Starting a Class

Essentially, once a scheduled class has been confirmed by both tutor and student, a green button appears at the top of Spires to 'Open Classroom'.

You simply come onto the platform at the scheduled class start time and click 'Start Class' and then both you and the student can click 'Open Classroom' to meet in Lessonspace.

Once scheduled, the classroom button will appear and display the start date and time of your next class.

Clicking on this early will inform you that the class is not ready to begin until the scheduled time, but that you can 'Test Classroom' (see below). This gives new students a chance to get familiar with the classroom ahead of time. You will also see a link to this page of the guide.

Up to 20 minutes before the scheduled start time, the button turns green and starts to flash.

Clicking on "Start Class" will start the class for both you and the student, as well as the class timer.

It is best to make sure you are both online (you will see a green circle next to the name of the other party to know they are online) and can message them to let them know that you are ready to start.

Finally, clicking "Open Classroom" will pop open a new browser tab with the classroom for both parties.

You can also test the classroom at any time on Spires by clicking on the classes tab on the navigation bar followed by 'open classroom'.

There is a complete article on how Lessonspace works, which contains further links to the developer's help center and knowledge base. We strongly recommend that tutors go through it, Lessonspace is a very flexible piece of software. It not only carries the audio and video, but has a built-in whiteboard, a document writing feature, a graph drawing feature, and an environment to mock up code.

If you are experiencing problems with Lessonspace, we recommend the article here.

The final section of this main guide covers how payments work.