Dr. Maimuna Musarrat, EdTech Consultant and CEO, E-Home-School.com
The COVID-19 has changed everybody’s lives in many ways. Everyone has been forced to adapt to new ways of doing things. Some lost their jobs, some started new initiatives, some of us are thriving in this new system while others are striving hard.
For educators, the change seems to be the most drastic. A lot of the educational institutions have shifted to online learning in a very short period of time. In most cases, this came without proper training or even an audit of whether the teachers have the required skills and equipment. In reality, teaching online is very different from teaching face-to-face. It requires a teacher to completely shift the teaching pedagogy and use different techniques to engage learners.
If you are a teacher who prefers to move around the class and observe your students, you are now bound in a chair and only can look at the names of the students (and probably going through an internal battle of remembering the face of that particular student). Is that the real student or their sibling, or friend, or maybe even parent, sitting there? How come the student who never raised his hand in the class is suddenly very chatty in the chatbox?
I hear you!
If you are the teacher who loved to fill every blank space on the whiteboard, you are probably stuck with a screen with limited flexibility. Without the proper tools you can’t even “write” on the screen! And the mouse doesn’t work the same way as a hand, does itt?
Some teachers have not even used a PowerPoint presentation before. How do they go on and teach their lessons! Especially if their lessons require equations and diagrams using all sorts of handstrokes?
The truth is, it’s tough! You can’t be just told overnight that you have to change everything you have been doing for x number of years and still be expected to deliver the same results.
So what’s the solution? How can you become just as good at teaching online as you were in teaching face-to-face? How can you get your students to collaborate? Will you be able to engage them like you did face-to-face?
As an EdTech researcher, I feel you! That’s why I have enlisted out three simple tools that you (probably are already using and) can use to make your lessons more engaging. These are simple and free to use. You may have already heard them, and have maybe used them to some sense. I have tried to categorise them based on user competency so you would know if it’s useful for you or not. I have also tried to share about Mentimeter, which you could use in your classroom too:
Mentimeter (mentimeter.com)
This is a tool for you to do online live interactive presentations. If you are the sort of teacher who likes to ask questions and assess your students’ knowledge about something before you want to teach them the concept you will love this.
What you need to do?
It requires a bit of extra work BEFORE the lesson. You need to go to mentimeter.com and sign up. When you log in to the site, you can see multiple ways of creating a presentation. You can choose to use multiple choice, or word cloud options or whatever you like from the given templates.
Note that you are given a code on the top. Note down this code.
In the class, you have to tell your students to go to menti.com and use the given code to “vote”. The students will be able to do this from a Smartphone or a laptop.
Once the students give their answers, you can check the results live and even export the data for further analysis.
Students will be engaged and thrilled to see their answers on the screen – you can cast this live by sharing this screen with the students while they vote.
Word cloud is particularly interesting as the word cloud is generated live based on the responses of the students.
Level of technical difficulty: Medium. Doesn’t require installing any new programs.
Applications: You can use this for generating feedback after the class, to see whether the students have grasped the concept.
You can also use this to assess before and after a lesson to see whether students have understood the concept.
There are numerous other applications that you could use this for. It is particularly useful for older learners rather than younger learners.
Image: what you will see
What your participants/students would see:
To try out as a participant: Go to menti.com and use the code 6070001 and try out by choosing an answer.
What do you think could be some other applications of this tool?
What other tools do you use in your classroom to engage with students?
Share your thoughts in the comments!
