The Teaching Board is built for tutors, but nothing stops a parent using it — and for sitting beside a child with a laptop, it is genuinely good. You can build a lesson out of real dictionary entries and HSK material, print it, and put it on your child’s screen. This is what a parent account can do with it, and — because it matters more here than anywhere — what it cannot.
The quickest version
If you have ten minutes before you sit down with your child tonight, do this and skip the rest of the article: open the free tools, pick Stroke order, type the character you are working on, and turn the screen round. No account, nothing to set up, and stepping through the strokes one at a time is the single most useful thing on this whole page.
The board is for when you want more than one thing, in an order, that you can come back to next week.
What a parent account gets
A parent account is an ordinary signed-in account as far as the board is concerned. That gets you 20 of the 23 tools and the whole content library — which is nearly everything.
- The Chinese instruments — Stroke order with step controls, tone cards, the 田字格 writing grid, the radical and pinyin tables, character formation, numbers, word banks and character cards. All of them here.
- The practice ones — Match, Build a sentence, Fill the blanks, Drop zones and a Timer.
- The real content — Search the dictionary, every HSK lesson, grammar points, readings and culture articles, and drag any of it onto a slide. What your child sees inside a card depends on their own plan — a paid lesson shows as locked to a free account.
- All six templates and all six backgrounds — Including the full-slide 田字格, which turns the whole board into a writing sheet.
- Printing — Free, on any plan. One page per slide, straight to PDF or a printer — which is how a board becomes tomorrow’s worksheet.
Teaching from it with your child
- Side by side — The simplest and the best. Build the deck, press Present for full screen, and work through it together on one screen. Nothing else is needed and nothing is shared anywhere.
- On their own screen, live — If you have a Family Circle with your child in it, press Present to and pick it — your slide then appears on their screen and follows you as you move. They can raise a hand; they cannot change anything. Circles explained.
- As something to look at later — On a paid Family plan you can turn on an unlisted link and send them the deck to read on their own. On the free plan, print it to PDF instead — which works just as well for a child at a kitchen table.
What a parent cannot do
Written plainly so you do not spend an evening looking for a button that is not there.
- Set a slide as homework — The Assign button is for tutor and school accounts, at any price. Your child’s practice is set through the family view and their own study plan instead.
- Share a link on the free plan — Free accounts hold no share links at all — boards stay private. A paid Family plan lifts that. Printing is always free.
- Use the three classroom tools — No picker, scoreboard or quick check, so no live answers coming back from a child.
- See a board your child made — Boards are private to the account that made them, and the family view does not show them. Ask them to open it beside you, or to send you the link.
- Edit at the same time as them — One person at a time. A second writer is stopped rather than overwriting the first.
- Find it in your own menus — There is no Teaching Board entry in a parent account’s navigation yet. Bookmark /teaching-board, or reach it from the Learning Materials menu, or from the Put on a board button on any dictionary entry, grammar point or lesson.
What is stored, and who can see it
- Private by default — A board belongs to the account that made it. Nobody else can open it — board pages are not listed, not indexed, and not searchable.
- A slide points at content, it does not copy it — So a link you send can never hand out paid material: the person opening it sees what their own account allows.
- Pictures you add — Re-encoded before they are stored, which strips camera and location data, and screened automatically. Still — think twice before putting a photograph of a child on a board you might share.
- Yours to take or delete — Boards and slides are part of your data export and of account deletion. Exporting or deleting your data.
What it costs
Using the board is free. Creating one spends 50 AI credits, and adding a photograph of your own spends 2 — and the board does not mention either on screen, which is why they are here. A free account is topped up monthly, which is a handful of boards a month; in practice one board per topic, added to over weeks, costs almost nothing. See AI credits explained.
Common questions
No. A free parent account gets 20 of the 23 tools, the whole content library, all the templates, printing, and presenting to a Family Circle. A paid Family plan adds unlisted share links and unlocks the paid lessons inside content cards; it does not add the three classroom tools, which need a tutor plan.