My School - Custom lessons

Lessons you create yourself - Pro version only

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

Students have a My Class tab instead of a My School tab. The only items they will see there are lessons created by you for their class. Optional alerts are available for classes you specify.

Custom lessons 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.

MyClassLessons
  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 2019 or 2018-2019 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' lower in this page.

Creating a New Lesson

FoSProCustomLessons900

After you click the green 'Add 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 'Custom lesson'. 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. There are only three levels for now.

4. Choose the class(es) to receive the work. If no classes appear that will be because you haven't set up any in the MusicFirst admin. Check the administration section in these User pages. Note, also that you might want to delay adding the classes until you're sure the lesson works fine.

5. Type some introductory text to describe what's in the lesson, 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 lesson 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 in the lesson - or choose to stop there.

9. Finally you can click the 'Publish Lesson' button when you've finished. You can then test to check it's fine. If you delayed adding the classes you might want to do that now - you can always edit a lesson you have already created.

How to Set Up Year Groups

Year groups are set up via your MusicFirst administration pages:

YearGroupAdmin
  1. Go to School Tools
  2. Find the Your Classes section and click on List
YearGroupAdmin2

Then choose a class and click on Action->Edit

YearGroupAdmin3

Finally type a year group name

Notifications in FoS Pro

You can now get notifications to students of classes you select. As soon as they open Focus on Sound they see the lesson(s) you want them to do. Clicking on the lesson name directs them straight to the lesson itself.

Notification2B
 

Find more information here.

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.