Creating an internote

Four templates. Blank opens a single empty scene. Maths, Programming and Literature arrive with the example blocks that subject tends to need — a worked derivation, a runnable snippet, a passage with annotations — which makes them useful as a demonstration even if you delete everything in them.

To bring in a document you already have, switch to Upload .chalk File. The title, description and tags fill themselves in from the file, so you are confirming what the file says rather than retyping it.

The title is the one thing worth getting roughly right up front, because it is what appears everywhere the internote does. It stays editable from the title header afterwards.

Tags are how people find work in Explore, which filters by subject and subtopic. You can add up to seven. Fewer, accurate tags beat seven loose ones: an internote tagged with everything turns up in searches it does not answer, which readers learn to skip.

Ticking Lesson says the internote is structured teaching material rather than an explainer, a report or a write-up. It does two things.

It puts the internote in front of readers who turn on the Lessons filter in Explore. And for readers who have Ask, it changes what Ask does: inside a lesson it acts as a tutor and guides a reader’s thinking on the interactive questions rather than giving the answer. Outside one it answers directly — withholding an answer from somebody reading a report is not teaching, it is obstruction.

Plenty of good internotes are not lessons. The flag is a claim about format, not quality, and you can change it later from the title header.

If you contribute to a site, an Owner choice appears. Keep it Personal and the internote is yours. Hand it to a site and it is published under the site’s name, and the site’s other contributors can edit it.

This is not decided only up front — an internote that started out personal can be handed over later from the editor’s overflow menu. See Joining and contributing.

Visibility and publishing are two separate things, and confusing them is the most common way to be surprised by who can see your work.

Visibility

Who may see it. Public means anyone; Private means you and the people you have shared it with.

Published

Whether there is anything for them to see yet. Until you publish, an internote is a draft that nobody but you can open — public visibility included.

So a public draft is still invisible, and a published private internote is still limited to your share list. Both are changeable at any point.