The Editor is the heart of Mindsmith. It’s where lessons take shape into polished, interactive experiences that learners can easily absorb and apply.
If you’ve used AI to generate your lesson through the Storyboard, by importing a document or media file, or by prompting AI directly, this is the place where your first draft appears. You’ll see pre-built pages with text, visuals, and interactive tiles that you can refine and customize.
If you choose not to use AI, the Editor opens as a blank canvas. From there, you can add pages, drop in content, and design interactives manually.
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How the Editor Fits into the Workflow
Layout of the Editor
Side Panels
Keyboard Shortcuts
Collaboration in the Editor
Publishing from the Editor
FAQ's
How the Editor Fits into the Workflow
Storyboard → Think of this as the blueprint. It sets the lesson’s parameters (style, tone, objectives, page outlines, AI generation settings). When you generate from the Storyboard, the AI creates a full draft lesson with text, images, and interactivity.
Editor → This is the workshop. If you’ve used AI to generate your lesson — whether through the Storyboard, importing a document or media, or prompting AI directly — this is where your first draft appears. You’ll see pre-populated pages with text, images, and interactive tiles ready for refinement.
If you skipped AI generation, the Editor gives you a blank canvas to build from scratch using pages and tiles.
👉 For more on generating lessons, see Creating a lesson with the Mindsmith Agent
Layout of the Editor
There are five areas to know:
Top Left: Switch between lesson views and rename your lesson.
Left Sidebar (Filmstrip): Organize and navigate your lesson structure.
Main Canvas: Build out each page with text, media, and interactive tiles.
Bottom Bar (the Agent): Add tiles, launch AI builders, and chat with the AI about the current page.
Top Right: Manage lesson-level controls like themes, settings, sharing, and comments.
Let's look at each in detail:
Top Left: Lesson Views
Click the lesson title to rename it.
Storyboard → the blueprint behind an AI-generated lesson. This tab appears once a lesson has a storyboard.
Editor → the page-by-page workshop. This is where you'll spend most of your time.
The panel icon expands the Filmstrip when it's tucked away.
The language button (🌐) at the top of the Filmstrip shows the language your lesson is currently in. On Business+ plans, clicking it opens Manage Translations, where you add languages and review translated versions. On other plans it opens Settings, where you can change the lesson's language.
Left Sidebar: Pages & Sections
The left panel is your lesson’s navigation and structure manager.
Here you can:
Scroll through all lesson pages.
Click “+ New Page” to insert a Blank Page, Section Divider, Title Page, or Text and Image layout — plus any of your Saved Page Templates.
Drag and drop pages to easily reorder them.
Click the Options menu (...) on any page — or right-click the page thumbnail — to edit its title, turn it into a section divider, copy, paste, duplicate, save it as a page template, hand it to the AI Agent, or delete it.
📌 Tip: Use Section Dividers to break longer lessons into clear learning segments. By clicking the arrow next to a section divider, you can collapse entire sections to keep your workspace organized.
Main Canvas: Page and Tile Editing
The center canvas is where you build. Each page is made of tiles — modular content elements.
To add a tile, click + Add tile in the bottom bar and pick from these categories:
Text → Text, Title, Heading, Subheading, Quote, Table, List, Note, Code, Line Break, Spacer, Section Marker, and Timeline.
Media → Image, Image Comparison, Image Carousel, Video, Audio, File Download, Custom Code, and Embed.
Question → Multiple Choice, Short Answer, Feedback, Select Multiple, Ranking, and Matching.
Interactive → Buttons, Flashcards, Accordion, Tabs, Process, Flashcards Carousel, Hot Button, Sorting, and Chart.
Three tiles get their own buttons along the top of that menu, because AI builds them with you rather than dropping in a blank tile:
Experience → a branching decision tree learners click through.
Video → an editable AI-generated video.
Conversation → a role-play conversation with an AI character.
To edit a tile, select it. A small toolbar appears above the tile:
Click directly into the tile to change text or replace media.
Move (✥) → drag the tile to reorder it, or place it side-by-side with another tile.
Palette (🎨) → on tiles that support styling, opens the tile's settings panel with the theme section already expanded, for colors and styling on just that tile.
Edit → opens the same settings panel for the tile's content and behavior options. On Experience and Conversation tiles this button reads Edit experience or Edit conversation and opens the full-screen builder instead.
Plus (+) → on tiles made of repeating parts, adds another one: a choice, a flashcard, a tab, a matching pair, a step.
Three-dot menu (⋯) → tile actions: set the tile's width (S, M, L, or Full), duplicate, copy, paste below, or delete.
Press Cmd + K (Mac) or Ctrl + K (Windows) to open the AI Agent already focused on the tile you have selected.
📌 Pro Tips:
Keep pages focused. Two or three tiles per page works best for readability, especially on mobile.
You can instantly create a table tile by copying a table from Excel, Google Sheets, or CSV, and pasting it directly onto the canvas!
Bottom Bar: The Agent
The bar at the bottom of the Editor is both your content picker and your AI Assistant. It has two states, and which buttons you see depends on which one you're in.
Collapsed — the default, a single slim bar:
Quick Add → drag or click to drop in a standard Text, Image, or Video tile.
+ Add tile → opens the full tile menu. Start typing to search, use the arrow keys to move through results, and press Enter to insert.
Undo / Redo → step back and forward through your recent changes.
Ask the Agent → type into the input to rewrite text, draft quizzes, or add interactivity to the current page.
Expanded — click the input field, or send the Agent a message, and the panel grows to show your chat history plus a fuller set of tools:
Microphone → speak your request instead of typing. Once you start typing, this becomes the send button.
Add resource (+) → attach a file for the Agent to work from, or Reference Lesson to point it at another lesson you've already built.
Narration → open the narration panel to add or adjust voiceover. Requires a paid plan.
Objectives → review the learning objectives tied to the current page.
Accessibility → scan the lesson for accessibility problems and fix them with the Agent.
Skills → save your own reusable instructions and re-run them on any lesson. Admins can create skills for the whole organization.
Model → choose how much horsepower the Agent uses: Standard (balanced), Lite (faster and cheaper), or Max (most capable). Which options you see depends on your plan and your organization's AI settings.
Web search → let the Agent look up current information while it works. This appears only if your organization has enabled web search, and you can turn it off for yourself.
New Chat → clear the conversation and start the Agent fresh.
Feedback → tell us how the Agent did on that request.
Opening Narration, Objectives, or Accessibility collapses the Agent and opens that panel beside your lesson.
Drag the top edge of the expanded panel up or down to resize the chat history, or click the minus (−) button to collapse it again. The panel stays fixed at the bottom center of the screen and can't be moved.
📌 Note: Adding "Custom Code" tiles from the full tile menu requires a Business+ plan.
Top Right: Global Controls
At the top-right of the Editor, you’ll find lesson-level controls:
Collaborator avatars → see who else is in the lesson right now.
Version History → restore past versions of your lesson.
Comments → leave and review inline feedback with your team.
Analytics (📊) → view learner performance data and engagement metrics. Requires a paid plan.
Settings (⚙️) → four tabs: Preview (thumbnail and how the lesson is presented), Learning (how learners move through it), Grading, and Certificate.
Kebab Menu (⋮) → Translate, Narration, Logo, Move Lesson, Duplicate Lesson, Version History, and Move to Trash. Organization admins can also save the lesson as a template for the whole team.
Theme (🖌️) → adjust fonts, colors, and logos for the whole lesson.
Share → publish your lesson or export it.
Preview (▶) → open the lesson exactly as learners will see it.
📌 Pro Tips:
Open the Theme tool early. Setting your logo, fonts, and colors upfront ensures a consistent look across every page.
Preview frequently. A page that looks balanced in the Editor might feel crowded in learner mode. Previewing helps catch formatting issues early.
Side Panels
Several tools open as floating panels you can drag around the canvas. Only one is open at a time, and closing it returns you to normal editing.
Theme → fonts, colors, and logo for the whole lesson.
Tile → settings for the one tile you selected.
Narration → voice and audio settings for a specific tile.
Comments → the feedback thread for the page or tile you're on.
Objectives → the learning objectives tied to the current page.
Accessibility → scans your lesson for accessibility problems such as missing alt text, and offers to fix them with the Agent in one click.
📌 Tip: Run the Accessibility panel before you publish. It catches issues that are quick to fix while you're still in the Editor and awkward to fix after learners are already in the lesson.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Action | Mac | Windows |
Undo / Redo |
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Copy / Paste |
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Cut |
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Duplicate |
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Delete selected tile or page |
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Open the Agent on the current selection |
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There's no save shortcut, because there's nothing to save — Mindsmith saves your work automatically.
Collaboration in the Editor
The Editor supports real-time teamwork:
Click the Comments icon in the top right to add notes to a page, a specific tile, or the overall lesson.
See live avatars in the top toolbar to know exactly who is editing alongside you.
Watch live cursors and real-time updates as your teammates build and refine content.
💡 Why it matters: Collaboration inside the Editor eliminates version control headaches. Subject matter experts, instructional designers, and reviewers can work together without passing files back and forth.
Publishing from the Editor
When your lesson is ready, click Share in the top-right corner. From here you can:
Publish a public link for learners.
Send a review link for feedback.
Export as SCORM, PDF, website, or embed code.
👉 For more detail on each method, see Sharing & Publishing
FAQs
Does the Editor autosave my work?
Yes. Every change saves automatically to the cloud as you work.
Can I duplicate a page or tile?
Yes. For a tile, select it and choose Duplicate from the three-dot menu (⋯) in the toolbar above it. For a page, use the ... menu on the page thumbnail in the Left Sidebar, or right-click the thumbnail.
You can also do it from the keyboard. With a tile or page selected, Cmd + D (Mac) or Ctrl + D (Windows) duplicates it in place. To put a copy somewhere else, use Cmd + C / Ctrl + C to copy and Cmd + V / Ctrl + V to paste — this works across lessons too, so you can copy a page out of one lesson and paste it into another.
Can I undo edits?
Yes. You can undo and redo actions using standard keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Y on Windows, or Cmd + Z and Cmd + Shift + Z on Mac.
What is the Storyboard, and do I have to use it?
The Storyboard is the planning step behind an AI-generated lesson — it holds your objectives, tone, and page outline, and the AI builds the lesson from it. It's optional. If you create a lesson by importing a document or by describing what you want, Mindsmith builds a Storyboard for you and you'll see the tab at the top. If you start from a blank lesson, there's no Storyboard and you build pages yourself in the Editor. Either way you can keep editing the pages directly.
Can I save and reuse a theme?
Yes. Themes can be saved in your workspace settings and instantly applied to any future lessons.
Can I save custom page templates? Yes! You can design a perfect page structure, click the ... menu on that page in the Left Sidebar, and select "Create Page Template" to easily reuse that layout later.
Where is the text formatting toolbar? The rich text toolbar appears automatically when you select text within a tile. It follows your text selection and cannot be moved to a fixed position. To access formatting options, simply highlight the text you want to format.
How do I delete a page? Click the ... menu on the page thumbnail in the Left Sidebar (Filmstrip) and select Delete. You can also right-click on a page thumbnail for the same options.
Where is the AI Agent panel? The AI Agent is fixed at the bottom center of the editor. You can expand it by clicking the input field, and resize the chat history area by dragging the top edge of the panel up or down. The panel cannot be moved to a different position on the screen.
Can I talk to the Agent instead of typing? Yes. Click the input field to expand the Agent panel, then click the microphone icon and speak your request — Mindsmith transcribes it into the Agent for you.
What's Next? Suggested Reading
Now that you know your way around the Editor, try:
Page Types — types of lesson content
AI Prompting Tips — getting the most from AI features
AI Assistant — faster, smarter lesson building
Interactive Tiles — flashcards, accordions, tabs, and more
Branching Scenarios — build interactive decision trees