Using Lesson Plans

Take your students to visit history. A Running Reality lesson plan turns an inquiry into a guided virtual or on-site field trip, with the structure and synchronization controls teachers need to keep the class together.

Overview

A Running Reality lesson plan organizes a visit to Reality into a reusable sequence of steps. Each step can establish a date, location, and view; provide the context needed to begin an investigation; and lead students toward people and documents they can examine. The class can travel together on a shared display, follow on synchronized student devices, or use augmented reality while visiting a historic site. Unlike a slide deck, the historical setting remains interactive at every stop.

This reference explains how to design an inquiry, share access with students, lead a discussion, choose an appropriate level of device synchronization, and connect the lesson to an existing learning platform. You can purchase a blank lesson plan template and add the historical steps that support your own learning objectives.

Pedagogy

Running Reality supports inquiry-based learning: students learn history by asking worthwhile questions, seeking out people and sources, comparing perspectives, and using evidence to construct their own explanations. Visiting a place in Reality provides a compelling starting point, but the learning comes from investigating what people say, collecting the documents behind their accounts, and deciding what the evidence supports.

A lesson plan should orient students without answering every question in advance. Use the narrative for a step to establish context and focus attention, then let interactive people, documents, the setting, and cited sources provide evidence for students to examine. The teacher remains essential: helping students source and corroborate what they discover, notice what is missing, and decide when the evidence supports a conclusion.

These habits of historical judgment are increasingly important in a world shaped by generative AI. Students need the subject knowledge and critical skills to question polished answers, recognize uncertainty, and use AI as a tool rather than a shortcut around meaningful work. Running Reality complements rather than replaces books, lectures, and other sustained historical narratives by providing an interactive visual context in which to test ideas and evidence.

Planning the Inquiry

Begin with a compelling question that can support more than one defensible answer. Then design the lesson steps around four actions that students can repeat as the investigation develops:

1.		Visit the moment	Explore a historical place as events unfold. In the lesson editor, set the date, location, and view for each stop, then give students a focused prompt about what to observe.
2.		Question the people	Hear from individuals with different roles and perspectives. Identify the interactive people students should seek out and prepare questions that reveal how position and experience shape each account.
3.		Collect the evidence	Bring speeches, letters, records, and other documents back to class. Decide which evidence students should look for and what they should record about its creator, context, and citations.
4.		Build a conclusion	Compare accounts, evaluate claims, and construct an evidence-based interpretation. Plan where the class will pause to discuss its findings and how students will communicate or apply their conclusions.

The four actions do not have to occur only once. A longer lesson can repeat the cycle at several historical stops, introduce evidence that complicates an earlier conclusion, or divide the class so groups investigate different people before comparing their findings. Documents collected during the visit can be reused for discussion, writing, or a summative assessment later in the unit.

Sharing with Students

Running Reality can be shown on a range of devices that might be available in a classroom.

The student access URL looks like this, with the values in the brackets replace by the lesson's id number and the access key. This access key is required when sharing the lesson so that your students and only your students can see the lesson. It is also used to synchronize steps so that everyone with this same key can be synchronized together. You can give this URL to your students directly or via the sharing links.

• https://www.runningreality.org/?lesson=[id]&key=[key]

From the lesson plan editor, there is a panel of sharing links that will prepare the student access URL for you to make it easier to share via learning platform, social media, or email. There is also a QR code generator. QR codes can be put into printed materials so a quick scan with a mobile device camera will go straight to the lesson.

These links will either directly connect you to the other platform or will give you specific instructions for opening the other platform to add the student access URL.

Leading a Discussion

Running Reality can be used multiple ways to lead a discussion. The steps that you create in a Running Reality lesson plan can have some narrative, but that should just be a starting point. Show the students each step in turn, pointing them to each successive spot in history.

On each step, we recommend you:

• Talk about what it is they are seeing,
• Elaborate on the map, what it shows, and what it can't show,
• Connect it to reading assignments and other coursework, and
• Ask questions.

When presenting, you have a lot of other things going on in the class, so you want your technology to do exactly what you expect it to do and not require a lot of mouse movement or remembering exactly what and where to click. A lesson plan simplifies presenting because it pre-scripts the steps through history that you will be taking -- no need to remember dates or lat/lon values or fine tune your zoom levels. It makes a fully interactive map operate as simply and precisely as a slide show. You can still explore around the locations you pre-script, but you also know that you can easily go right back to that battle/ship/city when a student raises their hand and asks "I have a question about what you said two minutes ago..."

Approach	Description
Presentation	Lead a discussion live in a classroom using a single full-screen projector or touch-panel display.
Guide	Lead a discussion live in a classroom with student devices synchronized to the main display. LITE Take the students to a waypoint, then let them explore and talk to people. Ideal for inquiry-based learning. HARD The students see just what the presenter's computer is showing. Ideal for distance learning.

Running Reality would rely on you and your other classroom tools for things like voice chat, video chat, quizzes, assigning homework, and tracking homework. So, for distance learning, you will have an existing way to chat with your students provided by the school or university and to which the students already have accounts.

Integration with Learning Platforms

The student access URL for your lesson plan can be added to your class resources page. This URL includes the student key id code so that it is seamless for a student to start on your learning platform page and then transition to the lesson plan and back without any further log in.

Platform	From Running Reality	From the Platform	Instructions
Blackboard	Use the share button in your lesson plan editor	Add the student-access URL to your Blackboard class resources page.	Instructions
Google Classroom	Use the share button in your lesson plan editor	Add the student-access URL to the class materials using "Classwork" tab -> "Create" button -> "Material" menu item.	Instructions
Schoology	Use the share button in your lesson plan editor	Add the student-access URL (which includes an access key if sharing a Lesson Plan) as a Schoology "link", by copy-pasting any Running Reality URL or iFrame.	Instructions

With this kind of "lite" integration with learning platforms, Running Reality collects no personal information about your students, requires no student sign in, and is free of advertisements. It lets them follow along with your computer as you step through the lesson. It does not allow for evaluation, quizes, or other grading of student work, so this will have to be done back on the learning platform.

Distance Learning

Running Reality has taken specific considerations regarding distance learning that will hopefully mitigate problems for you and better integrate with your other tools.

• Safety: Classrooms have been disrupted by interlopers. While a Running Reality lesson plan key could be shared by a student with non-students, those others can not disrupt a lesson. Also, we carefully control all edits to the map to prevent map vandalism.
• Security: We do not request any student personally identifiable information (PII), nor do you hold any sign in account information about them.
• Access: Running Reality requires only very low bandwidth and can run on any device with a web browser. This helps provide equal access to all students, especially those in rural areas, using older devices, or with less than ideal equipment.
• Audio & Video: Running Reality does not provide audio or video capability, but it pairs well with such capabilities provided by your Learning Platform or another chat tool.

Feedback

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