Prepare and run a class in ALLO

Class starts in ten minutes. The handout is a PDF, each group needs somewhere to work, and the notes you plan to reveal at the end should not be readable yet. When those pieces live in different tools, the first stretch of class becomes a tour of links instead of a lesson.

This guide follows one example from the teacher guide series: a class investigating how to reduce disposable items on campus. You will build a home for the course, turn the handout into a working canvas, prepare group rooms, set student access, run the live activity, and leave a record the next lesson can start from. The class is a demonstration you can adapt, not a real course or a customer case study.

The short version

1. Create one project for the course and organize its sections around how students find work.
2. Build a class canvas with today's question, handout, activity zones, and entrances to each team's sub-canvas.
3. Invite students, test their entry path, lock the fixed structure, and save a named version before class.
4. During class, use presence and follow to orient the group; afterward, resolve finished discussions and write the recap beside the work.

Use these three spaces for different jobs:

A finished class canvas holds notes, files, media, drawings, and student work side by side.

Give the course a home

Start with a project named for the course and term, such as Sustainable Campus - Fall. In education workspaces ALLO may present projects as classrooms; the workflow is the same, and it is the shared container for canvases, members, dates, and sections.

Create sections that describe where students are, not where your prep is. Start here, Week 1, Week 2, Completed works for a lecture course. Brief, Research, Experiments, Presentations works for a studio or project course. An internal teaching checklist is rarely a usable navigation system for twenty-five students opening the project for the first time.

To organize those sections:

1. Open the project and switch to List.
2. Open a section menu to rename it or add another section above it.
3. Use the add row or add action in the current section to create a canvas called Week 7 - Reducing campus waste.

This canvas is the meeting point. It carries the learning question, the handout, the activity zones, the doorways into group rooms, and the closing recap. Anything that needs its own access or its own working space becomes a separate canvas inside the same project.

Turn the handout into a working canvas

Start from a file on your device

If you are starting from a PDF, Word file, presentation, spreadsheet, HWP, or HWPX, use Import document from the new-canvas flow. ALLO prepares the file as canvas pages. Wait for the page slots to finish filling, then check page order, text, tables, and images before anyone else arrives. Large files are easier to check, and easier to teach from, when you split them rather than importing one 200-page reader.

Those imported pages are a surface to work on top of, not a replacement for editing the original in Word. Students annotate around and over the pages while the source file stays a file.

1. Open New Canvas and choose Import document.
2. Select or drop the handout, then stay in the new canvas while the pages are prepared.
3. Wait for import to finish and check that every expected page is readable before sharing it with students.

The clip shows the upload turning into canvas pages. Check the completed pages before building the activity around them.

Start from a file already on the canvas

If the handout is already sitting on your class canvas as an uploaded file object, select that one object and use Convert to canvas. The original file object stays where it is and a connected sub-canvas appears beside it, which saves the download-and-reupload round trip. Avoid starting a document import from the template chooser of a canvas you have already filled; that path rebuilds the page structure you just set up.

For the campus-waste lesson, put the question across the top: “Where does a reusable cup journey break down?” Place the three-page handout under it. Beside the handout, build labeled zones with real room in them: observations, assumptions, research questions, possible interventions, evidence needed. Students should be able to see where their note goes without asking you out loud.

Use the PDF walkthrough to compare the two starting points and prepare the surrounding activity space.

Give each group a focused room

From the class canvas, create a sub-canvas per team: Group 1 - Cup returns, Group 2 - Takeout packaging, Group 3 - Event cleanup. Build one room properly first, with a short task statement, the roles, the stages of the investigation, and open space for the work, then repeat that shape for the others so the three results are comparable at presentation time.

1. Choose Sub-canvas from the canvas toolbar and place the doorway on the class canvas.
2. Name it for the group, then select the doorway and choose Open canvas.
3. Add the task, roles, investigation stages, and working space inside the room.
4. Return to the class canvas and prepare the remaining rooms with the same structure.

The doorway stays on the class canvas while the team works inside its own room.

Show students both directions during the warmup: how to open their room from the class canvas, and how to get back to the class canvas when it is time to present. Two seconds of demonstration saves a scattered group later.

Creating rooms is teacher work. Guests, even on an editable shared canvas, are restricted from creating sub-canvases, so set the rooms up yourself before class rather than asking teams to make their own.

Set access before students arrive

Invite students with the role their activity needs

Students who stay with you all term belong in the project. Invite them through project members, including external students as collaborators, then sign in as one test student and confirm they land where you expect. A visiting critic, a guest lecturer, or a student who only needs one activity is better handled by sharing that single canvas with view, comment, or edit access.

Match the role to the activity:

Run that comparison with a separate account that has nothing but the canvas share, because broad project access will quietly mask a mistake in your test.

When you paste a class roster into an invite field, paste one address per line and read back the number of recipients ALLO recognized before sending. Invite in batches rather than dumping an entire cohort into one field, and confirm arrival in a real inbox. An address sitting in the input box is not a delivered invitation.

The project invitation clip shows where to enter the roster and review the member list.

Keep preparation material outside the shared path

Preparation material follows a different rule. Keep the answer key, the teaching notes, and next week's prompts out of the shared path from the start, and open them when you intend to. In canvas permissions, Private removes access inherited from the project audience, but direct members and active share links are separate paths that can survive the change. Check both before you treat a canvas as closed. Visibility changes also reach the canvases below in the hierarchy, so look at the whole tree before changing a parent.

Add a PIN for the start of an activity

For a timed activity, a Canvas PIN adds a four-digit check in front of the content.

1. Open the canvas header menu and choose Manage Canvas PIN.
2. Choose Set a canvas PIN, enter four digits, and confirm.
3. Test the student entry path, then read the code out when the activity begins.

The clip shows the header menu and the four-digit entry field.

PIN management requires read access and an eligible role: the canvas owner or creator with edit access, an active workspace admin, or an instructor granted this permission by the education workspace. Owning the project or having ordinary edit access alone is not enough.

The PIN is a check, not a grant: a student still needs membership or a valid link, and entering the code opens the canvas with whatever view, comment, or edit role they already had. Different codes per group can stage entry, but a code that travels to another team still works, because the PIN does not verify identity. Real separation between rooms comes from the membership and share scope of each room.

Run the live activity

Use this sequence for the campus-waste activity. The outputs are instructions for the class, not automatic tracking by ALLO.

Start together and help students find their place

Open with a two-minute warmup on the class canvas: one sticky note for something you observed, one for a question you cannot answer yet. One thought per note, because the next thing you will do is cluster them, and a note holding three ideas cannot be moved into a cluster.

A freeform canvas used for a class warm-up with notes, media, and drawings.

Live collaboration shows who is present and where their cursors are. Use that to steer the room, not to judge it. Presence shows who is currently in the canvas. It is not attendance, not attention, and not a participation record you should grade from.

Collaborators move through the same brainstorm canvas with their cursors visible.

When the class needs to look at the same corner of a wide canvas, ask them to follow you. Their pan and zoom match yours until they stop following. Later, follow a student presenter through their group's evidence. Follow works between people already present in the same canvas: it does not grant access, does not carry anyone into a different canvas, does not control a student's machine, and does not synchronize video playback, so if you embed a clip, let each student press play.

In the clip, a participant selects another person to follow and the canvas shows the following state. Everyone must already be in the same canvas.

Move into group work, then compare results

Then send teams into their rooms. Ask them to keep observations and assumptions in separate zones; that single constraint produces better discussion than any prompt about being rigorous. Arrows connect a cause to an effect, drawings mark the exact spot on the handout that provoked the question, and a comment carries the reasoning the drawing cannot. If you vote with stickers, say the rule out loud, such as two stickers per person, and count with your eyes. Stickers are objects on a canvas, not a tallying system, so write the chosen option down in words when the vote settles.

A class brainstorm canvas collects ideas under three directions for review together.

The live-class walkthrough shows presence, following, and feedback in context.

Keep feedback attached to the work

Put comments on the note, image, or page region they are about. “Needs more evidence” sends a group back to the whole canvas. “How would you measure returns if you do not know how many cups were borrowed?” pinned to their intervention note sends them to one decision. Use @ for the one student who should answer, and keep the exchange in that thread so the next reader gets the request, the reply, and the outcome in one place.

Close each group's work with a labeling pass: what is observed, what is assumed, what still needs research. Resolve the threads that reached an answer, which keeps the conversation readable, and leave the unresolved ones open with a name attached. Deleting a thread removes the context a group will want next week.

Opening a comment thread on an object shows the existing feedback and its replies.

Lock the structure and keep a way back

Lock the headings, zone backgrounds, instructions, and reference material. Leave every area students write in unlocked. A class canvas where nothing moves feels broken in the middle of a live session, and the accident you are actually preventing is someone dragging “one idea per note” into the middle of the board during the activity.

Choose the protection based on what students need to do:

The protected option adds a shield indicator to the selected object. Locking governs editing, never who can see or enter the canvas.

Save a checkpoint before group work

Before students begin, open Version History from the canvas header menu and choose Save this version, if the feature is available. Name it Week 7 - before group activity. The menu requires Version History to be enabled and an account that can change the canvas; guests, demo mode, and read-only access do not get this action. ALLO also creates versions automatically after qualifying changes, but do not plan around a promised ten-minute rhythm; the checkpoint you named yourself is the one you will look for.

Check that the named entry appears in the version list before students start editing.

Preview before restoring the shared canvas

If something large goes wrong, Activity shows recorded changes, and Version History lets you preview earlier states before deciding. Activity is a collaboration feed, not a keystroke log and not evidence of how much each student contributed. Small, recent mistakes are still faster to undo in place.

Recovery reaches only as far as the versions still available in your history window, so it is not unlimited. Restoring a parent does not restore the contents of its sub-canvases. To recover a deleted canvas, open Trash.

Set up the next lesson before you close the tab

Come back to the class canvas after the presentations and write the recap while the evidence is still on screen: what the class now trusts, which assumptions survived, and what reading or fieldwork is due. Point each follow-up at the group room that holds its context, so a student who missed class lands in the work rather than in a summary of it.

Keep the finished canvas as the record of that week. For next time, create a new weekly canvas or copy the activity structure that worked, then strip out student names, old dates, private comments, and access that does not belong in the new lesson. What you want to carry forward is the shape: the question that started a real argument, the zone labels that stopped the sticky notes from piling up in one corner, the comment prompt that got an actual answer. The next group should have room to reach a different conclusion.

Before reusing the lesson, check:

• The next question and due dates are current.
• Each group has the right room and can open it.
• Answer keys and teaching notes remain outside student access.
• Student working areas are unlocked, and fixed instructions have the intended protection.
• The recap names the open questions and the people responsible for following up.

What can go wrong

A student has the PIN but cannot get in. The PIN is an extra check, not an invitation. Confirm they also have access through the project, a direct invite, or the share link you sent.

A student can open the room but cannot add a note. Check their effective role first: view and comment access cannot create or move objects. If the role is right, check whether that zone or object is locked.

A group room will not open even though its doorway is visible. Parent access and child access are separate. Review the sub-canvas members, visibility, and share path instead of rebuilding the room.

Students still open a canvas after it was made private. Private removes project-inherited access. Direct members and existing share links can remain, so review both.

Follow does not work. Run through these:

• Are both people currently present in the same canvas?
• Did you open the destination canvas first? Follow does not move anyone between canvases.
• Does the student still have access to that canvas?

Version History is visible but restore is not available. Edit access alone does not authorize restore. Ask the canvas owner, the project owner, or a workspace admin who can also access and edit the canvas. If the state you want is older than the available history, it may no longer be recoverable there.