Build your first experience

1. Create it

On My Experiences, choose New experience. Give it a title — you can change it later — and it opens straight into the editor.

2. Add your first scene

The editor's left rail is your scene list. Add a scene and give it an image. The picker offers five places to get one: your organisation's Library, an Upload from your own machine, Panova's drawn patterns, a Stock search if you have connected a provider, or a URL. You are also asked to describe the picture before you can confirm it — see Choosing a picture, describing it and pointing it.

If the photo is a 360° panorama, Panova will usually detect it. If it doesn't, set the projection yourself in the scene's settings — a spherical image shown flat looks stretched and wrong.

3. Drop some pins

Turn the pin tool on first: in the Pin tools cluster at the top of the canvas, press the map-pin button. Right-clicking the picture does the same thing.

The cursor becomes a cross-hair. Click on the image where you want a pin, and a small card opens asking for its label.

The tool stays on, so the next click is the next pin. Press Escape, or right-click, when you have finished.

A Pin panel opens on the right with everything about the pin you just placed. To write what a learner reads, press Content panel preview in that panel and then click a block on the card that appears — see Placing and styling pins.

Pins land in the scene's default context. Once you have more than a handful, split them into contexts so learners can filter.

4. Preview as a learner

Use Preview in the header. This is what a learner sees — no editor chrome, no hidden contexts. Preview early and often; it is the fastest way to catch a pin that made sense while you were placing it and doesn't when you arrive at it cold.

5. Publish

Publish takes a snapshot of the draft and makes it the live version. Nothing a learner can reach changes until you press it — so you can edit a published experience all week without anyone seeing half-finished work.

If Publish refuses, a picture somewhere has no description. Readiness in the header lists them and takes you to each one.

6. Share it

The header's Share dialog holds two different addresses, and the difference matters:

• the Link is for people who already have an account in your organisation, and it is the only one that records anything;
• the Embed code puts the experience inside another web page and opens for anyone at all, recording nothing.

Neither of them is a public link you can send to a class of children who have no accounts. Read Getting a class into your experience before you hand anything out — it is short, and it says which of the two is right for a school. If you are using an LMS, see Connecting your LMS with LTI 1.3.