Activities, lesson plans, live lessons and the Chrome extension, all in one place. Look anything up the moment you need it.
Getting started
Four pieces, one live lesson.
LessonBoard puts short interactive activities — polls, quizzes, timers, questions — in front of your class during a live lesson, and collects their answers as they come in.
The words used throughout this guide:
For the picture version, see How it works.
Getting started
The shortest path from nothing to a class answering a question.
Want to see what students see? In a live session, press the Try as a student button above the board — it opens the student page in a new tab.
Activities
The building block of every lesson.
An activity is one thing you put on the board: a question with answers, a countdown, a task to discuss, a name picked at random. You set it up once — the wording, the options, how it behaves — and then launch it with a single click during the lesson.
Every activity has a type, which decides what students see and how they answer. There are nine; see Activity types.
Activities live in two places:
Activities fall into two kinds:
Activities
What each one is for, what students see, and what you can set.
Ask a simple question and show the results live.
What students see
The question and a button for each option. Results appear on the board as bars that grow as answers arrive.
What you can set
Best for: Opinions and preferences with no right answer — “Which topic next?”, “Did you do the homework?”.
Multiple choice to check learning without a separate platform.
What students see
The question and answer buttons, like a poll. With “reveal after stop” on, the correct answer is hidden until you close answers — then it is highlighted on the board and on every phone.
What you can set
Best for: Checking that something has landed — vocabulary, a grammar rule, a fact from the reading.
Students show if they understand, need an example, or feel lost.
What students see
Three coloured buttons — by default Clear, Not sure, Need help. The board shows how the class splits.
What you can set
Best for: A 10-second pulse check after explaining something, before moving on. The combined results also show on your Statistics page.
Collect short written answers from everyone at once.
What students see
The question and a text box. Their answers appear on the board as they are sent.
What you can set
Best for: Short written production — “Write one sentence with the new word”, “What would you do?”.
End the lesson with a quick question and review answers later.
What students see
A closing question, answered either in writing or with a star rating.
What you can set
Best for: The last two minutes of a lesson — “What is one thing you learned today?”, “How confident do you feel?”. Read the answers afterwards in Lesson sessions.
Countdowns for exercises, speaking practice, tests and transitions.
What students see
A large countdown with your label above it. A sound plays when it reaches zero.
What you can set
During the lesson
Pause / Resume, Reset, and +1 min while it runs.
Best for: Timed exercises, speaking practice, tests and transitions.
Show speaking prompts, writing tasks or discussion questions.
What students see
A heading, your instructions, and a picture if you added one. Nothing to answer.
What you can set
Best for: Speaking prompts, writing tasks, discussion questions, a picture to describe.
Choose the next student fairly and keep everyone involved.
What students see
Your heading and the name that was picked, in large type.
What you can set
During the lesson
Pick a student / Pick another student, and New round to put everyone back in.
Best for: Choosing who answers next, fairly, without always calling on the same people.
Add points for students or teams to motivate practice.
What students see
A ranked table of names and points.
What you can set
During the lesson
+ and − beside each name. Your list stays in a fixed order so rows do not jump under your finger; the board shows the ranking.
Best for: Games, competitions between teams, and keeping motivation up across a practice block.
Activities
Not sure how it will look? The Preview button (the eye) on any activity in a plan shows it on a phone and on the board side by side.
Activities
Reusable templates you can drop into any lesson.
Made something good inside a lesson? Use Save to library in its ⋯ menu to keep it as a template. See Editing a plan.
Lesson plans
Your lesson, prepared in order, one click per step.
A lesson plan is an ordered list of activities for one lesson — say, a warm-up prompt, three quiz questions, a timed speaking task and an exit ticket. During the lesson the plan sits in your control panel and you click each item when its moment comes.
You do not have to follow it strictly: click items in any order, run one twice, or add something that was not planned (see Adding activities mid-lesson). Items you have already shown get a tick.
The plan’s header shows how many activities it holds and roughly how long they take — timers count their duration, everything else about two minutes.
Lesson plans
The search box looks through everything at once — folder names, plan titles and the activities inside plans — so you can find “past simple” without remembering where you filed it.
Lesson plans
Press Details at the top to rename the plan or write notes for yourself — what it covers, which class it is for. Students never see the notes.
Editing a plan never affects lessons that already happened: their results stay exactly as they were.
Running a lesson
A session is one lesson actually happening.
You can start one from three places:
Each session gets its own six-character join code. You can have one lesson running at a time, and the dashboard and the extension control the same one: start on the website and open the panel later, and it picks the lesson up.
On the website, the live screen has the board on the left (What the class sees) and your controls on the right: the activity that is running, then your Lesson plan and Students tabs.
Running a lesson
A new lesson opens with the invite on the board: a QR code, the join code and the address. It stays there until you start the first activity.
The Students tab lists everyone who joined. A green dot means they are connected right now; points appear next to names once they have any.
Running a lesson
Click an item in the plan to put it on the board. Whatever was there before is replaced. The top of the control panel then shows the activity and its controls:
Running an activity again later in the same lesson starts a fresh round of answers. Both rounds are kept.
Running a lesson
For the question you did not plan.
Under the plan, always in reach, are two buttons:
Neither changes your lesson plan. What you launch this way is listed under Just this lesson with a dashed outline, so you can run it again, and its answers are saved with the session like everything else.
Running a lesson
Pick whichever suits your room — they can all run at once.
Running a lesson
Press End. Students see “Lesson finished”, and everything they answered is saved. You can review it straight away in Lesson sessions.
Closed the laptop without ending? A session with no activity for two hours is ended automatically, with its end time set to when things actually stopped.
Lost the control screen mid-lesson? The Overview page and Lesson sessions both show a running lesson at the top with Back to control.
Chrome extension
The remote control that sits beside your call.
The extension works in Google Chrome and other Chromium browsers (Edge, Brave, Arc) — version 116 or newer.
Installed or updated the extension while a meeting was already open? Reload the meeting tab and turn your camera on again. Meeting apps take the camera when they load, and the extension can only draw on a camera it saw being opened. The panel warns you and offers a reload button when this happens.
Chrome extension
Before a lesson, the panel lists your lesson plans — with folders and a search box — plus No lesson plan at the top for a lesson run entirely on the fly. Pick one and start.
During a lesson, from top to bottom:
The panel and the website control the same lesson. You can start on one and continue on the other — for instance, prepare the board on a big screen and run it from the panel.
Chrome extension
How the board looks in your video. Open them with the gear.
Settings are saved to your account, so they are the same on any computer you sign in from.
Chrome extension
Students do not need the extension — the phone page is enough. But on a laptop, a second device can be a nuisance, so students can install the same extension:
Chrome extension
After the lesson
Lesson sessions lists every lesson you have run, newest first, with any running one at the top. Open one to see:
Deleting a session removes it and all its answers for good.
After the lesson
The Statistics page adds up every session:
For students
Nothing to install, no account.
If your connection drops, reopen the same link on the same device — you come back as the same person, with your points. When the teacher ends the lesson, the page says so.
Tell us what you were trying to do — signed in, use Tell us what you think in the dashboard, or write to us from the contact page. A question here usually means this guide is missing something.