Quick Share: A Reading in Student Hands Before the Bell

The right reading rarely arrives on schedule.

It comes the night before. In the hallway between periods. At 7:40 in the morning, when you find the chapter that fits exactly what you want to teach today and first period starts at 8:05.

Until now, getting that chapter in front of students on Lexandria meant building a classroom first: create it, invite every student, wait for each one to make an account and confirm an email, then assign the reading. That's the right setup for a semester. It's the wrong one for this morning.

In July, I wrote that we were still building better ways for teachers to put readings in students' hands quickly. Quick Share is that.

How It Works

Find it → Share it → See who finished.

Look for the share icon wherever you find something worth teaching: a book's landing page, a chapter, a quiz, a lesson plan, a reading guide, or a bell ringer. It's on every card in the Bell Ringers library and on our Shows, where you can share a whole series, one season, or a handful of episodes. You can also start fresh with Quick Share on your Classroom page.

Pick what you want students to see. When you start from a chapter, that chapter is already chosen. If you start from a book, you can trim it down to the chapters, quizzes, and guides you need. Give it a title your students will recognize and decide how long it stays open. Two weeks is the default; anything from one day to ninety works, and you can extend it later.

Then you get three ways to share: a link to paste into your LMS, an email, or a chat; a six-character code students can type at learn.lexandria.org/s; and a QR code for the projector.

Students open it, type their name, and start reading. A contents list shows everything you shared, a progress bar shows how far along they are, and if they close the tab and come back in the same browser, they pick up where they left off.

No Accounts Required

Students don't make an account. They type a name, and the screen tells them that their name and answers go to their teacher. That's all we ask for.

What You Get Back

Open the share from your Classroom page and watch the roster fill in as students join. Each row shows a progress bar, how many items that student has finished, and their score on each quiz. Expand a student to see how they answered each question. From the same page, you can extend the share another week, close it when the lesson is over, remove a name that doesn't belong, or download everything as a spreadsheet for your gradebook.

When a Classroom Is Still the Right Tool

Quick Share is built for today: this lesson, this week, this group of students. If you teach the same students all semester and want their work collected in one place, a Lexandria classroom is still the better fit. Plenty of teachers will use both. And any student who wants to keep their Quick Share work can create a free account from the finish screen.

The next time the right reading finds you twenty minutes before class, look for the share icon. Pick what you want, put the code on the board, and let your students get to work. Quick Share is live now at learn.lexandria.org.