LessonUp

LessonUp is an online teaching platform where teachers find, create and teach interactive lessons, in the classroom, online or in a hybrid setup. A teacher imports a PowerPoint, builds slides from scratch or starts from the lesson library, adds quizzes, polls, spinners and other activities, and then teaches the lesson while students answer on their own devices. The site addresses individual teachers; teams, schools, colleges and multi-academy trusts; and content partners such as publishers and cultural institutions. It describes itself as a "Front-of-class teaching tool" and says it is "Trusted by more than 200,000 teachers and 3,000 schools worldwide".

Building a lesson

There are three ways in, and the homepage stresses that the teacher chooses: use existing lessons, create interactive slides, or let the AI help. The PowerPoint route is the most direct. Teachers import their slides and add interactivity on top: quizzes, fill in the blanks and open questions, polls, word clouds, mind maps, drag and drop, hotspots, videos, and a random name picker. The spinner is the feature the company singles out; its comparison post calls it "one of our most beloved interactive features", a colorful wheel that picks a random student to answer, or that can hold questions of its own in a gamified lesson.

The lesson library is the second route. Teachers can "Get inspired by lessons from other teachers and put your own spin on them", and content partners, which the site describes as publishers, institutions or organizations that want to reach thousands of teachers, publish lessons there too. The Anne Frank House offers lessons on prejudice, discrimination, racism and antisemitism built on Anne Frank's life story, and the Van Gogh Museum offers interactive art lessons and teaching resources for primary and secondary school students. The homepage also features ready-made sets such as PSHE lessons on diversity, mental health and British values, and GCSE Macbeth lessons on the play's supernatural elements and Lady Macbeth.

The editor lets a teacher go straight from building to teaching. The comparison post points out that a lesson can be taught directly without leaving editor mode, and that a teacher can check what the lesson looks like for students in "teach" mode and fine-tune it on the spot.

The AI tools

LessonUp says it "decided to embrace AI at the beginning of 2023" and describes the AI tools as free. They are optional by design, under the heading "You do the magic. AI just follows": AI "is just there if you want it to be, and only to lighten your load". The homepage lists three groups of tools:

• AI for lesson creation, to "Obtain pedagogically sound lesson structures in minutes, based on your input."
• AI for quizzes, to turn a lesson or slides into relevant quiz questions without extra tools.
• AI tools for smart content, which summarize, translate or build glossaries with one click.

Elsewhere the homepage says the AI can assist with lessons, rubrics, assignments, quizzes and images, so a teacher can draft a full lesson and its assessment in one place. That makes LessonUp an authoring tool as much as a presentation one: the output is a reusable interactive lesson rather than a single quiz.

Teaching and tracking

Lessons run in person, remotely or in a hybrid format, and the company states that "Any number of pupils or students can attend lessons". There is a downloadable app for students. Lessons do not have to be live: Dorrie Baker, a primary school teacher quoted in the comparison post, says LessonUp lets her students work at their own pace, and that "each slide gives them instant feedback."

As students answer, LessonUp shows how the lesson is going, so the teacher can give immediate feedback. Teachers "See student results after each interactive slide and in the student reports", which helps them spot misconceptions right away and use the reports to plan the next lesson. Cerys Walker, cross trust digital provision leader and science teacher at Turner Schools, describes the effect on the homepage: "Since using LessonUp, we have noticed that all the kids are actively participating in the lessons."

Integrations

The homepage lists four learning platforms: Canvas, where teachers access LessonUp lessons with one screen open; Google Classroom, for sharing lessons with classes; Microsoft Teams for Education, with a single login; and itslearning, again with lessons accessed inside it. For a school already running one of these, LessonUp slots into the existing setup rather than replacing it.

Price and support

Teachers can start for free. The company's comparison post states that both free and paid accounts have no limit on the number of students or on storage, and puts the school price at "approximately £8 per month per teacher", for "the cost of just a couple of cups of coffee per teacher". For that, the post says, a school or trust gets the full toolkit across teaching, assessment, organization, feedback, monitoring, sharing and reflection. A pricing page in the main menu holds the plan details.

Support and training come through a helpdesk, webinars, workshops and free CPD resources on formative assessment, active learning, metacognition, critical thinking and Rosenshine's theory applied in class. The case studies cover schools and colleges such as Belfast MET, Garibaldi School, Turner Schools, Colchester Institute and Peterborough University, including stories on encouraging quiet students to participate and on supporting young people with autism.

Who it suits and who it does not

LessonUp suits a classroom teacher who already teaches from slides and wants them to become interactive without rebuilding them, a teacher who wants AI help planning lessons and quizzes but keeps the final say, and a school or multi-academy trust that wants a shared platform and library across its staff at a per-teacher price. Primary and secondary teachers get the most ready-made content, and the college and university case studies show it working in further and higher education too; Kyle Smith, a manufacturing engineering lecturer, says it can "enhance their learning experience and knowledge retention".

It is less suited to anyone who wants to sell courses or run a self-paced online academy for paying learners; LessonUp is a teaching tool for schools and colleges, not a course marketplace. Teachers who only need a one-off game-style quiz may find a full lesson platform more than they need, and the integrations cover Canvas, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams for Education and itslearning, so schools on another system should look at how lessons would be shared there.