The rise of online teaching were happening before the Coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the world, but now we have reached the peak at a much faster rate than expected. When teaching is put online, gauging student understanding proves to be more difficult than classroom teaching.
The good news is ClassPoint gives you the chance to be on the same page as your students. It easily integrates with any video conferencing solutions such as MS Teams, Zoom and Google Meet. By engaging your students, you will be able to clearly see how they are retaining and understanding the information. Below are 5 different ways that you can use ClassPoint to keep your students engaged while teaching over the web.
Tip #1: Use laser/pen tools to annotate on slides
The laser pointer and pen tools are simple but powerful, they help to make sure your students are following your thought process. If you have a digital inking device, you can easily make any annotations you’d like on your slides, but even if not, be sure to use the laser or highlighter with your mouse to aid your presentations.
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Tip #2: Use the Whiteboard
The large blank canvas of the whiteboard is a huge benefit. It can be used to answer questions or further explain your ideas. You can also use it to give your students a clearer understanding of the topic.
Furthermore, the whiteboard is the best way to teach tutorial classes. Just open a blank PPT file and keep adding whiteboard pages as you need them. Remember, after your class, you can easily share the whole slide deck to your students as PDF!
Tips #3: Ask Questions!
ClassPoint has a variety of questions you can use to get responses from your students. Especially in online teaching, all your students are using their devices already so it makes it more straightforward for them to participate in your questions. This is a great way to test their knowledge and see how they are understanding the lesson so far. Multiple choice questions are especially quick and useful in this setting.
Tips #4: Quick Poll & Pick-a-Name
Quick Poll is an extremely simple way for you to get instant feedback from students, and it can be found on the ClassPoint toolbar in slide show mode. With this tool, you can make sure students are always with you, and their opinions are always heard.
Pick-a-Name is the icon next to Quick Poll and can add a lot of excitement to your class. Students’ names are all hidden behind the colour boxes, and you can randomly choose a box to flip and reveal their names. You can use this tool to pick students to answer questions, or group students for activities. When you open the dialog, surely every student’s attention is on you.
Tips #5: Review Student Responses
Online teaching is usually very fast paced and you may not have time to dive into the responses submitted by your students. Fortunately, all student submissions are saved automatically by ClassPoint and you can easily review them after class at your own convenience. This way, you can get a clear idea of your students’ participation and performances, then adjust your teaching accordingly.
My tutorial on using ClassPoint for online teaching
I recorded the following video in early April right before the Home Based Learning started in Singapore. This video summarized how you can use ClassPoint for online teaching (using Zoom as an example). If you haven’t checked out my article, feel free to watch it below.
P.S. We have implemented quite some updates in July 2020, check out the release note here.
