:

1. Classroom Live Sessions (for teacher subscribers only)
2. Temporary Live Sessions (for all registered users with featured resources)

1. Classroom Live Sessions

Classroom Live Sessions are available via any *Private Classroom on TeachVid.

(*Private classrooms are classrooms set up just for your students, to whom you provide an access code so that they can join. The difference between Private and Public classrooms is that teachers can see students / student data for Private classrooms, AND they can set Live Sessions.)

CREATE A CLASSROOM LIVE SESSION

Classroom Live Sessions are accessed via the “Live” tab in your private classroom. If you have a Teacher subscription and you have created a private classroom, this is what that looks like:

Click on the “New Live Session” button to begin.

The next step is to choose a resource for your Live Session:

Choose from the public resource search as well as your favorite resources list. Click on a resource to select it as the basis for your Live Session.

On the next step (above) you need to do the following:

• Set the end time for the Live Session
  By default, 1 hour is added to the current time, but a Live Session can last for anywhere between a few minutes and a couple of months. Use the Date / Time input to change the date and time. (Note that you can end the session manually at any point, so the time that you set is not set in stone.)
• Select the activities for the Live Session
  By default, all available activities are selected. Deselect those that you don’t want to be included in your Live Session.
• Decide on access for Live Session activities
  You can click on the checkbox to “Allow students to only access each activity once.” By default, this is not selected, so students are free to open and close any of the activities as many times as they like, and each time they access an activity that they have already started, it jumps to the correct place. However, if this checkbox is selected, students can only open each activity once. This means that once they have closed an activity, they will not be able to open it again, irrespective of how far through the activity they had progressed.

lAUNCH THE LIVE SESSION

Click on “Go Live!” to launch the Live Session. It will look something like this when it starts:

The “End Live Session” button shows if you are the teacher of the class. You can click this to end the Live Session at any point.

The 3 white blocks contain information for the user. So in this case, I am told that:

• I have scored 0 points.
• There are 0 students currently connected. (This will show my position relative to the rest of the class once people are connected. See the scoreboard image below.)
• There are 56 minutes and 47 seconds remaining before the Live Session ends.

GAME PLAY

Students can access the available activities in any order. They score points based on their interactions (clicks, letters, etc) with the activities. And this happens on a per caption basis, so after each TeachVid mini-task, the student is awarded points based on how accurate their interactions were. They can see immediately…

• The number of additional points (+500 in the image below)
• The total points for this activity (500)
• The total points for their live session, in brackets (800 below)

Since points are awarded based on the number of interactions, some activities can score way more points than others. Those which score the most points will be the Initials-100 and Spell-100 activities.

THE SCOREBOARD

The image above shows the scoreboard, which appears for the classroom teacher, and which updates automatically every few seconds.

(Students do not see the scoreboard on their screens – they just see the white info boxes which tell them their score, their position and the time remaining.)

LIVE SESSION HISTORY

A classroom teacher will see a list of all Live Session history for their classroom, which appears below any current Live Session data. e.g.:

Teachers can delete Live Session data, and they can also access scoreboard data for the finished Live Session:

So you can see the total score achieved by each student during the Live Session. If you then click on the + symbol at the end of each row, you can see much more in-depth data about each student’s interactions within each of the Live Session activities:

GIVE IT A TRY!

So if you have an active Teacher (or School) subscription, go and create a private classroom, and have a play with this new feature. We’d love to hear your feedback.

And if you don’t have an active Teacher (or School) subscription, remember that all our subscriptions come with the 1st month FREE (provided you haven’t previously set up and canceled a subscription), so you pay nothing if you cancel in the first month.

Even if you just register for FREE, you can try out the Temporary Live Session feature discussed in section 2 below.

2. Temporary Live Sessions

All registered users can set temporary Live Sessions based on “featured” resources and their own created resources, and active Teacher subscribers can set temporary Live Sessions based on any non-private resource.

Temporary Live Sessions are set directly from a resource page. Simply click on the Live Session icon that appears on the resource preview image (if available). See image below:

The process of setting up a Temporary Live Session is similar to the process described in section 1 above (Classroom Live Sessions).

What you end up with is a Live Session which…

• has its own unique URL / identifier
• can last for up to 7 days
• can be accessed via the new Live option on the main menu, which opens the Live Sessions page
• allows you to see the scoreboard scores for up to 7 days after it has finished
• can be ended by you at any point

Note that you need to be logged in to create a temporary Live Session, and your students need to have registered and be logged in to take part in it. (No subscription is required to create Live Sessions based on featured resources.)

The student experience / game play is as described in section 1 above (Classroom Live Sessions). The only differences between a Classroom Live Session and a Temporary Live Session are:

• A Temporary Live Session can last for up to 7 days only (compared with several weeks for a Classroom Live Session).
• Temporary Live Session scores are available for up to 7 days only (whereas Classroom Live Session data is stored until you delete it).
• The only data available to the teacher for Temporary Live Sessions is the scoreboard itself (whereas teachers can get activity-level feedback for all students for Classroom Live Sessions).

Check out the following Temporary Live Sessions Links:

• Live Session in the Example Classroom: click here to try it
• Temporary Live Sessions for all (FREE) registered users, and a new Live Sessions page

Enjoy 🙂