6. Running a session in class

This page is the cheat sheet: what to press, in order, and what you will see.

Before class

Start the app (the Desktop icon), log in.
Open the class, open the session, press Deploy. The run screen appears. Deploy a few minutes before class; it sends nothing to students.
Project the run screen if you want the class to see the histogram and the summary; otherwise keep it on your own screen.

For each question

Students open their links. The run screen counts them: submitted: 0 of 23 joined (35 on roster). Wait until the joined count matches the room, because a student whose page is not open yet does not count towards "everyone has submitted".

Start. The question appears on every student's page at once; a timer counts up on yours. Tell the class how long they have.

While it runs. The counter shows who has submitted. As answers come in they are graded within a few seconds each, and the histogram of scores fills in to the right of the question. Once about 70% of the joined students are graded, the class summary appears below: what the class understood, common difficulties, what went well. Read it while the last students finish.

Stop, or not. When every student whose page is open has submitted, the question closes by itself and the screen says so. Otherwise press Stop when most have submitted: students still typing get five seconds' grace, then whatever is in their box is submitted for them (a blank box scores 0); their pages say the question is closed. The rest of the grades arrive within about 20 seconds in a large class.

Refresh summary re-runs the summary on all the grades in so far. The button greys out the moment it is pressed and "Updating the summary…" appears beside it until the new summary lands, a few seconds later. It stays greyed out when the summary on the screen already covers every grade; "based on 23 of 23 graded" beside it says how complete it is.

Lead the discussion from the summary and the histogram. Then Next question, and again.

Ending

End session, then Write the files: the app waits for any grades still in progress, writes the results into the session's folder (chapter 8), and only then tells the server to delete its copy. The box under the buttons lists the files written. Untick Include the rubric in the per-student messages first if you would rather students did not get the rubric.

If you press something twice or out of order

Nothing breaks. Buttons that make no sense in the current state are not shown: Start only before the first question, Stop only while a question is open, Next only after a Stop. Pressing Stop as the question closes by itself does nothing. Deploying a session that is already running on the server offers to resume it. End can be pressed at any point, even mid-question: the open question is closed, drafts are submitted at once, and the files are written when the grades are in.

Using the summary

The summary is a reading of the graded answers against your rubric: overall, common difficulties, what went well; the last two are boxed so the eye finds them. It is best used as the starting point of the next few minutes of teaching: put a common difficulty to the room, ask someone who got it right to explain. The provisional summary is based on the answers in so far; the files get a complete one at End.