Check out this digital walkthrough of the Koala Go online classroom.
Koala Go is the teaching software taking the online education community by storm. A quick google search turns up blog posts, explanatory videos and instructional guides, all written by fellow teachers and educators, and almost all expressing, in one form or another, a consensus of - “wow!”
So what is Koala Go, and why are educators lining up to incorporate it into their teaching? Here’s a guide to take you through how it works, what its features do and what makes it quite so special.
What is Koala Go?
The primary thing to remember about Koala Go is that its creators want to help you, the teacher, to do your job. Founders Xavier Lesage Moretti and Benjamin Roux want to make teaching as fun, as easy and as intuitive as possible. Koala Go is the tool to achieving this: it’s a highly interactive, intensely personalized and collaborative online classroom. It takes the traditional classroom foundation of a simple whiteboard and builds on it, harnessing online learning to add reward systems, gamification and flexible features. And on top of all that, it offers 24/7 and on call support to all educators who use it.
Setting Up Koala Go
So you want to teach with Koala Go? The set-up is so simple that it hardly needs explaining. You just open the browser, enter your email address, enter the resultant code sent to your image - and voila, you’re in. You’ll see a whiteboard that fills the screen and your video (as well as that of your student) will be on the left. This is your classroom. Bookmark this; it will remain logged in as long as you’re using it, so you can simply open the link and jump straight to it.
To invite students, you just click the “invite student” button. A link will pop up that you can share with them - it stays the same forever, so it's easy to schedule into reminder emails and calendar invites.
The Koala Go Login page
Feature Highlights
Koala Go’s popularity can be attributed to the myriad of inventive, thoughtful and genuinely helpful features that it boasts. Let’s take a look at a few of the main ones.
The Open Classroom
The classroom is the central feature of Koala Go. As you might expect, this is where the lessons take place and the teaching is done. The Koala Go classroom differentiates itself from the traditional classroom set up in two important ways.
First, you have the opportunity to create personalized and distinct classrooms for each of your students. Simply click on “add new classroom”, give the space a name, and set it for a particular student’s needs. You can add PDFs, powerpoints, custom activities - and once it’s personalized, you can save the classroom to come back to in future lessons.
Second is the fact that the classroom is “open”. This means that - if you enable them to do so - students can access and review the learning materials from your classroom, crack on with their revision and complete homework assignments. All their learning, in and out of lessons, will be in this one classroom, facilitating continuous learning and increasing engagement.
The Koala Go Classrooms, Personalized For Each Student
The Whiteboard
You may be wondering how exactly it is possible to “personalize a classroom”. The answer to this lies in the whiteboard, which - just like in a regular classroom - is the focal point of the lesson. In Koala Go, the whiteboard can be used for all that stuff which whiteboards have been used for for decades - instructions, tests, interactive lessons, student demonstrations, problem solving and more. Both teacher and student can use digital pens to scribble and draw, text boxes to type and erasers to remove.
But in Koala Go, the whiteboard doesn’t stop there. Games can be mapped out ahead of time for students to play and templates saved to limit set up time in future; multiple pages can be added to take students through different lesson stages with ease; and, perhaps best of all, learning resources can be uploaded directly onto the board. PDFs and presentations can be imported and a slide created for each page*. This means that activity pages can be instantly integrated into lessons and filled out by students, or reading exercises uploaded and unknown words highlighted.
Stuck for ideas on lesson plans or strapped for time? Simpy head to the Koala Go marketplace, where you can buy well-established templates from other amazing teachers.
Example Of A Whiteboard Activity
Co-Browsing Feature
Just as you thought the whiteboard couldn’t get any more advanced - Koala Go has added a co-browsing feature that allows teachers and students to browse the internet together in real-time, directly within the platform. It’s kind of like screen sharing, except much, much better.
While co-browsing, both teacher and student can interact with the web page that’s on view - clicking, scrolling and navigating web pages to explore resources together, while the teacher maintains control with the ability to disable student participation if needed. The teacher is also able to flick between web browsing and the whiteboard due to handy integration, meaning that knowledge gained from the browsing can be transferred instantly into activity.
We hardly need to explain the impact this will have on student engagement. You’ll now have an internet-sized resource at your fingertips during every lesson, one that you can explore and interact with alongside your students.
Open Playground
Not to be confused with the open classroom, the open playground is a distinct space within the Koala Go platform. It functions like a - well, like a playground in a school. Teachers can create themed worlds in which their students can complete educational quests, scavenger hunts, quizzes and other learning activities (or, like with the whiteboards, purchase template worlds created by other teachers). These worlds are amazing, immersive experiences - once opened by you, your student will parachute in via a customizable avatar and begin to explore their personalized learning world.
Navigation of these worlds is kept super simple, using just the arrow keys, and they open up a whole new type of gamified learning for your students.
The Koala Go Open Playground - Top Down View
Reward System
The final feature that we’ll look at in this guide is the reward system built into Koala Go - a feature that demonstrates the deep understanding that the Koala Go team have of how to drive student engagement. The reward button can be found in the top left hand corner of the classroom. Clicking on it as a teacher will give you the chance to reward your students with shining stars and celebratory confetti (both of which are unlimited) or gems (which are limited according to your subscription). Gems, when awarded, can be exchanged by students for extra cool and customizable features in their playgrounds.