The other day I met with our wonderful ClassPoint Certified Trainer, Filipe Galego, to discuss his experience using ClassPoint in his classroom. What did I learn? ClassPoint allows Filipe to check for understanding for each and every one of his students and how using Competition Mode for math has helped increase his students’ motivation.
Filipe is a High School Math Professor in Coimbra, Portugal. In addition to his passion and profession of teaching math, Filipe is a tech enthusiast! He shares this love and knowledge through his YouTube and social media channels to help other teachers and students.
We were so excited to have a chat with Filipe about how he uses his and his students’ favorite ClassPoint feature: Competition Mode for math class! Continue on to read our short summary, or watch the interview below to hear for yourself what Filipe has to share on his experience.
Impact of Multiple Choice Questions In Class
With ClassPoint, Filipe is able to gather instant feedback from his students as they are learning and keep them actively participating throughout the lesson.
Before ClassPoint, Filipe could only tell if 10% or 20% of his students understood the content; however, with the use of ClassPoint’s MCQs, that percentage jumps to 100%! It is no longer a guessing and assumption game because each student has their device. Once Filipe runs an MCQ, his students can easily and quickly choose which option they think is correct. Then, Filipe can review and verify which students have learned the content.
These days, he says, the greatest daily challenge for teachers in Portugal is to keep their students involved throughout the class to make their learning meaningful.
Filipe shared that all of the ClassPoint activities are enjoyable for his students, which helps make them more involved and engaged in the lesson and interested in the results.
Why does MCQ competition mode for math work so well?
Filipe shared that many of his students’ favorite part of ClassPoint is the Competition Mode. In Competition Mode, teachers can turn any regular Multiple Choice Questions into point-scoring questions with a leader board that showcases the top 5 leading scores.
Filipe’s students love Competition Mode as they are all very competitive and want to win. Knowing this, he says he uses the competition mode as an extra motivation tool and as a reward for students he sees putting in a lot of effort.
To add an ongoing element to these quizzes in his classroom, Filipe notes the students’ scores after each lesson. Then, he totals these scores with all of the lessons from that month, tracking the students’ ongoing scores. This way students can continue to move up in the rankings and improve over time. This extra layer of competition, Filipe says, keeps his students motivated for every lesson’s game so that they can add to their monthly score, too. What a great idea for using competition mode for math classes!
During Filipe’s competitions, he also shares, students have the addition of using their graphic calculators. This gives students the opportunity to continue using this tool that will be in their exams. The more comfortable they get in using it under pressure, the more comfortable they will feel when the final exam comes around. Testing for the test!
ClassPoint for Online and In Person Learning
Is ClassPoint an online learning tool or a face-to-face tool? With educators around the world teaching in a range of modalities, we’re always interested in which situation our users find ClassPoint most helpful.
To learn from Filipe’s experience, we asked him his opinion, and he has used ClassPoint for both online and in-person teaching. All the features of ClassPoint are great to use for engaging students in both situations to engage students, shares Filipe. However, he does believe that ClassPoint really shines with in-person teaching.
In person, Filipe finds his students have greater involvement in the activities. This could be due to fewer distractions for students compared to online learning. In addition, Filipe loves getting to physically see the enthusiasm and joy of the students when they are in the classroom. The power of that in-person connection is something I think everyone around the world can agree on.
Summary
- ClassPoint allows instant knowledge verification for 100% of participating students.
- Using Competition Mode for math proves to be a motivational tool for students.
- Seeing students’ real joy and enthusiasm is most impactful when using ClassPoint in person.
Competition Mode can be implemented in anyone’s class as it is such a versatile tool. However, if you are a Math teacher and want to take a look at Filipe’s Math Quiz Game, you can download it from the button below.
