7 min read · Updated 2026-10-18
In short
A centre's own online classroom is booked like any lesson, so only the tutor, the students on the roster, their parents and permitted staff can join, and only around the lesson's time. Students check their camera and wait until the tutor is in, the shared board is the lesson, and the room closes on its own once the lesson is over.
General information, not legal advice. Laws and the regulators' rules change: check the sources below, and talk to your own adviser about your centre.
Ask a centre owner how online lessons run and the honest answer is often "each tutor uses their own link". One tutor sends a meeting link by text, another uses a personal account, a third shares a whiteboard from a different website. The owner cannot see who joined, a link sent in March still works in September, and a child can end up alone in a call with an adult nobody at the centre can see. Parents notice the mess too, and wonder why the online lesson costs the same.
A classroom that belongs to the centre fixes that in one move: the lesson itself becomes the room. This article walks through what that looks like for the tutor, the student and the parent. For the general craft of online teaching, such as equipment and lesson shape, start with our article on running online tutoring lessons.
The lesson is the room
In XTutio a lesson booked as an Online classroom has its own room, and nobody gets a standing link. Who may come in is decided from the lesson: the tutor delivering it (or the tutor covering it), the students on its roster, their parents, and centre staff who supervise lessons. Everyone else is refused. The room opens 15 minutes before the start and closes to new joiners 30 minutes after the end, and a cancelled lesson has no room at all.
- Each person joins from their own sign-in, so the centre knows exactly who was there
- One emailed link sends each person to the right screen for their role
- A tutor taken off a lesson loses the room; the covering tutor gets it
- A room still open past its window is closed by the server, not left running
Before the lesson: check yourself, then wait
Most lost minutes are a microphone nobody can hear. So before anyone joins, they see their own camera, watch a meter move when they speak, play a test sound and run a quick connection check, with plain help for each thing that fails. A background blur or picture can go on here too, worked out on the device itself.
Then students wait. A centre chooses whether they are let in automatically as soon as the tutor is there, or by the tutor one at a time. Either way, no child is in the room before the tutor. The waiting screen shows whether the tutor has arrived and when the lesson starts, and offers a short warm-up such as quick sums at the student's own level. It all stops the moment they are let in.
- Open the lesson
From their own sign-in, up to 15 minutes before.
- Check
Camera, microphone, sound and connection, with help if one fails.
- Wait
See if the tutor is here and warm up while they wait.
- In
Let in once the tutor is present, straight onto the board.
The board is the lesson
The shared board fills the screen by default. Tutor and student write on it with a finger or a stylus, and the tutor can ask everyone to follow their page. Our whiteboard brings the tools a maths lesson needs: shapes and arrows, a ruler and a protractor that show the length or angle as you draw, graph paper and number lines, typed equations, graphs drawn from an equation, pictures that move and resize, and pages you can reorder. A tutor can also send a picture from the maths tools straight onto the board.
When the tutor shares a screen, such as a past paper, it takes the stage on its own, with the faces in a strip beside it. One tap shows everyone's faces large for the start and end of the lesson, and the board keeps everything written on it while you talk.
Parents in the room
By default a parent of a child on the lesson can take part, with their camera, microphone, screen and the board, which suits a parent sitting beside a young child. Everyone sees "Parent in the room" while they are there, and "Centre staff watching" when someone from the centre looks in, so nobody is ever hidden. The tutor can mute a parent or stop their screen share if a lesson needs it.
The NSW Child Safe Standards ask organisations to manage risks in online environments and use them in line with their code of conduct. A room that only opens to the right people, shows everyone who is present, and carries no private written messages makes that much easier to meet. Other states have their own rules, so check yours.
Keeping students with you
The tutor
- Let students in, or let the centre do it automatically
- Ask a quick poll with two to five answers
- Mute a parent or stop their screen share
- See the time left and a nudge to wrap up
- Save the board as a PDF for the family
The student
- Write on the board with a finger or stylus
- Send one of five reactions or raise a hand
- Tap an answer to a poll, never type one
- Turn captions on for themselves
- Turn their own camera and microphone on or off
Reactions are a fixed set of five and a raised hand, with no free text, so nothing a child sends carries words. A poll shows only the counts: nobody sees who picked what. Where the centre has speech captions connected, each person can turn captions on for themselves. Mute and camera are big buttons with words, and the screen says "You're muted" when someone talks while muted.
After the lesson
The time left sits in the top bar for everyone, and near the end the tutor gets a gentle nudge to wrap up. The board goes home as a PDF linked on the family's home page, and the roll is suggested from who was connected, for the tutor to confirm. Then the tutor writes the lesson's notes and homework as for any other lesson; our article on lesson wrap-ups covers that. The online classroom guide shows how a centre switches the classroom on and books its first lesson.
Questions centres ask
- Who can join an online lesson in a centre's own classroom?
- The tutor delivering or covering the lesson, the students on its roster, their parents and centre staff who supervise lessons. Everyone joins from their own sign-in, from 15 minutes before the start to 30 minutes after the end.
- Can a student be alone in the room before the tutor arrives?
- No child is in the room before the tutor. Students wait until the tutor is present, and are let in automatically or by the tutor, as the centre chooses.
- Can parents join their child's online lesson?
- Yes. A parent of a child on the lesson can join and take part, and everyone in the room sees that a parent is there.
Sources
- What are the Child Safe Standards, NSW Office of the Children's Guardian. Read 2026-10-17.
