One way that all of our FREE registered users can make use of TeachVid is by setting Temporary LIVE Sessions based on “featured” resources (those marked with a gold star in the resource search), or based on their own created resources

What is a Temporary LIVE Session?

A Temporary LIVE Session is a real-time scoreboard competition based on a TeachVid resource. Students score points on the scoreboard by completing activities, with each correct interaction worth 100 points.

An “interaction” means any interaction with a TeachVid activity, so it could be clicking a chunk, clicking a word to fill a gap, clicking to separate words in “Space”, or typing a letter in any of the “Spell” activities.

So the more difficult activities — i.e. those requiring students to type the L2 text — score many more points than those that simply require a few clicks.

A Temporary LIVE Session is set via the button that appears on the resource preview image on the resource page for each “featured” resource (see image below).

When you set a LIVE Session, you can decide which of the resource’s activities are included in your LIVE competition (see the image at the top of this post).

As the image at the top of this post shows, you can also set it up so that students can only access each activity once, which means that if they begin an activity and then close it before finishing it, they won’t be able to open it again. (This encourages students to try to score the maximum points they can for each activity, since they know that the number of total points available is finite.)

Once you click on “Go Live!”, you’ll be taken to a “Live” page with a unique identifier and URL. Simply share the URL with your students and they’ll be able to join the competition and see their scores on the scoreboard.

All you need to do is register for FREE (so that you set up the LIVE Session), and get your students to register for FREE too (so that they can have their scores registered).

So what’s changed?

When we introduced this feature, we set it up so that a Temporary LIVE Session could last up to 12 hours, with scoreboards available for a further 24 hours once the LIVE Session had expired, We also limited Temporary LIVE Sessions to “featured” resources.

We’ve now decided to extend this as part of a package of measures to help teachers to make better use of our FREE tier, in response to the increased demand for online / distance learning as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Temporary LIVE Sessions can now last up to 7 days, and LIVE Session scoreboards will now be available for a further 7 days after the LIVE Session has expired.

AND you can now set Temporary LIVE Sessions based on your own created resources (as well as on all “featured” resources).

How does this help me?

This means that now, even without any kind of subscription, you can get your students competing in video-based textivate-style text-reconstruction activities based on any of our many “featured” resources, or on your own created resources, which can last up to a week.

And you and your students will be able to see the scoreboard automatically updating throughout the competition, and the finished scores will be available for a further 7 days. So you’ll have evidence of them having completed the work that you have set them to do.

You could set up weekly competitions for each of your classes.

You could require them to score a minimum number of points per week / per competition (say 50,000?) and reward in some way those who appear at the top of the board.

You and your students can see all of their active LIVE Sessions via the “Live” menu option in the TeachVid navigation bar.

Anything else I should know?

We’ll also be increasing the number of “featured” resources so that more of our platform is available to be used in this way during the pandemic.

We hope this helps 🙂