Welcome to Pencil Spaces! This guide will help you set up your institution, prepare your team, and get ready to deliver engaging online lessons with confidence.

Before inviting teachers and students, take a few minutes to configure your institution’s settings. To access your institution’s permissions, navigate to the Settings panel and then click Permissions.

From here, you can customize permissions and preferences to match the way your organization operates, including who can create Spaces, recording settings, and other administrative options.
​

Once your institution is configured, invite your teachers so that they can access Pencil Spaces using the correct organization.

Adding users to your institution makes it easy to manage access and collaborate across your team. To learn how to add users to your institution, see our guides: How to add tutors to my institution? or How can I add people to my institution in bulk?
​

Create a more professional experience by adding your organization’s branding.

You can personalize Pencil Spaces with your logo and brand colors, so your virtual classrooms will always reflect your institution’s identity.

To learn how to customize your institution's branding, see our guide: How do I configure branding?

Pencil Spaces integrates with a variety of third-party platforms and LMSs, and it also offers an API for custom workflows.

To manage your integrations, follow the appropriate guide below to connect your preferred platform:

To learn more about all our other available integrations, see our collection: Account and institution management.

If it’s their first time using our platform, we recommend helping your teaching staff get comfortable with Pencil Spaces before they host their first lesson.

We recommend sharing our free training resources, available here, along with our guide for tutors to help teachers prepare for their first lesson.

Additionally, if you’d like to help your students and their parents grow accustomed to Pencil Spaces, you can share this guide with them: Guide for parents and students.

If you’re also using Pencil Spaces to schedule lessons, you can configure your timetable before inviting students to book or attend their sessions.

To learn how to set up your tutoring schedule, see our guide: How do I use Schedule?

If you’ll be teaching classes yourself, these steps will help you ensure everything you need is ready before your students arrive.

Everything that you add to a Space will be saved automatically, so you can prepare lessons in advance and reuse your materials in future sessions.

Before your first class, visit our Tech Check page to confirm that your:

If prompted, remember to allow your browser to access your camera and microphone.

A Space is your online classroom. It’s where you’ll meet with students, present your lesson materials, use the whiteboard, share resources, and collaborate with them in real time.

Create your first Space before your lesson so you have time to prepare your materials.

To learn the steps for creating your first Space, see our guide: How to create a Space.

Once your Space is ready, you can then start inviting your students so they can join your lesson. You can send out invitations by email or by sharing the Space link with them directly.

To learn more about how to invite participants to a Space, see our guide: How to invite people to your Space.

Once you’ve hosted your first session, you can start to monitor your usage patterns and understand how your subscription is billed from the Billing section of your account.

To learn more about how billing is calculated, see our guide: How is my billing usage calculated? Additionally, to learn how to view your billing usage, see our guide: How do I view my usage and billing?

If cloud recording is enabled for your institution or account, you can share recordings with your students or their parents after each lesson.

To learn how to access and share recordings, see our guide: How to share a recording with your students?

Session analytics are also available separately. These are especially helpful for reviewing your tutors’ and students’ attendance, engagement, device information, and network quality to better understand how each session performed.

To learn more about post-session analytics, see our guide: How do I record and view attendance?

If you experience any issues during your lesson, our Live Support team is available 24/7.

Click the Help button at the top right-hand side of your screen to start a conversation with Support.

To help us resolve your issue as quickly as possible, try to include the following information in your message:

If you’re still not sure how to find support, see our guide: How to access 24/7 live support.