Advanced Features for Engaging Students in a Hybrid Environment
One of the most significant hybrid learning challenges to overcome is figuring out how to provide engaging, interactive learning experiences to both in-person and remote students at the same time.
“As we go back to a new normal, we have to think about how we can be fluid in teaching a lesson, whether it is in the classroom setting or at home,” says Cheryl Miller, chief marketing officer for Promethean.
As educators share resources and best practices for improving online learning engagement, many point to the Promethean ActivPanel as a useful tool for engaging students, while also creating an intuitive and integrated teaching experience for professors. The ActivPanel Elements series offers a simple interface that puts the most commonly used tools at instructors’ fingertips, enabling them to move seamlessly between content and resources without disrupting the lesson.
ActivPanel helps professors engage students by delivering dynamic lessons to everyone, including those attending from a distance. The interactive features are a welcome change from static overhead projectors and chalkboards. The panel’s built-in Android OS offers premium tools that make it easy for instructors to create visually engaging lessons on tablets. The ability to see such digital assets — and the instructor using them — offers a higher level of engagement.
“They can see the lesson, the teacher, the whiteboard. And it keeps them more engaged, as if they were in a classroom,” Miller says.
MORE ON EDTECH: Here are some best practices for engaging students online.
Optimizing Online Learning Environments
Efforts to make courses resilient to tech failures at the University of California, Berkeley have resulted in better user interfaces that incorporate more asynchronous learning components. “It’s been said a typical college lecture is the process of information passing from the instructor’s notes to the student’s notes without going through the heads of either one of them. We’ve tried to avoid that by engaging students,” Mark Kubinec, an instructor in the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry, told Promethean.
When Kubinec and his student instructors set out to develop an eight-week summer course, they created a makeshift studio in a spare room. Kubinec used tools such as Zoom, Live Stream, YouTube and iClicker Reef to support remote learning for a large audience, and he was able to use the interactive panel as the focal point to include most online learning technologies.
DIVE DEEPER: Here's 7 hidden Zoom features that can improve online learning.
To combat the common issue of isolation in online learning, he enabled students to watch livestreamed lectures in Promethean ActivPanel’s breakout rooms. The experience included “Zoom Roomies,” which helped recreate a physical classroom setting where students sit with friends.
Instructors could drop in on individual rooms throughout the lecture to guide the discussion and unite the larger class. According to Kubinec, students noted through evaluations that they were especially impressed that the instructor could show a video, hit pause and annotate the clip as he explained the concept.
“We know the technology works, and students appreciate it. They gravitate toward it, so we don’t have any fear of assigning it,” Kubinec says.
Brought to you by:
