Choosing a Course
Once you’ve arrived at the Pencil home page, you’ll need to select the course for which you wish to write a lesson. For this example, let’s pick physics.
Naming and Setting Up Your Lesson
After you’ve decided on and selected a course to create a lesson for, you’ll be automatically redirected to the “Lessons” tab of the course. If you accidentally click on a different tab, click the “Lessons” tab located directly under the course title on the upper left-hand side of the page.
Once you’re on the “Lessons” tab, you’ll see one of two things: a plethora of existing lessons and chapters, or a blank slate, like this one.
Click the “Add Lesson” button to get started with your first lesson. From there, you can choose to give titles to the chapter and lesson, or you can start with the lesson content and come back for those later!
Adding Content to your Lessons
When you’re ready to start writing your lesson, click on the “Edit” button to the right of the lesson title.
You’ll then be transported to the page where you can edit the lesson content. This page will automatically open up a blank “Note” page on which you can write out your lesson content. These “Note” pages can be used as an additional organization feature, as you can organize sections of each lesson with “Note” pages, or you can create sections within the “Note” page itself.
To add an additional “Note” page, click the “Add note” button underneath the current page that you are working on.
To add text to your lessons, move your cursor to the right side of the screen, where the “Note” page is prominently displayed. Hover your cursor over the text that says “Click to add…” and click once the grey bar appears. This will give you the ability to write your lesson.
Pencil also provides you with several text formatting options that can be located just under the title of the “Note” page.
Adding Supplementary Content to Lessons
You can add more than just text to your lessons. Using the same menu that you used to edit your text, you can also add images, PhET simulations, PDFs, videos, and equations to your lessons.
To do so, navigate to the far right side of the “Notes” page menu, and select the tool that you wish to use. From there, a pop-up will appear that walks you through the steps of importing the additional content into your lesson.
Publishing Your Lesson
When you’ve finished writing your lesson and are ready to publish it, click on the blue “Next” button in the bottom right corner of your screen.
Once you’ve clicked the button, a pop-up will appear on the right-hand side of your screen. This pop-up gives you the ability to “tag” your lesson with applicable topics related to the lesson concepts covered.
After you’ve “tagged” your lesson, click the blue “Publish” button in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen to share your lesson with your class.
If you need any extra assistance, our support team is always happy to help you!