Teaching tools
A Live Class gives the teacher a small, sharp toolkit — enough to run a real lesson, not so much that it gets in the way. Everything is driven from the teacher's screen and mirrored to every student in lockstep.
The shared deck
The center of a class is a deck of tabs the teacher builds from the class's idea collection and pushes live (up to a dozen at a time). Click a tab and it switches everyone's center screen at once. As the teacher scrolls, every student's view follows — their own scroll is gently locked so the room never drifts out of sync. Nobody's left hunting for "which slide are we on?"
The teacher assembles the deck from a small palette of components:
Key point
Drop any key point from the lesson's idea straight onto the screen. One tap, no editing.
Rich note
Write a formatted note — bold, italics, code, spoilers — and push it as a clean card.
IPA reading
Type a line of text and turn it into a pronunciation reader. The SmartIPA tool, below.
Image
Paste or drop an image; it uploads and appears full-screen, ready to annotate.
Whiteboard
A blank board the teacher draws on freehand while everyone follows the ink live.
The dozen-tab cap is on purpose. A Live Class is a conversation, not a lecture — the deck holds a handful of anchors the teacher improvises around, not a slideshow to click through. And because it's built straight from the class's idea collection, there's almost nothing to prepare: your key points are already the deck.
SmartIPA — the pronunciation reader
The standout tool for language teachers. The teacher types a line of English; SmartIPA transcribes it into IPA — the International Phonetic Alphabet — and renders the pronunciation under each piece of the text. The student reads the line aloud with the phonetic helpers right there to guide them, and the teacher listens and makes remarks on the spot.
It turns the single hardest part of speaking — how do I actually say this? — into something you can see, attempt, and correct in real time. No guessing, no "say it after me" ambiguity: the sounds are on the screen, the student tries them, the teacher fixes them.
A text-to-speech clip tells a student what a word sounds like once. IPA teaches them to read pronunciation themselves, for any word they meet later — and pairs it with a human ear giving live feedback. The skill outlasts the lesson.
The live whiteboard
The whiteboard (and any image tab) is fully annotatable. The teacher draws freehand with a small palette of ink colors and pen widths, and the strokes appear on every student's screen smoothly and in time — the ink is replayed at the tempo it was drawn, so a circled word or a quick diagram lands the same way it would on a shared desk, even across phones and laptops of different sizes and over a patchy connection.
The feedback soundboard
Sometimes a word isn't the fastest feedback. The teacher has a row of five instant cues — played for the whole class — that punctuate a turn without breaking the flow:
Correct
That's it — a bright confirming ding.
Try again
Not quite — a gentle nudge to retry.
Attention
Eyes here — a soft chime to gather the room.
Well done
A little fanfare for a real win.
Time
A tick to mark the end of a turn.
They're generated in the browser on the fly — no audio files, no delay.
Running the queue
The teacher works the line one student at a time. The current student is on the mic; the teacher taps Next to wrap a turn and pull up whoever's first in the queue. A three-seat header — teacher, current student, next up — shows who's speaking with live waveforms, so the whole room can see the lesson move.
Setting up your class
From your class page you control the two numbers that define it:
- Your rate — credits per 60 interactive minutes. Every slot price scales from it (see the queue economy).
- Your usual time — a free-text note (e.g. "weeknights, 8 PM") so regulars know when to find you live.
That's the toolkit. The economics of who pays for what live on the Live Classes page, and the money itself in Credits & payments.