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New lesson editor: Explained and compared
New lesson editor: Explained and compared
Updated over a month ago

As described in our blog post, our new lesson editor is currently in Beta as we continue to build and refine its features. If you want to get answers to frequently asked questions, please read our FAQ article.

This article describes the key upgrades of the new lesson editor, compared to the classic lesson editor. The classic lesson editor is the lesson editor you already use to create and teach your lessons.

Note for channels: If you own a channel at LessonUp, you're also able to try and use the new lesson editor. However, please note that it is currently not yet possible to publish lessons created in the new lesson editor to your channel or the lesson library.

Key upgrades in the new lesson editor

  1. Upgrade your PowerPoints: import, edit, and add interactivity

  2. Benefit from a revamped, user-friendly interface

  3. Edit your slides and components effortlessly

  4. Customise and personalise your lessons

  5. Co-edit lessons with your colleagues in real time

1. Upgrade your PowerPoints: import, edit, and add interactivity

One of the major upgrades in the new lesson editor is the possibility to import an existing PowerPoint file and edit this in LessonUp. Make your PowerPoint interactive and edit the look and feeling to make a personal lesson. Read all about the possibilities in this article.

2. Benefit from a revamped, user-friendly interface

With the new lesson editor, we have adapted modern ways of user interfaces to make sure you are able to create lessons in an intuitive and familiar way.

Guides: Position your components accurately using guides.

Grab texts, images, or other components on your slide and arrange them wherever you want. With support of improved guides, you will be able to position your components more accurately and "snap" them to a line.

Positioning: Select and drag multiple components at once.

Select any combination of components on your slide, like texts, images, or hotspots. With the selection of your components, you are able to move and rearrange them on your slide. Also, it's possible to resize all your selected components at once. Especially with a selection of images, or hotspots, this will save you additional clicks and actions.

Edit texts: Change or delete text in any slide, regardless of its layout.

Regardless of your slide layout, you can now edit and delete any of the texts and images on your slide. In the classic lesson editor, you need to switch to a specific layout for your styling. In the new lesson editor, you have full flexibility to adjust slides to your needs.

Edit overview: Edit your slides in a clean workspace with fewer distractions.

Looking at the interface of the screen you use to edit your slides, we've made a few changes in the new lesson editor. First and foremost, the main menu at the top of the screen is removed. Since you are editing your lesson, you get full focus on your slides and its settings. By using more white-space, clear menus, and improved thumbnails of your slides you have more focus on viewing and editing your slides.

The possibility to toggle the sidebar with settings on and off contributes to this idea. You can use the quick actions for making and viewing changes directly in your slide. Whenever you want to make more changes you can enable the sidebar and hide it again if you want full focus on your slide again.

Other improvements include the use of icons for components to directly add them to your slide. This makes it easy to add them with less clicks compared to the classic lesson editor. For the settings of your lesson, to set the duration, school type, subject, level, and year, there is a settings icon next to the title of your lesson. Using this icon also saves space, compared to the "options" button in the classic lesson editor.

3. Edit your slides and components effortlessly

Part of the improved user experience is the way slides and components can be edited. There are 2 main improvements for editing your slides and components.

The sidebar

When you have a slide, or a component, selected you will see a sidebar on the right side of your screen. You can enable the sidebar by using the settings icon on the right of your screen. Hide the sidebar by clicking on the cross in the top right corner of the sidebar. You can also directly view/hide the sidebar by clicking on the settings icon that appears in the quick actions above any component, when you select a component.

This sidebar contains all settings that are available for your slide or component, grouped by category. Different components have different settings and categories. Read more details about all settings per component: Text, Image, and Hotspot.

Quick actions

When you click on any component on your slide, quick actions will appear. Depending on the position of the component, the quick actions will appear just above or below the component. Using these quick actions, you're able to directly make changes to the styling of your component. For example, when you select text you can easily adjust the font-size, colour, and styling for your text without having to use any menus or sidebar.

4. Customise and personalise your lessons

The new lesson editor offers some improvements to personalise your lessons with custom options. Custom options that are available:

  • Set a custom font size for texts

  • Within 1 text area, use multiple font families

  • Set the orientation for any text

  • Set transparency for images

  • Set a corner radius for images and component backgrounds

Teaching your lesson

Next to improving the edit experience of your lesson, we've also made several enhancements to the teaching mode to help you deliver your lessons smoothly:

  • Visibility of the QR and join codes have improved, making it easier for students to access your lesson.

  • Slide navigation has improved, giving you greater control to jump effortlessly to any slide.

5. Co-edit lessons with your colleagues in real time

Within the new lesson editor, you are able to collaborate and edit lessons together with your colleagues. If you both have access to the same lesson in the same shared folder, you can open the lesson and edit simultaneously.

In your lesson, you will see an indicator of the other person, or multiple people, that are active in the same lesson at the same time. This works similar to working together in other tools from Microsoft or Google.

List of features

The list below indicates what features are currently available in the new lesson editor and how this compares to the classic lesson editor. Note that not every single feature on a detail-level is listed, only the most notable features. Some features have a link to a separate Help Center article where you can find more information about the respective feature.

If you want to know what features are coming up next, please read this article.

Interactive slides

Feature

New editor

Classic editor

Word Cloud (formerly Mind Map)

Picture question

Drag and drop question

(Interactive) video

Poll

Informative slides

Feature

New editor

Classic editor

Blank slide

Image slide

PowerPoint import & edit

Video slide

Hyperlink slide

Components

Feature

New editor

Classic editor

Video

Table

Audio

Symbol

Formula

Spinner

Timer

Traffic light

Teach mode

Feature

New editor

Classic editor

Slide navigation

View & navigate to slide

Close for participation

Student overview

Move images on slide

Make annotations/drawings

Raise hand

Show ranking

Sound effects

AI-assistant Maia

Feature

New editor

Classic editor

Generate lesson based on prompt

Generate lesson based on image

Generate lesson based on contextual text

Generate quiz from slide

Generate poll from slide

Lesson library

Feature

New editor

Classic editor

Choose lesson from library

Add lesson to library

Choose slide from library

Choose slide from favourites

Share lessons

Feature

New editor

Classic editor

Share lesson in shared folder

Share lesson with link

Share lesson with class

Share lesson via Somtoday

Share lesson via Google Classroom

Share lesson via Canvas

General

Feature

New editor

Classic editor

Select and drag multiple components

Components snap to advanced gridlines

Collaborate simultaneously

Show/hide lesson phases

Export to PDF

Print lesson

Add notes

Differentiate slide

Animated bullet lists

Create a test from your lesson

View reports of your lesson

Hand out and revise homework

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