My School - Custom lessons

Lessons you create yourself

Everything is based on our assignments system. So, to create content or tests for students to use on their own you'll need to make sure everything is in an assignment.

Students have a My Class tab instead of a My School tab. The only items they will see there are assignments created by you for their class.

Assignments can include content or tests you create yourself - or they can include any existing Focus on Sound content, tests or lessons.

What you can't do is combine existing Focus on Sound lessons with additional content or tests. They need to be used on their own (see below) and just attached to classes.

The opening screen shows a list of year groups and classes.

1. To see the lessons you have created for a year group, click the year group name (here Year 7) - or you can click class names separately.
2. You will then see a list of lessons you have created for that year group or class on the left.

IMPORTANT - If you haven't set up year groups yet, or you have simply got 2024 or 2023-24 or something similar, you will need to go to your school tools and edit each of your classes so that they are attached to year groups. See 'How to set up year groups' below.

Creating a new assignment

After you click the green 'Create new' button, here are the stages in creating a lesson, using the numbers shown in the screenshot:

1. Give the lesson a title

2. Choose what type of lesson it is.

• If you just want to set one of the existing Focus on Sound lessons for a particular class or group of classes, then choose 'Use existing lesson', selecting one of the titles in the list you'll see below. There's a search button to make it easier.
• If on the other hand, you want to set your own entirely new lesson, choose 'Build my own'. You can then add existing Focus on Sound content or tests or add your own.

3. Choose the difficulty level. This is entirely up to you. In the UK you might decide to have Level 1 for yrs 7-9, Level 2 for yrs 10-11 and Level 3 for years 12-13.

4. Choose the class(es) to receive the work. If no classes appear that will be because you haven't set any up in your administration system. Check the administration section for help.

5. Type some introductory text to describe what's in the assignment, or anything else at all, e.g. when you want it done, which sections to work on for now, etc.

6. Enter the text for the first page of the assignment itself. This will introduce the first content page(s), test or external web link.

7. Attach content from Focus on Sound or an external web page. If you're attaching Focus on Sound content, you need to choose the relevant page and then click the Attach button at the top right of the screen. The first time you do this you'll have an explanatory screen.

8. You then go on to add as many pages as you want to the assignment.

9. Finally you can click the 'Set assignment' button when you're ready to share it with your class(es)

Here's a two minute video explaining how you can set an existing Focus on Sound lesson for a class, so that it appears in their My Class tab and they are also notified as soon as they log on to Focus on Sound.

Pages seen

Lesson results show how many pages in a topic have been seen by the student. To understand more, please go to this page.