Key Concepts

Activity

Activities – like posts and polls – are the building blocks of your simulation. They define how students will interact with the site.

Activities were called Assignments on previous versions of the platform.

You'll create an activity for anything you expect your students to do over the course of your project.

Activity content always appears on the Dossier, and on the activity's page, if you assign it to one.

You can also add functionality to the site by creating "Teacher Only" activities for yourself.

Page

A page is a destination for content on the site. Each page displays a preview on the Home page so students can always see what's going on in your simulation.

You can limit access to pages or their content by team or role.

Each page has a theme: you can use our built-in themes or design your own. A page's theme is reflected on the page itself but also as a frame around content from that page when it is displayed elsewhere (e.g., in the Dossier). This helps create a sense of place for content on your site.

Get creative with pages! Use our templates or customize their design to create realistic destinations, like a News Page or Social Network.

See also:

Persona

A persona is a character that a student or teacher inhabits on the site. Each persona has its own name, title, and team. It's important to remember that your students are always logged in as a specific persona, and should be expected to interact with the site in character.

Each Persona has a profile in the Dossier.

One account (a real person with an email address) can have multiple personas within a simulation, with the caveat that only the first persona created for a given account can be given teacher privileges.

See also:

Team

Personas are grouped into teams. Each team has its own section in the Dossier.

Teams can collaborate on posts and you can use teams to limit access to activities, content, and pages.

See also:

create and edit teams on the Dossier
assign users to teams on the Edit Students page
limit an activity to a specific team on its settings page
limit page access to a specific team by editing the page

Role

Roles give students special capabilities, like access to a page or activity.

Create a News page and a Reporter role for students whose job it will be to report on the events of your simulation.

Roles are not public facing character attributes – they just control what students can do on the site.

See also:

create and assign roles on the Edit Students page
limit an activity to a specific role on its settings page
limit page access to a specific role by editing the page