Month: September 2026

Calling on students at random is one of the oldest classroom participation strategies. It is also one of those simple practices that becomes surprisingly awkward in an online class.

In a physical classroom, the teacher can look around the room, choose a student, pull a name from a cup, or use a deck of index cards. Everybody understands what is happening. The selected student responds and the lesson moves on.

A remote class presents complications. The teacher may be looking at a video-meeting roster, a separate lesson, a browser window containing the activity, and perhaps a handwritten list of names. Students may be muted. Some may not have working microphones. Others may be attending from a classroom where speaking individually is difficult.

The new WordStudy Live Call-On feature attempts to restore this useful classroom routine without requiring teachers to manage yet another list.

Students Join the Session

The teacher begins with an existing WordStudy activity and selects the option to start a live session. The host page produces a student join link, much like the links used by other Innovation Assessments live activities.

The room number is already included in the link. The teacher can copy it into Zoom chat, Canvas, Google Classroom, or another system used to communicate with students.

As students open the link and join, their names appear automatically on the teacher’s host screen.

This replaces the original version of the call-on tool, which required the teacher to type every participant’s name. That method was functional for a small group, but entering a full class roster at the beginning of every session was not an especially good use of instructional time.

Automatic registration also tells the teacher who has actually reached the activity. A student appearing in the video meeting does not necessarily mean that the student has opened the lesson. The live roster provides quick confirmation.

Everybody Might Be Next

Once the class has joined, the teacher can use the call-on control to select a student.

The student’s name appears prominently on the teacher’s screen. On the selected student’s screen, a clear Your Turn message appears. Other students remain able to follow the activity and prepare themselves for a possible turn.

The value of random call-on is not merely that it distributes participation more evenly. It changes the way students attend to a lesson.

If volunteers provide every answer, the same few confident students may carry the discussion while others become spectators. When anybody may be called, students have a reason to consider each prompt before a name is selected.

This does not mean that random call-on should be used to embarrass an unprepared learner. Like any classroom method, it depends on the teacher’s judgment and knowledge of the students. It works best when the atmosphere communicates, “We are all thinking together,” rather than, “I am trying to catch somebody who was not paying attention.”

Spoken or Typed Responses

WordStudy Live Call-On is naturally suited to spoken responses. A teacher might display a vocabulary cue and ask the selected student to supply the response, pronounce a word, use it in a sentence, or explain a distinction.

Audio is not always practical, however.

A student’s microphone may not work. The learner may be sitting in a supervised room where several online classes are occurring at once. Background noise may make speaking difficult. Some students may also have accommodations that make a written response more appropriate.

The teacher can therefore enable an optional response box on the student screen. When selected, the student may type and submit an answer. That response appears on the teacher’s host page.

This gives the teacher a useful alternative without changing the basic activity. The class still sees a cue, a student is still selected, and that student still produces a response. Only the method of delivery changes.

The typed-response option can also be pedagogically useful in its own right. A language teacher might want to inspect spelling or accents. A teacher may ask for a short definition and then use the submitted wording as the beginning of a class discussion.

Built from an Existing WordStudy

The live session does not require the teacher to create another copy of the vocabulary list.

It begins with a WordStudy activity that is already part of the course. The same cues and responses used for individual study can become the basis of a synchronous classroom exercise.

This matters because teachers already spend enough time preparing materials. A live feature is much more useful when it can reuse an activity that serves other instructional purposes.

Students might first study a WordStudy independently. The teacher could then use the same material for live recall practice. Later, students might complete its quiz. The content remains familiar while the cognitive task changes from recognition and private rehearsal to public retrieval.

Retrieval practice is one of the most useful things a student can do with learned material. Attempting to produce an answer strengthens memory differently from simply rereading it. The possibility of being called also encourages every student to attempt that retrieval, even when only one student ultimately answers aloud.

A Simple Host Screen

The host page is intentionally focused.

The current call-on occupies the most prominent position. The roster of students who joined appears lower on the page in smaller type so that it remains available without competing visually with the current student.

The teacher controls whether typed responses are permitted and can see a submitted response when that option is in use.

The teacher host and student participant pages also omit the ordinary top and side navigation bars. During a live session, those application controls would add clutter and provide opportunities to navigate away accidentally. The live activity should look like the immediate classroom task it is.

Useful Beyond Vocabulary Translation

WordStudy often contains a cue and a response, but those two fields can represent many relationships.

A live call-on session might ask students to provide:

• A foreign-language translation.
• A definition.
• A synonym or antonym.
• A historical person associated with an event.
• A scientific term matching a description.
• A mathematical formula.
• A spelling response after hearing or seeing a cue.
• An example using the displayed word.
• An explanation of why two ideas are connected.

The teacher is not limited to asking for the literal response stored in the activity. The displayed material can serve as a starting point for pronunciation, elaboration, comparison, or discussion.

Reclaiming Participation Online

Remote teaching often makes it too easy for students to become passive observers. A learner can enter the meeting, mute the microphone, and fade into the background.

No single technical feature can solve that problem. Participation depends on relationships, lesson design, appropriate expectations, and the teacher’s classroom presence.

A live call-on tool can nevertheless help.

It gives students a visible place in the activity. It lets the teacher know who has joined. It signals clearly when a student has been selected. It accommodates both spoken and typed participation. Most importantly, it creates the expectation that everybody should be considering the prompt because everybody remains part of the lesson.

The technology behind this feature includes live registration and rapid communication between student and teacher screens. But, as is often the case, the goal is not especially technological.

The goal is to let a teacher say, “All right, who is next?”—and have the online classroom respond.

Authorship note: This feature announcement was generated by artificial intelligence using samples of David Jones’s blog writing as a stylistic guide. It was reviewed for consistency with the current Innovation Assessments WordStudy Live Call-On feature.

One of the most important things I lost when I moved to online teaching was the ability to walk around the room.

In a traditional classroom, I could circulate while students worked. A glance at a notebook or computer screen usually told me a great deal. I could see who had begun, who was making progress, who had misunderstood the directions, and who was staring at a blank page hoping not to be noticed.

This was not surveillance in the sinister sense sometimes associated with educational technology. It was ordinary teaching. I could quietly intervene before a small misunderstanding became fifteen minutes of wasted effort.

When the classroom moved online, that familiar source of information largely disappeared. Students became little boxes in a video meeting. If their cameras were off—and they often were—I could not even tell whether they were still sitting at the computer. Asking “Is everybody doing okay?” generally produced the same silence it had produced in the physical classroom.

The monitoring tools at Innovation Assessments are an attempt to reclaim some of what was lost.

Seeing Work While It Is Happening

Many Innovation Assessments applications have a teacher monitor. While students work, the teacher can see such information as:

• Who has opened the activity.
• Who has begun responding.
• How much work has been saved.
• Which students appear to be progressing.
• Who has completed the task.
• Whether a student has left and returned to the activity.
• Responses that are being entered into certain live activities.

The exact information depends on the assignment. A writing monitor naturally looks different from a vocabulary monitor or a live media activity. The purpose is the same: to give the teacher enough classroom awareness to make timely instructional decisions.

If most students have answered the first five questions but one student has not begun, I may need to contact that student. If half the class gives the same incorrect response, the problem may be my explanation rather than their effort. If students finish far more quickly than expected, I may have underestimated the task or need to inspect the quality of their responses.

Information is most useful while there is still time to act on it.

The Problem with Polling

The first versions of these monitors used a common web technique called polling.

Every few seconds, the teacher’s browser would ask the server whether anything had changed. The server would check the database and return the latest information. The browser would wait a few seconds and ask again.

This worked. In fact, it worked reliably for years. It was also somewhat wasteful.

Imagine a student saving an answer. The teacher’s monitor might not ask for an update until several seconds later. Meanwhile, every open monitor continued asking the server for information even when nothing had changed.

With a few users, this is not much of a concern. With several classes using monitors and live activities at once, all those repeated requests create unnecessary work. It is rather like a teacher asking every student “Anything new?” every five seconds instead of allowing students to signal when something has happened.

Our new real-time system changes that relationship.

Server-Sent Events

Innovation Assessments monitors are being moved to a technology called Server-Sent Events, or SSE.

The name sounds more complicated than the idea. The teacher’s browser opens a continuing connection to the real-time service. When something changes, the server sends a small notification through that connection. The monitor then retrieves the updated classroom information.

The teacher does not need to understand any of this or turn on a special setting. The visible result is simply that updates appear much faster.

When a student saves work, the teacher may see the change almost immediately. There is no need to refresh the page and little need to wait for the next scheduled check.

The system does not send the student’s entire assignment through the real-time connection. The notification is more like a tap on the shoulder: something changed in this course and activity. The existing, authenticated application then retrieves the information the teacher is permitted to see.

This allowed us to modernize the live behavior without replacing the established databases and assignment systems underneath it.

Keeping a Fallback

Newer is not always the same as more reliable.

The real-time service depends on a long-lived connection among the browser, web server, and Node.js application. School networks, browser extensions, firewalls, and temporary internet interruptions can all interfere with such a connection.

For that reason, Innovation Assessments retains polling as a fallback. If the live connection is unavailable, the monitor can continue checking periodically using the older method.

This redundancy adds a little complexity, but I think it is justified. A classroom tool needs to keep working when conditions are imperfect. Teachers should not have to diagnose a network protocol in the middle of class.

The teacher can generally see the connection status on an upgraded monitor. A green live indicator means the real-time channel is operating. If it cannot be maintained, the page falls back to periodic updates rather than simply going silent.

Monitors and Live Sessions

The real-time infrastructure is useful in two related kinds of Innovation Assessments activities.

The first is the ordinary monitor. Students work independently while the teacher observes progress. Writing, tests, Études, Grammar, WordStudy, Cloze, sorting, ordering, and several other applications benefit from rapid updates.

The second is the live session. These are activities conducted with the class together. The teacher may control the current question, advance a presentation, call on a student, collect a response, or reveal results.

Examples include live PowerPoint media sessions, Ventura activities, classroom study games, and the WordStudy Live Call-On tool. In these situations, even a delay of several seconds can make the activity feel clumsy. Faster signaling makes the teacher and student screens feel like parts of the same classroom event.

Different kinds of interaction may eventually require different technologies. A text chat or continuously interactive AI conversation, for example, may be better suited to a two-way WebSocket connection. For classroom monitors, however, the teacher primarily needs the server to say, “New information is ready.” SSE is a good fit for that job.

A Pedagogical Feature, Not Merely a Technical One

It would be easy to describe this upgrade entirely in terms of servers, connections, and database traffic. Those things matter to the programmer, but they are not the reason for doing it.

The reason is that a teacher needs to know what is happening.

In a classroom, I do not wait until every paper is handed in before discovering that students misunderstood question three. I walk around. I look. I ask a quiet question. I stop the class for a clarification when necessary.

Remote teaching should not reduce instruction to distributing links and collecting finished products. Teachers need some awareness of the process between those two events.

Real-time monitors do not reproduce everything available in a physical classroom. They cannot show a student’s expression or reveal the thinking behind a hesitant response. They also should not be mistaken for proof that a student is attentive merely because the browser is active.

What they can do is restore a portion of the teacher’s situational awareness. They make it easier to notice a learner who is stuck, recognize a classwide misconception, and respond while assistance still matters.

Technology That Recedes into the Background

The best outcome for this project is that teachers eventually stop noticing it.

A student saves a response and it appears. A live-session prompt changes and the student screen follows. A teacher opens a monitor and sees current information without repeatedly refreshing the page.

The considerable work beneath the surface should result in something that feels ordinary.

That is often the most useful kind of educational technology. It does not ask teachers to invent an entirely new practice. It helps them recover an effective practice they already had—in this case, walking around the classroom and seeing how their students are doing.

Authorship note: This feature announcement was generated by artificial intelligence using samples of David Jones’s blog writing as a stylistic guide. It was reviewed for consistency with the current Innovation Assessments real-time monitoring infrastructure.

Teaching is rarely a solitary enterprise. Paraprofessionals, teaching assistants, special education teachers, facilitators, tutors, and other support personnel may all help students complete their work. This is especially true in remote courses, where the classroom teacher and the adults assisting students may be working in different schools—or even different time zones.

Until now, Innovation Assessments was organized mainly around two kinds of users: teachers who created and scored assignments and students who completed them. That model worked, but it left an important group out.

The new Staff Access system provides authorized support personnel with a useful, read-only view of a teacher’s course.

Sharing a Course Without Sharing Teacher Controls

A teacher can invite a staff member from the course-management page by entering the person’s email address. The recipient receives a private invitation link. Each invitation can be used only once and expires after seven days.

If the recipient already has an Innovation Assessments account, the course is added to that account. If not, the invitation guides the person through creating a staff account.

The important distinction is that staff members are not made co-owners of the course. They cannot change assignments, alter student responses, enter scores, edit feedback, manage enrollment, or modify the teacher’s course settings. They receive the information needed to support students without receiving the controls needed to administer the course.

I think this is an important boundary. The goal is not to reproduce the teacher dashboard with a few buttons removed. The goal is to provide a separate interface designed around the actual work of classroom support personnel.

A Read-Only View of Student Work

A staff member begins at the Shared Courses dashboard. From there, the person can open courses that teachers have shared and preview the visible assignments inside them.

The staff interface supports the major Innovation Assessments applications, including tests, writing assignments, Études, conversations, Presto recordings, WordStudy activities, sorting and ordering tasks, Cloze exercises, media activities, and other student-work formats.

Staff members can review:

• Student responses and submitted work.
• Recorded scores.
• Teacher feedback.
• Assignment completion information.
• Read-only versions of the tasks students received.
• Available scorecards and class results.

This is particularly useful when a student tells a teaching assistant, “I don’t understand why I received this score.” The staff member can now look at the assignment, the student’s response, and the teacher’s feedback instead of trying to reconstruct the situation from the student’s description alone.

A Gradebook Designed Around the Student

A classroom teacher often wants to begin with a classwide gradebook grid. A teaching assistant, on the other hand, is frequently concerned first with one particular student.

The Staff Gradebook was designed with this distinction in mind. Staff members can select a student and see a vertical scorecard showing that student’s assignments, scores, feedback, completion status, and links to the corresponding work. A class grid remains available when a wider view is useful.

The scorecard may also be downloaded as a CSV file. Staff members can choose which assignments to include rather than downloading an entire year’s worth of work. Module titles and subtitles are included to help place each task in its instructional context.

“Set My Students”

Remote and combined classes introduced another problem. A single course may contain students attending from several schools, each with a different facilitator or teaching assistant. A staff member at one location may need to support four students in a class of twenty.

The Set My Students feature lets each staff member choose which students should appear in that person’s staff views. Once selected, the choice applies throughout the shared course.

The staff member’s gradebook, class results, student work, and proctor activity are then limited to that selected group. Another staff member assigned to the same course may choose a different group.

This makes the interface less cluttered, but it also follows a sensible privacy principle: people should ordinarily see the student information necessary for the work they are assigned to perform.

Read-Only Proctor Activity

Many Innovation Assessments applications record browser and task events that can help a teacher understand how a student interacted with an assignment. Staff members can now review this information through a centralized, read-only Proctor Activity page.

The class overview displays such information as:

• The number of recorded events.
• Departures from the task window or browser tab.
• Security or restriction signals.
• Evidence of completion.
• The most recent activity time.

A staff member may then select an assigned student to see a human-readable timeline. Technical event data remains available in a collapsed section when closer investigation is necessary.

These records require cautious interpretation. A browser event does not prove that a student was—or was not—paying attention. A tab change may deserve a conversation, but it is not by itself proof of misconduct. The system presents the evidence while leaving judgment where it belongs: with the educators who know the student and the circumstances.

Staff access to proctor information does not include teacher actions. Staff members cannot readmit a student, unlock a secure assessment, run an AI proctor analysis, or manage a live session.

Teachers Remain in Control

The course owner can remove a staff member’s access at any time. Removing access from one course does not disturb any other legitimate course assignments the person may have.

Staff access is also logged. Teachers and administrators can retain a record of staff activity such as opening a shared course, viewing a task, reviewing student work, or accessing proctor information. This provides useful accountability without turning the interface into a surveillance system of its own.

Unused staff-only accounts are also managed through an account lifecycle. When a staff member no longer has any course assignments, the account becomes inactive. A new invitation can reactivate it during the inactive period. After ninety days without an assignment, personal account details are anonymized and the credentials are invalidated. Invitation records are retained for up to one year.

When a Teaching Assistant Is Also a Teacher

Some support personnel are teachers themselves. A person might assist students in one remote course while teaching separate classes of their own.

A staff member can now create a permanent Free teacher workspace using the same account. The Staff dashboard presents an obvious Create My Teacher Workspace option. After confirmation, the person can create and manage courses as a teacher while retaining read-only access to all courses previously shared with them.

There is no duplicate account and no need for a second login. The teacher’s own courses appear in the regular teacher workspace, while courses owned by somebody else remain under Shared Courses with the original staff permissions intact.

Support Without Surrendering the Course

The Staff Access system reflects a practical truth about education: students are often supported by more than one adult, but those adults do not all need the same authority.

Teachers should not have to share passwords or surrender control of a course merely to let a teaching assistant see whether a student completed an assignment. Support personnel should not have to work from incomplete information when they are expected to help a learner.

Staff Access provides a middle ground: enough information to offer informed assistance, carefully limited controls, individually scoped student access, and accountability for the use of the system.

It is a modest idea, perhaps, but one that can make cooperation among teachers and classroom support personnel considerably easier.

Authorship note: This feature announcement was generated by artificial intelligence using samples of David Jones’s blog writing as a stylistic guide. It was reviewed for consistency with the current Innovation Assessments Staff Access feature.

A school I work with recently adopted a policy requiring teachers to minimize student information stored on outside platforms. Even a student’s full name was considered more information than an instructional application needed. A permitted first name was acceptable, but the surname had to be replaced by an alias.

This struck me as a reasonable programming challenge. Could Innovation Assessments provide teachers with the student identities they need to manage a class without requiring personally identifying information the school does not want stored?

The answer turned out to be yes.

What Is Alias-Only Student Identity?

Teachers may now designate an Innovation Assessments course as Alias-Only. Students registered for such a course have an account containing:

• Their permitted real first name
• An unrelated, system-generated alias in place of their surname
• A randomly generated privacy identifier
• A private internal login value rather than a real email address
• Their customary classroom PIN

A student named John, for example, might appear in the course as John Iris with the privacy identifier IA-EF25EA. The word “Iris” has no relationship to the student’s real surname. It is selected from a neutral list by the system.

The student can sign in using the teacher’s Class Number and a four-digit PIN. No student email address is required.

Privacy Without Making the Classroom Unmanageable

There is a practical problem with aliases: teachers still have to know who their students are!

The system therefore retains the student’s permitted first name and pairs it with a memorable word. This is considerably easier for a teacher to manage than a roster of random numbers. The additional privacy identifier gives the teacher a stable reference when two students have the same first name or when records must be distinguished more carefully.

Aliases are generated automatically. Teachers do not have to invent them, and students are not asked to choose amusing screen names that may prove distracting or inappropriate. The purpose is not to disguise the classroom from the teacher. It is to minimize the personal information stored in the application.

Keeping Standard and Alias Accounts Separate

One complication became apparent as I planned this feature. A single student account cannot safely contain a real surname for one course and simultaneously be treated as anonymous in another. The information still exists in the shared account.

Innovation Assessments therefore keeps the two account types separate.

A standard student account may participate in standard courses. A privacy-alias account may participate in Alias-Only courses. If the same student needs access to both kinds of courses, the teacher creates two separate accounts.

The application enforces this distinction. Teachers cannot accidentally assign one account to a mixture of standard and Alias-Only courses.

Converting an Existing Course

A teacher must empty a course’s active roster before changing it to Alias-Only identity.

This sounds more dramatic than it is. Removing a student’s course access does not erase completed submissions or scores. It simply ends that account’s ability to enter the course. Once the active roster is empty, the teacher can enable Alias-Only identity and create new privacy-alias accounts for the students.

This approach avoids trying to rewrite student identities across numerous kinds of assignments, recordings, scorecards, proctoring records, and gradebook entries. As an old programmer, I have learned to respect the opportunities for mischief that come with an unnecessarily clever database operation! A clean boundary is safer and easier for teachers to understand.

The course page explains the procedure and prevents Alias-Only mode from being enabled while ordinary student enrollments remain active.

Privacy Rules That Follow the Course

The setting applies to the whole course rather than to individual assignments. Once Alias-Only identity is enabled:

• Self-registration requests only the permitted first name.
• Google profile autofill is not offered.
• The system supplies the alias and private internal login.
• Teacher-created and batch-created accounts follow the same rules.
• Enrollment controls prevent standard accounts from entering the course.
• Older and direct-access routes cannot bypass the restriction.

Copying a module from the course does not copy its identity policy. The destination course retains its own privacy setting. This is important because instructional content may be reused in schools operating under different guidelines.

Collect Only What Is Needed

Schools differ considerably in their policies governing educational technology. Some permit ordinary student names and school email addresses in approved instructional systems. Others require far greater data minimization.

Innovation Assessments can now accommodate both approaches.

My aim was not to make every classroom anonymous by default. Most teachers do not need that. Instead, the platform now gives an institution the ability to say, “This is all the student information we permit this course to store,” and have the software enforce that decision consistently.

That is much better than placing the entire burden on the teacher to remember which fields to leave blank, which names to alter, and which accounts may be assigned to which courses. Good privacy practices are more dependable when they are built into the workflow.

This feature arose from a subscriber’s real classroom need. That is how many of the best additions to Innovation Assessments begin: a teacher encounters a practical problem, we think through what would make the work easier and safer, and then the platform becomes a little better for everyone.

Transparency note: This article was generated with AI assistance based on the implemented Innovation Assessments feature and writing samples supplied by David Jones. It is published under a separate author identity to distinguish AI-assisted posts from articles written personally by David.