Filling a course, and assigning what you make
A course is a shape you fill in over a term. This page is about the two steps that used to sit either side of that work: getting a lesson into the right unit, and getting it in front of the right students.
Both now happen without leaving the page you are on.
Watch the walkthrough
A course is a shape you fill. Add a lesson straight onto the unit that needs one.
Add a lesson to a unit
Open a course from your library. Each unit is a row, and each row has Add lesson.
That opens the ordinary Create form, with one difference: it already knows which unit it is filling. The line above the title reads Create · Lesson · in Unit 2 · Equivalent fractions, and the unit shows as a tag on the box itself.
You do not have to tell Zippy where it is going, and you do not have to file it afterwards. When the lesson is finished it lands in that unit, in order, in the tree.
Two smaller things follow from that:
- It writes for the sequence, not in isolation. Zippy treats the unit name as context, so a lesson added to Equivalent fractions is pitched as one step of that unit rather than as a standalone.
- One lesson at a time. There is deliberately no "generate the whole unit" button. Ten ungrounded lessons are worse than one good one, and a unit is easier to judge a lesson at a time.
Say who it is for
Below the description is the audience: For, then whoever this piece is for.
Click Add class or student and pick from your roster. You can name:
- a whole class, which is the common case, or
- individual students, when the work is for the three who need another pass at something.
Picking a class and a student in that class means the class. You do not have to remove one to get the other.
The audience does two jobs. It tells Zippy who it is writing for, so the reading level and the examples land in the right place. And it is the assignment target, which is the next section.
Rubrics and skill maps have no audience control. They are your reference, and there is nobody to assign them to.
It arrives as a draft
When the lesson is finished, Zippy attaches it to whoever you named and tells you so:
Drafted and attached to P5 Falcon · not yet visible to students — publish when you're happy with it.
Read that second line literally. The activity exists on the class, with your due-date and marking defaults already on it, and no student can see it. It is not on their activity list, they are not notified, and nothing about it has reached them.
That is deliberate, and there is no setting to turn it off. Making something is cheap and reversible; sending it to thirty children is neither. Publishing is the moment you decide, and it stays yours.
From the card you can:
- Review and publish — open the activity, check the questions and the due date, and release it when you are ready.
- Change who gets it — go back to the class and adjust the audience first.
Your marking settings come from the class you assigned to, and are copied onto the activity when it is created. Changing the class defaults later will not quietly rewrite work you have already set.
Each run starts fresh
Every time you open the Create form, Zippy starts a new conversation.
This matters more than it sounds. A lesson written in the same conversation as the last one inherits it: its topic, its level, its question shapes, its examples. You never see that happening, and the second lesson comes out subtly shaped by the first.
So a P3 science worksheet in the morning and a P6 English quiz in the afternoon are genuinely independent pieces of work. Your other conversations with Zippy, marking and analysis and everything you ask it in the panel, carry on as one continuous thread the way they always have.
Where to go next
- Generating a lesson for the detail of the drafting step itself.
- Bulk grading a class set once the work comes back.
Zippy fills the unit and stages the assignment. Whether your class sees it is still a decision you make.