Month: October 2020

Categories
Education Online Education

Top 5 Free Tools to Make Your Online Classes More Interactive

How to keep students engaged in an online course.
Illustration courtesy of the Author. Made with Canva.

Keep your students engaged and learning

We all know remote teaching is challenging. While we know online classes are the best option in the current context, there is no secret about how difficult it can be to ensure students’ learning and active involvement.

Let’s be honest, Zoom classes and traditional slides are not enough. Students are not participating, and unfortunately, they are not learning. This is not completely their fault. It’s not because they don’t care, but because they struggle. They struggle to stay focus; they struggle to connect with others; they struggle to become active learners.

And it’s not our fault either, we are all doing our best. We are trying to adapt to extreme circumstances, without proper training, support, or even enough time to change the curriculum. 

The good news is that there are plenty of tools and online resources out there to help us make our classes more engaging and interactive. 

To save you time and help you choose the right tools for your classes, I have selected 5 of my favorite tools for online education. In this post, I’ll give you a hint to some of the best-in-market, low-budget, and user-friendly applications for improving the online learning experience and some ideas on how to use them.

Let’s start.

1. Explain Everything

Explain Everything is my favorite interactive whiteboard platform. And quite frankly is much more than a collaborative whiteboard. With Explain Everything, you can create video beats about your lecture topics and share it with students to check for understanding. You can either record your slideshow while you speak, or draw and write on the whiteboard and record everything you said and add to it. 

Another pretty interesting functionality is the collaborative whiteboard. You can create groups and invite your students to collaborate on projects. Students can work on cloud projects simultaneously or at their own pace, and you have an eye on their work in real-time. This is great both for synchronous and asynchronous group work. What I love about this is that participants that join the whiteboard at the same time can hear one another thanks to their audio chat.

Finally, you can also livecast your whiteboard and keep your online classes engaging. Either by using a videoconferencing system (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, etc) or just by sharing the whiteboard link, participants can see in real-time what’s happening. This is a great option for big sized synchronous classes. 

Explain Everything is free up to three simultaneous projects, but for only 3 dollars per month, you get access to unlimited projects, slides, and recordings. 

2. Mural

Mural is also one of my favorite apps for interactive online learning and visual collaboration. Mural is essentially a remote design thinking platform, but its potential for education is outstanding.

As an educator, you can invite up to 100 members or guests to your workspace and collaborate with students and other faculty in real-time. You can have dedicated rooms for each class or group of students to encourage teamwork and project-based learning. Inside each room you can create several murals that can be set to private or public, depending on how you want to share it. 

Screenshot from the Author

Mural works as a big whiteboard that you can organize in different small areas to outline your lecture session. From course kick-offs, warm-ups and energizers, brainstorming, traditional slide-decks, the possibilities with Mural are infinite. 

The functionalities I love the most are their chronometer, the celebrate button, and the facilitator superpowers. With the chronometer you can set up timing for each activity in the Mural and thus plan with more precision each of your lectures, ensuring also time for breaks. The celebrate button is just a lovely confetti party that you can throw every time the class completes an activity. Everyone will get the confetti party on their screen. This is great for rewarding effort and progress. Finally, you can assign Facilitator superpowers to your students so they take the leader role on their team. Facilitator superpowers include the possibility of timing activities, start voting sessions, and celebrate task completion. Giving facilitator superpowers to students is an original way to engage your students and make them accountable for their learning.

Mural is free for educators and students. You just need to create an account with your institutional address and provide proof of your status. For an education plan you can apply here. 

3. Playfactile

PlayFactile is a learning platform that lets teachers create engaging Jeopardy-style quiz games for the classroom. You can create and personalize your own game boards or use pre-made quizzes shared by the community. With PlayFactile you can either host live jeopardy games, regular multiple choice quizzes, memory games, and create study flashcards to improve students’ learning proficiency. 

Screenshot from Author.

These jeopardy games can be a great option to complement the traditional slide lectures, as you can divide the board into different topics and use it as a kick-off or wrap up activity. Students can then review their learning while playing, and you can instantly complement concepts when doubts arise. 

Students can play individually or in teams and they can choose beautiful avatars and nicknames. You can control whether they use their names or a default nickname. 

With the free version, you can create up to 5 teams for each game and you can host up to 3 games. With the education version, only 5 USD per month, you can play and create as many games as you want and have over 50 teams. The premium account offers other amazing features like buzzer mode, memory and choice games, and share flashcards.

4. Edpuzzle

I recently came upon Edpuzzle and I’m convinced of its potential for enhancing online learning. Edpuzzle is a video platform where you can create and edit videos from the web and use them in your classroom. Take any video from YouTube, Khan Academy, Learn Zillion, or your own and build your lessons around them. 

Video and visuals are more effective for learning than traditional slides, but most of us, teachers and professors, don’t have time to create sketch videos for every lesson. Here’s where Edpuzzle stands out. You can just turn existing videos from any platform and tailored them for learning. 

You can use any video and transform it into engaging video lectures thanks to the embedded questions and voice-over features. You can just insert open-ended and multiple-choice questions all along the video to check for understanding. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Screenshot by the Author.

Edpuzzle takes videos to another level, converting them into video lessons. If you want to make sure your students watch and actually learn from the video, then Edpuzzle is just the right tool. 

What I love about this app is that you can integrate it with Explain Everything to upload your whiteboard videos and convert them into quizzes. Edpuzzle is free.

5. Sli.do

Sli.do is a great tool for promoting active learning in online classes. It helps you involve your students in the lectures. The possibilities are endless. With Sli.do you can empower your students to ask questions, vote in polls, and be a part of the lecture by using a simple Q&A and polling tool.

  • With polls, you can learn if your lecture’s content resonates with your students. You can also use them to drive meaningful discussions in your class.
  • Use quizzes to find out how much your students remember from your lectures. Use them to recap the content from the last topic. Or motivate your students to pay attention during your lecture by hosting a live quiz.
  • Use the Q&A feature to collect students’ questions and feedback throughout your lecture and address them as they come or in a dedicated Q&A session at the end of your class. You and your students can upvote and provide answers in real-time, making peer-learning possible.

Another awesome feature is the switcher app. With Slido Switcher, you can display polls or questions on top of your presentation using your smartphone as a remote control. Whether you use PowerPoint or Keynote, with the Switcher app you can change seamlessly between your presentation and the Slido event.

Sli.do offers an education package starting at $5 per month. But you can also use the free version for up to 100 participants and one event at a time.

If you, like me, are interested in making your online classes more engaging, then I’d love to hear what are your strategies and tools you are using in your classroom. Drop your comments with ideas or questions here below.

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Categories
Education Online Education

15 Free Digital Tools to Boost Students’ Engagement Online

15 Free Digital Tools to Boost Students’ Engagement Online
Illustration courtesy of the Author

15 Free Digital Tools to Boost Students’ Engagement Online

A review of digital tools and ideas for teachers to support formative assessment in online classrooms

Engaging students online is nothing like engaging students in physical classrooms. It can be challenging, especially in times of crisis as students have to deal with more stress and anxiety.

For many learners, online learning is a new experience. And even when they have the best intentions, they can easily get distracted and lose interest. This can cause a higher number of students dropping out of school or resiting classes. Also, students with special needs and learning disorders are more likely to feel lost and disengage.

While engaging students online can be more challenging, the learning experience can be as good or even better than in the traditional physical classroom. With the proper planning and tools, remote teaching can be as effective as in-person teaching.

To save you time, effort, and money, I have compiled a list of the top free tools to increase your students’ engagement online. No matter if you are a newbie or an expert, these tools are the best in their market and are free, or almost.

This post will tell you everything you need to know about from the best online tools and resources for engaging students online.

Collaborative Annotation

1. Diigo

Diigo is a social bookmarking with excellent organization tools. The main value of Diigo is how it increases both students and teacher productivity while making it fun. Teachers can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks and access to premium functionalities for free (apply here).

You can create your personal library in the cloud for each of your courses, with links, pages, notes, pictures, and invite students so that they can access it and annotate. Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums. Students can then collaborate and all read the same article and discuss synchronously right on the page.

You can also provide feedback to students’ work and writings by posting sticky notes and making screen captures and marking it up. Diigo provides powerful search capabilities.

You can find anything easily, even your own annotations. Diigo also provides excellent organization capabilities, with both tagging and lists, to suit different needs.

2. Evernote

Evernote is one of my favorite apps for learning. Is one powerful tool. Evernote is a note-taking app that can do much more than just taking notes. Like diigo, Evernote lets you save any content, forever. With Evernote you can do almost everything you want, is like a second brain. From a simple checklist to writing business plans, from class note-taking to academic research, from organizing your ideas to organizing your team.

Evernote is compatible with all kinds of devices and operating systems, and it is accessible also through the web app. You can share with your students complete notebooks, composed of unique resources, and organize it with tags. Guests are allowed to annotate and collaborate if you give them permission, or just read if you restrict it.

Evernote has a free version that’s quite complete for students. But the premium version is accessible and gives you the power to add notes to pdf files, do a text search on all your content, save and access revision history of your notes, send yourself emails with notes and integrate other apps like google drive. For a quick guide on how to use Evernote, you can read this article.

3. Notion

Notion started as a collaborative document editor. But you can do many other things. Students can use it to take and share notes in class or to organize their tasks with to-do lists.

But as an educator Notion can be the perfect workspace for your syllabi, notes, assignments, grades, and much more. You can create your course syllabi and share it with your students or create a wiki for the class.

Notion offers built-in templates that make student and teachers’ life easier. Students can find tools for building grade calculators, personal budget, job applications. While teachers can adopt ready-to-use templates for lesson plans, schedules, and class directory.

Notion is free for both students and educators. With an official institutional email address, you get access to unlimited block storage and no file upload limit.

4. Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is is not like any other annotation tool. If I have to be honest, is one of my favorites. Not only it’s a remarkable tool, but it is also open-source and completely free. Hypothes.is goes beyond traditional digital annotation, they enable sentence-level note-taking or discussion on classroom reading, news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation, and more. The beautiful about it is that it promotes web literacy and digital citizenship in students, more than any other app.

Educators need to create an account and then send the registration link to their students. Students will then be able to access the readings assignments and start annotating. You can also create private annotation groups. So, for example, if you want your students to work in smaller groups, you can send them special links. This link will also serve as the group home page with a list of members and texts annotated by the group. You can also link to a stream of annotations created by group members from the group home page.

Hypothes.is has a Chrome browser extension and is compatible with almost all Learning Management Systems (Canva, and Moodle included). For a quick guide on how to use it in your classroom, go here.

Visual collaboration and communication tools are also a brilliant way to make your online classes more dynamic and to motivate your students to be more active. There are several apps for doing this, but Mural and Miro are my favorite.

Visual Collaboration

5. Mural

A digital workspace for visual collaboration. As an educator, you can apply for a free facilitator account and start collaborating with other educators and students. With the educator account, you can have up to 10 team members (which can edit, facilitate and create murals) and 20 guests (only for collaborating to murals you give them access to) to your mural spaces. With Mural you can conduct virtual brain-storming sessions, use canvas layouts and frameworks designed by experts for different activities (business model, mind-mapping, empathy map, many others). you can break out your classroom in groups so that students’ teams can collaborate in different workspaces. You can apply for a Mural educator account here. Here you can find a tutorial on how to use Mural for education.

6. Miro

Similar to Mural, Miro is an app that acts as a virtual whiteboard for team collaboration. Educators and students can apply for a free education account that has the same functionalities as the pro version. Even if you don’t apply for the education account, you can create your free account and have up to 3 whiteboards to play with. You can invite an unlimited number of viewers and have small teams collaborating in your whiteboards. Otherwise, with the educational plan, you can invite and collaborate with as many students as you want and create unlimited whiteboards. To apply for an education account, you just need to apply here.

Engagement and gamification

Games are by far the most effective way to keep students engaged in learning, off and online. There is nothing more gratifying for learners than getting rewards and recognition when they work hard for it. Not only games are fun, but they facilitate learning. There are plenty of apps available for educators (and anyone else) for creating challenges, evaluations, and assignments while leaving the boring side apart. These two are my favorite.

7. Kahoot

The most famous interactive quiz platform is Kahoot, a free student-response that uses many gamification techniques to engage students’ participation and enhance learning. With Kahoot, you can both host live quizzes and self-paced challenges for out-of-class review. You can play Kahoot games in single mode or in team mode and offer plenty of fun features to stimulate students to play and learn. Kahoot offers a basic free plan where you can invite up to 50 players, host online games, play, and create as many Kahoots as you want and have assessments of reports ready to download. Premium plans start at 5 USD per month and you get more amazing features and more players.

8. Sli.do

With sli.do you can empower your students to ask questions, vote in polls, and be a part of the lecture by using a simple Q&A and polling tool. Sli.do is a great tool for promoting active learning in online classes. It allows you to involve your students in your lecture and give them the freedom to express their opinion via live polls, quizzes, brainstorming. The possibilities are vast.

  • With polls, you can learn if your lecture’s content resonates with your students. You can also use them to drive meaningful discussions in your class.
  • Use quizzes to find out how much your students remember from your lectures. Use them to recap the content from the last lecture. Or motivate your students to pay attention during your lecture by hosting a quiz at the end.
  • Use the questions feature to collect students’ questions throughout your lecture and address them as they come in or in a dedicated Q&A session at the end of your class. You and your students can upvote and provide their answers in real-time, making peer-learning possible.

Another awesome feature is the switcher app. With Slido Switcher, you can display polls or questions on top of your presentation using your smartphone as a remote control. Whether you use PowerPoint, Keynote, or Prezi, our Switcher app allows you to switch seamlessly between your presentation and Slido.

Sli.do offers an education package starting at $5 per month. But you can also use the free version for free for up to 100 participants.

9. Factile

Have you ever played jeopardy? Well, Factile is a free learning platform that lets teachers create engaging Jeopardy-style quiz games for the classroom. You can create and personalize your own game boards or use pre-made quizzes shared by the community. With Factile you can either host jeopardy games, regular multiple choice quizzes, memory games, and create study flashcards to improve students’ learning proficiency. As Kahoot, you can play Factile in teams or individually. With the free version you can create up to 5 teams for each game and you can host up to 3 games. For as little at 5 USD per month, you can play and create as many games as you want and have over 50 teams. The premium account offers other amazing features like buzzer mode, play memory and choice games, play, and share flashcards.

Other great free apps for quizzes and assessments are quizziz and quizlet.

Interactive Activities

Online assessment and homework need not be boring. There are plenty of tools you can use to overcome the physical distancing and the lack of face-to-face interaction between you and your students. Collaboration and social co-creation are possible online thanks to technology. These are my favorite/

10. Wakelet

A free platform that allows you to curate and organize content from different platforms to save and share with students, colleagues, and friends. You need to create a collection — something like hashtags topics on Instagram — and students can contribute to adding text, pdf, videos, URLs, images, and Flipgrid shorts. These are brilliant ways for students to express their learning. Apart from this, the teacher can encourage creativity among the learners by inviting students to approach the assessment the way they want to. The idea behind Wakelet is to curate content like you will do for blogs (like Medium) or magazines. You can synthesize a bunch of different content, filter out the noise, and keep what is valuable in one sole collection to better communicate about a specific concept or topic. Wakalet is completely free and its potential is amazing.

11. Flipgrid

Flipgrid is a free social learning app to create and share short and exceptional videos. As an educator, you have free access to the app and you can create different grids — classrooms — and topics of discussion. Each grid has a unique code that you can share with your students so they can access the topics and the videos being posted by the professors and classmates. It is a magnificent tool for reflective learning and for building solid learning communities within your classes. As an educator you can post discussion prompts and students may respond with short videos, whether they are learning in class or at home. Flipgrid is completely free. For more info on how to use it, read the beginner’s guide here.

Backchannel discussion

Backchannel discussions are a great way for learners to have an on-topic conversation during a lecture. It is an effective way to keep your students engaged during an online session and continue the conversation afterward.

Unlike quiz tools like Kahoot, backchannels are not based on competition or gamification. The aim is not to test students’ knowledge. Instead, a backchannel is an informal way for students to interact with the educator and their classmates in the form of an online forum designed to complement classroom activity.

12. Slack

Initially conceived for business team communication and project management, slack can also be an outstanding tool for education. From planning and teaching curriculum to managing student services, slack offers amazing functionalities for both students and educators. You can create one workspace for each course, each with a set of channels for classroom work, discussion, group projects, and office hours. Students can use channels to post clarifying questions and comments throughout the lesson, and their classmates can use emoji reactions to second questions or show support for comments. Slack is compatible with Zoom, so when running a virtual classroom on Zoom you can directly access slack channels and questions. You can use threads to organize smaller group discussions around specific topics during the class. Slack is free, but for a better experience and more control over your interactions, and data premium plan is a better option. Slack offers 85% discount on the premium plan to education institutions. You can apply here.

13. Padlet

Padlet is a productivity software and we are pretty keen on making your work life easier. It’s essentially an online bulletin board, something like a notice board. It is an outstanding tool for making classes more interactive as it has a wide range of features such as sharing and collaborating documents, videos, post. But the best of it is their Backchannel option.

Padlet Backchannel provides a familiar messaging interface for both synchronous and asynchronous class discussions. You can use Padlet for student conversations during a lecture, for brainstorming ideas, or for Q&A session. You can make your Backchannels private, password-protected, secret, or fully public. You can also make them read-only or add admins. Another exceptional functionality is their Profanity filter that replaces bad words with emojis. You can also turn on discussion moderation and approve all messages before they show up for other readers.

While Padlet is not for free, it is still accessible at 99$/year per educator and includes unlimited student accounts.

Video conferencing and virtual classroom

Video conferencing is one of the best ways to get in touch with your students remotely. It’s a brilliant tool for having engaging conversations and lectures where you need interaction and peer discussion.

14. Zoom

The most common software for videoconferencing used by businesses and educators. Zoom has a freemium service. It’s great for hosting webinars, meetings, group collaborations, and calls. With a free account, you can invite up to 100 participants, have face-to-face interviews, and up to 40 minutes of group conference. With the current pandemic situation, Zoom has removed the 40 minute limit for educators. You just need to create an account with your institutional email address.

15. BigBlueButton

An alternative open source web conferencing system for online learning. The goal of the project is to provide remote students with a high-quality online learning experience. BigBlueButton is amazing because you can have the same Zoom pro functionalities for free. The software is really user-friendly. BBB has a whiteboard that you can share with your participants, you can breakout rooms for team collaboration and create polls during your virtual lecture. Here you can find a user guide on how to use BigBlueButton for education.

Another great software is google meet, which you can access for free if you have a google classroom account. Also, you have Newrow which offers amazing functionalities with its pro version.

Final words

While engaging students online can be more challenging, the learning experience can be as good or even better than in the traditional physical classroom. With the proper planning and tools, remote teaching can be as effective as in-person teaching.

You can anticipate and prevent students’ disengagement and procrastination by implementing these tools.

Engaging students online is not much more difficult than engaging with them in a physical classroom. Online methods provide a wide range of alternatives to promote active learning and teamwork.

Ready to shift to Online Education? Receive monthly tips and tricks on how to make your online classes more engaging.

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Education Online Education

10 Alternative Ideas for Assessing Students’ Knowledge and Skills Online

Vector with books, exams and a happy face

Redefining Student’s Learning Assessment for Online Teaching

We are changing approaches, shifting from traditional master class to hybrid, blended, and reverse learning. So why are we taking so much time in changing also the way we assess students?

Why do we still think multiple-choice exams, exercise calculations, or case studies are the best and only way to assess learning and knowledge? Who are we kidding?

The pandemic situation and the abrupt shift of schools and universities to remote teaching are finally opening our eyes: the way we assess students’ knowledge and skills need to change.

I’ve seen many high-ranked schools investing in very expensive software for remote testing and proctoring. These are technologies guaranteeing students don’t cheat during a remote exam sitting session. The software locks down the student device to ensure they open no other windows and provides video and audio monitoring throughout the entire exam.

Hello GDPR and goodbye student privacy!

I’ve seen also professors asking the students to do a 360° tour of their rooms before sitting the exam to ensure there is no whistleblower.

Is this what we want to do now? Are we changing our roles into prison guards?

Traditional assessment methods are far from being a fair indicator of intelligence, knowledge, skills, or effort. And they don’t reflect whatsoever the abilities and preparedness for work life.

Poor performance in an exam has nothing to do with incompetence or lack of knowledge. Many students suffer from attention deficit, hyperactive disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and other forms of attention and learning disorders. Other students just suffer from anxiety, stress, and fear of judgment and evaluation. Others have just bad luck.

The current situation is probably the best opportunity for us, educators, to change the way we approach student assessment of knowledge and learning outcomes.

We need to think about more appropriate assessment methods that encourage reflection, learning, and skills development.

Below, I discuss different effective methods for assessing students’ learning outcomes both online and offline.

1. Discussions and Socratic seminars

Online discussions and Socratic seminars are excellent ways to assess students’ understanding, reflection, and application of concepts. Asking specific, open-ended questions (or topics) can lead to mindful discussions and to the creation of knowledge. Students can share and respond to each other’s ideas with text, images, and videos. These can unfold asynchronously (over time) through open public forums like Quora or Reddit — functionalities also available in Moodle and Canvas. Alternatively, the discussion can happen synchronously by using videoconferencing tools like Zoom and other knowledge management and communication systems like Slack. Here, it’s important to clarify from the beginning your expectations on student’s participation and how their participation will translate into grades.

2. Explanatory student’s videos

Students can be really creative when it comes to recording and editing videos. You can capitalize on those skills and ask them to create short explanatory videos to present a concept learned in class. They can use animations, interviews, hand drawing, or slide decks to create their videos. Then they can share it into the course platform (like Canvas or Moodle) so that their classmates can access it and give their feedback. You can also use social media video sharing apps like Flipgrid, Instagram, or Tiktok. The choice should depend on how you want to manage Data and how comfortable you (and your students) feel with using social media. Flipgrid in this case can be the best compromise as it’s closed only for your class and you have more control over data protection and safety.

3. Self-assessment and retrospective learning

Self-assessment is a great opportunity for students to share their thoughts on the course, the process of learning, their performance, and many more. No one is better placed to know how much effort they put in learning and how much they’ve learned that students themselves. Self-assessment is not only a mean to know how good a student performs in a class, but is an opportunity for the student to learn to judge objectively his/her skills and knowledge. But self-assessment is not always easy. It’s crucial to clarify to the student the importance of honesty, transparency, and the concept of impostor syndrome when using self-assessment. Instructors can provide a sample assessment grid and questions to facilitate the activity.

The agile methodology for management and innovation uses “agile retrospectives” as an opportunity to learn and improve by reflecting on past events and behaviors. The idea of retrospectives is to have participants share their thoughts after each lecture on the following questions:

  • What I’ve learned?
  • What worked well? What did I enjoy?
  • What didn’t work well? What did I find challenging?
  • What are we going to try to do differently?

There are plenty of retrospective activities to derive the lessons learned, and many of them can be done remotely through a visual collaboration platform. But this can also be done asynchronously. Students can use original formats to share their retrospective lessons. Blog entries, 1-minute videos, mind maps, picture collage. Apps such Flipgrid, Wakalet, Instagram, or Pinterest work great for this kind of activity.

4. Simulations and Labs

Students can engage with real-world data or use simulations of laboratory environments. These are useful for practicing skills of the discipline and for engaging in real-world problems. While most simulation games are pricy, you can also find top quality free simulation games on the web. You can also create your own games and simulations easily, even when you don’t know how to code. Nick Case has built different simulations and game designer tools for people with no coding skills, check them out here. You can also use scratch to code games easily.

5. Group Projects

Online collaborations allow students to develop team spirit and team management skills. Working in teams is not only good for students, but it’s also good for educators, as assessment and tutoring can be easier. You can divide your class into several teams of up to 4 students so that each team works on a specific project. There are different alternatives for group projects. You can assign different topics to each group or the same problem to all the teams. Each team approaches differently the topic even when the major topic is shared by the entire class. Canva or Moodle allows you to create group assignments and divide the class into teams. Zoom, BigBlueButton, Glowbl, and Meet also allow you separate teams in different rooms, so when having online video conferencing you can provide personalized tutoring to each group. You can also use visual collaboration software like Mural or Miro for virtual teamwork.

6. Peer Review

Feedback from peers can motivate students to learn from each other. It is also probably one of the most effective approaches to learning. Evaluating peer work helps students to better grab concepts and knowledge. They not only understand better the topics, but they also develop critical and analytical thinking. Correcting the work of others requires students to understand the what, the why, and the how. It’s important to guide students to give each other valuable feedback using rubrics or other prompts. Be sure you provide a sample evaluation grid and examples on how to provide constructive feedback. Provide a list of guiding questions for them to ask each other and so they can evaluate objectively their classmates. To ensure the quality of peer review, you can also include a grade to the peer review activity. You can ask students to evaluate the quality and usefulness of the feedback and they received from their peers.

7. Blogs

Journaling is a great way to reflect on learning and documenting the process. Blogs can allow students to communicate their ideas in a more creative and informal format. There are several platforms that can be used for free by students and professors to create specific class blogs. You can use Medium and create a publication — a collection of stories — for each classroom. Students will then submit their pieces to the publication and you will review them. They are learning not only to write better but also to create content for the online community. They can learn how to apply SEO techniques and digital marketing. But mostly they can develop self-awareness and reflective thinking. There are other platforms that work for blogging like Wakalet, Blogger, or WordPress. Chose the one you prefer.

8.Creative Projects

Creativity is one of the most wanted skills by recruiters. Unfortunately, we give little space to boost student creativity. Using creative projects as a means of assessment is an opportunity to improve this skill in students and improve their learning. Creative projects can include original formats: Music, photography, writing, drawing, painting, etc. The idea is to let student’s imagination fly and use their artistic side to show their learning. Using this kind of format not only improves students’ creativity but also their ability to understand and digest the concepts and knowledge gained during the course. It also improves problem-solving skills and encourages students to think about a problem from original angles. Also, It’s a useful method to solve wicked problems. It’s important to define the criteria of assessment and how it translates into grades. For example, originality might be an important aspect of the grade, but also the ability to pass on knowledge to their classmates — that is, clarity of their presentation — is essential.

9. Open innovation challenges

Professors can use crowdsourcing or open innovation platforms to encourage students to work on real-life problems. Platforms like Agorize connects organizations with students to solve strategic problems and find innovative solutions. Students are confronted with real business (or social) problems and have to apply all their knowledge to come up with a suitable solution. Open innovation platforms are a great opportunity for students to team up with students all around the globe and collaborate virtually while applying their expertise to respond to the challenge. Open innovation promotes critical thinking, the ability to overcome concrete problems, creativity, teamwork, and innovative behavior. Also, students are more likely to show motivation and commitment to their learning process, as they apply their skills in real-life situations and get immediate feedback from the organizations and the crowd.

10. Games & Interactive Competitions

Hosting interactive quizzes during your online sessions are a great way to evaluate student knowledge and engagement. The most famous interactive quiz platform is Kahoot, a free student-response that uses all sorts of gamification techniques to engage students’ participation and enhance learning. With Kahoot, you can both host live quizzes as well as self-paced challenges for out-of-class review. Kahoot games can be played in single mode or in team mode and offers plenty of fun features to stimulate students to play and learn. Another great platform for live learning games is Factile. With Factile you can either host jeopardy games, regular multiple choice quizzes, memory games, and create study flashcards to improve students’ learning proficiency. As Kahoot, Factile can be played in teams or individually. You can also use Flipgrid, Flippitynet, Quizlet, and Socratic to create games.

Categories
Education Online Education

How To Create a Sense of Community in your Classroom in 5 Steps

An illustration with students doing a high five in a physical classroom and a someone connecting in a virtual class.
Illustration courtesy of the Author

Create an authentic sense of community in your classroom, regardless of the pandemic

Building a sense of community in a classroom is crucial for learning. The sense of belonging increases students’ motivation to learn, willingness to help each other, satisfaction with their academic programs, and cognitive learning. 

The beginning of the year is the best moment to create a sense of community in your classroom. And while this year feels very different for many of us, there’s no reason we can’t create connections with our students.

No matter if our classes are 100% virtual, or hybrid, or blended, or in-person, creating a sense of community in your classroom is not that difficult, and it will always be beneficial. 

Researchers identify 4 essential elements that create a sense of community: 

  1. Mutual interdependence among members
  2. Connectedness & trust
  3. Interactivity
  4. Shared values and goals

In this post, I go through 5 simple steps that will help you forge bonds and create a classroom environment where every student feels safe and part of the community. 

No matter what’s the format of your course and what are the channels you’re using. Creating a sense of community is this simple, and the learning outcomes are worth it.

Let’s take a look.

1. Define a common goal

A shared culture is only possible when there are shared goals, values, and beliefs. 

The first step to creating a sense of community is defining common goals, values, and agreements. And I’m not talking about the intended learning outcomes you have listed on your syllabi. I’m talking about student’s shared goals.

These common goals are crucial to building trust and connections among students, as well as developing a sense of responsibility. The goals can be a mix of learning goals and life goals. They should be adapted to the type of course, the level and depth of study, the duration of the course, the maturity level of students, and the initial knowledge they have. 

The key idea here is to give students the opportunity to set up their own shared goals, values, and agreements at the beginning of the course. While it might be a good idea to have some outlines on these three elements to guide the class, students must reflect and work on building their own community standards. This not only will increase their motivation towards learning, but it also will hold them accountable for achieving their objectives and complying with the community agreements. 

Use the first half-hour of your lecture to work on the community goals, values, and agreements. Ask your students to work in small groups and reflect on what are the goals they should achieve at the end of the course, and have them classify by priority (top, mid, low). Then have them discuss with the other groups to determine which goals are common and finally have them vote. This activity can be done through a brainstorming session with post-its and voting stickers, but it can be also conducted remotely with tools like Mural or Miro.  

We can do the same to reflect on classroom values and agreements. For example, you can ask them to brainstorm on what are appropriate/inappropriate behaviors both in physical and virtual lectures, and then make them ‘sign’ the agreement contract.

Finally, you can ask questions such as “How will we help each other adhere to the agreements we’ve adopted? What forms of reminders will you prefer and allow?” This will help you and students take actionable steps to accomplish those objectives and keep up with the community norms.

2. Use a common reward system

Recognizing individual accomplishments is a great way to motivate learning. Positive psychology studies show that by creating positive affect —  like giving constant encouragement or focusing on students’ strengths rather than weakness —  improves students’ self-efficacy. Learners with higher self-efficacy are more likely to achieve their goals and overcome challenges.  

Also, gamification has been proven to be a great approach for teaching as it enhances students’ engagement and learning. 

However, relying solely on individual rewards and recognition might also have a negative effect on learners, as it can increase the feeling of isolation of some students, especially those who are less extroverted or who struggle with some topics. 

A great way to overcome the pitfalls of individual recognition is by building a common reward system. The principal aim is to increase connectedness, trust, and interdependence between students. 

Instead of working individually to achieve their personal learning goals and secure their reward, students work as a group to achieve the community goals and obtain a common (bigger) reward. 

There are plenty of ways you can set up a common reward system, but let me give you an example. 

You can imagine a set of badges that go in line with the class goals, like “Effective communicator” or “Amazing tutor” or “Math genius”, or whatever suits your class goals and content. The idea is to encourage every student to obtain one badge, of course, after accomplishing the task for it, and if at the end of the class every student has gained a personal badge a common reward is revealed. The common reward can be something like “One extra week to finish mid-term paper” or “no-homework for tomorrow” or “one point in the final exam for everyone”. The idea here is to provide a greater and more satisfying collective reward than just individual recognition.

You recognize individual progress (badges) but also collaborative progress (big common reward). This encourages students to work in cooperation rather than in competition towards their common goals, increasing their sense of interdependence, connectedness, and belonging. 

3. Keep the discussion going

Most of the learning happens outside the classroom when students are home and have to prepare assignments. Keep the conversation going even after the lecture, and provide a space where students can ask, comment, and give feedback regarding the lecture material, their struggles, and their learning experience. 

Backchannel discussions are a great way for learners to have an on-topic conversation during and after the lecture. Having a Backchannel is also an effective way to maintain a connection with students in hybrid and online lectures. 

There are several ways to keep the conversation going either through collaborative spaces, blackboards, blogs, chats, wikis, or forums. The fundamental idea behind these Backchannels is that students can log in questions, comments, feedback, doubts, or even learning notes, both during and outside classroom hours. 

Think of it as a specialized Wikipedia for your own class with a complete FAQ section. Every student will contribute to the discussion and will have access to answers and feedback given to their peers. So, instead of answering the same question to every student that sends you an email asking about reports deadlines or precise guidelines, you can have them all go to the same wiki where all these questions have been already answered. 

Another outstanding feature of Backchannels is that you can ask students to moderate the discussion, provide feedback, and answer their classmates’ questions when they know the solution. This opportunity to give feedback encourages peer learning, but also improves learners’ self-confidence and helps them build trust. 

As a professor, you benefit also from it, as you spend less time answering the same questions repeatedly, and you delegate some of your responsibilities to the learners. Your job here is only to verify that the feedback given by other students is appropriate and accurate. 

If you want to learn more about Backchannels, you can look at some digital tools I recommend for creating beautiful and organized backchannels. Remember to reward students for participating in the discussions by both asking and answering questions.

4. Encourage peer learning

As I mentioned before, peer-learning is an outstanding approach for inspiring responsibility and motivating students to take ownership of their learning. 

When students are given the opportunity to teach and tutor other classmates, they’re not only revising their knowledge and own understanding, they’re also building self-confidence and trust in their community.

Peer learning activities are a powerful way to create a sense of interdependence, connectedness, trust, and shared goals between individuals.

You can easily implement peer learning through Backchannel discussions. But you can also imagine asking students to evaluate and give feedback to their peers after performing an assignment or class activity. You can give them instructions on how to evaluate and give feedback to others, and provide them with an evaluation grid so they can appreciate the work of their colleagues. 

Another example of peer-learning is pairing students with different skills and backgrounds, but that share common learning objectives, for in-class activities. You may give them specific goals to focus on for the class and challenge them to achieve them through collaboration. 

Other than learning and gaining a better understanding of the topics seen in class, students develop practical work skills such as teamwork, time management, organization, effective communication, and constructive feedback. 

5. Reflect on the journey

The most effective way to enhance learning is to learn about how we learn. Every individual is different and their learning journey is unique. 

However, we hardly ask students to reflect on their learning journey or give them enough space to think about what they’ve learned, how these match their goals and expectations, and how they felt during those lessons.

The agile method for management and innovation uses “agile retrospectives” as an opportunity to learn and improve by reflecting on past events and behaviors. The idea of retrospectives is to have participants share their thoughts after each lecture on the following questions:

  • What I’ve learned?
  • What worked well? What did I enjoy?
  • What didn’t work well? What did I find challenging?
  • What are we going to do differently?

When students answer these questions, they actually are thinking about how they think and learn. This encourages them to look closer at their learning journey, adjust and adapt goals, and take the actions to achieve those goals. 

You can for example dedicate the last minutes of your class to wrap up on retrospectives by having an open discussion on what they liked, how they felt, and what could be improved. 

There are plenty of retrospective activities to derive the lessons learned, and you can carry out them remotely by using a visual collaboration platform. It can also be an asynchronous activity. Students can rely on original formats to share their retrospective lessons. Blog entries, 1-minute videos, mind maps, picture collage. Apps such Flipgrid, Wakalet, Instagram, or Pinterest work great for this kind of activity.

Retrospective learning highlights the importance of honesty, transparency, and the concept of impostor syndrome for self-assessment. 

This exercise also helps learners to build connections and interact with each other, as they might discover they are not alone in their struggles and feelings. 

They’ll feel more empowered to work as a community, to meet their common goals, and to take action to solve potential conflicts or disagreements between them. 

Final thoughts

Creating a sense of belonging and a safe, nurturing, supporting environment is crucial for learning. Learning is mainly a social and emotional activity. 

It doesn’t take the latest technology or complex activities to build a positive learning community. And it doesn’t matter much whether your courses are online or in-person. Creating a sense of community is way easier than you think and is full of benefits for both learners and educators. 

Remember that community is built over time, and mutual sharing and trust are essential. Physical distancing need not mean social distancing. 

With a little creativity and willingness to create a positive environment for learning, we can create an authentic sense of community in our classrooms, regardless of the pandemic.