FAQ

For teachers

Common questions about building lessons, sharing them with students, and how the AI side works.

Do I need an account?: No. You can build a lesson and share its URL without signing up. Sign-in is currently a demo feature that lets you see lessons you’ve saved in this browser.
Is it free?: Yes. The core lesson-building workflow — picking a poem, generating questions, sharing the URL — is free to use.
How do I make a lesson?: Click Build · new in the top nav. Pick a poem, pick a musical setting, optionally adjust audience and length, copy the student link. Typical time start-to-finish: under a minute.
Can students just ask ChatGPT for the answers?: They can try, but it won’t work well. The discussion questions are deliberately general about the music (“identify a moment where the instrumentation changes unexpectedly”). To answer, students must point to a specific moment they heard in the recording and describe its interpretive effect. General-purpose chatbots can’t fake that without actually listening to the audio. The question design is the moat.
Can I edit the AI-generated questions?: Yes. In the builder, click Preview / edit on the student link. Each question becomes a textarea you can rewrite or delete; you can also add new ones. Click Save edits and the shareable URL updates immediately to reflect your changes.
How do students access the assignment?: Paste the student URL into Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, email, or a slide. Students click the link — no account, no install. If you’re projecting from the front of the room, the teacher edition has a Show to class button that pops a full-screen QR code; students scan and the assignment opens on their phones.
Can I print the lesson as a handout?: Yes. Hit ⌘P (Mac) or Ctrl+P (Windows) on either the student or the teacher URL. The print view drops the video embeds (and the qed’bop chrome) and shows the poem, the questions, and a plain youtube.com/watch?v=... URL under each listening entry so students can still find the audio. The teacher edition’s agenda, bio, context, and commentary all print too.
What devices do students need?: Any modern browser. Phone, tablet, laptop, Chromebook. The videos are YouTube embeds; the rest of the page is text. Works fine without headphones, but they help.
Why public-domain poems only?: Three reasons: poems out of copyright can be reproduced in full on the assignment page (no licensing concerns for teachers), the catalog can grow without per-poem permissions, and printing handouts is unambiguously legal. We pair the texts with musical settings posted publicly on YouTube; the recordings themselves are linked, not re-hosted.
What is a "teacher edition"?: Every lesson has a companion URL at /t/ (instead of /a/) that shows the same poem plus AI-generated supplementary material: a poet biography calibrated to your audience, historical context, a suggested class agenda with per-activity timing, and per-question teaching commentary explaining what the question is exploring and what to listen for in strong vs. weak responses. There’s also a chat panel where you can ask follow-up questions about any of it.
I can't find a poem I want to teach.: The catalog is small and curated. Browse what’s there at /library. We’re adding poems steadily; if there’s one you want, the easiest path is to find a YouTube setting of a public-domain poem and let us know.