As everything moved towards online learning, students’ attention also started lacking. The engagement of every student in learning activities decreased to a considerable extent. In simple terms, student engagement is a student’s will and curiosity to participate in the learning process. With everything being online, students are often seen doing other tasks even when the lectures are going on. This has affected education adversely. To make it easy for teachers and also interesting for students, there are various student engagement platforms. Teachers are using multiple classroom engagement strategies to keep the students engaged. Before we move ahead, let us understand more about student engagement platforms.
What is a Student Engagement Platform?
Student Engagement Platforms are the best way to capture individual inputs from every student. Whenever a student interacts, the data is put up in unified profiles. This helps in developing a personalized experience for every student. The faculty can also generate holistic insights for every student to track their performance. If you are trying to understand your students better, you can get a perfect idea with these platforms. The data is divided among different touch-points like attendance, interactive activities, daily submissions, and more. With this data, you can come up with valuable insights for every student.
Importance of Classroom Engagement amid Pandemic
With the pandemic hitting the world, education has suffered a lot. Students are facing a lot of difficulties in online education. They are not able to cope-up with the learning patterns and ways. The impact is clearly visible on students’ academic performance and results.
This is the reason why classroom engagement has become extremely important. Face-to-face learning is very effective, and the teacher can judge students’ learning and engagement levels. The case is not the same with online learning. Teachers and institutions are trying plenty of ways for active engagement in the classroom, and student engagement platforms are the most successful.
Classroom Engagement Strategies
Connect learning with real-world scenarios
Every student gets this same question several times – “Am I ever going to use this?” When you are able to answer this question, your class will be able to understand it better. Learning can be fun and easily understandable when the teachers connect it with real-world situations. Using real-life case studies and examples always interests the students.
Find out common interest points.
Rather than building interest from scratch, it is better to find out common interest points of students. You can use this interest in your learning process to engage everyone. The best example is to give some examples or calculations related to gaming. Usually, a majority of students are into gaming. You can use this as an example to connect with the students much effectively. This will help you engage with them, building a stronger relationship with the students. Your class will wait for your lectures and activities.
Encourage students to share progress regularly.
When sharing and presenting ideas in front of the class becomes normal for every student, you will see a vast improvement in classroom engagement. Sharing regular works will make students accountable, and they will also get to hear from someone other than their teachers.
If you notice that students have a stage fear, you can even include group work for better results. Students can be given group activities to create presentations where each member presents one part. This will improve their bonding as well as their skills.
Divide tasks with checkpoints
This is a classic technique for students as well as employees in any company. If you are burdening students from the beginning with all the tasks, then they are likely to get confused or lose interest. This is why it’s essential to break larger tasks into smaller ones that are achievable. Students will take it as a race with themselves when there are checkpoints. They will try to complete all the tasks one by one to reach the finish line. With all the instructions clear in different steps, the students are less likely to get off-tracked.
Encourage friendly competitions
You can use different in-class games or even make use of gamified learning programs to get students engaged in friendly competitions. There are plenty of online platforms like Kahoot, where you can test your students in the classroom and among students from all over the world. This is a platform where students will get to learn about friendly competitions. It will also help them realize where they stand in front of others. This is one of the classic classroom engagement activities because it works pretty well.
Update the traditional online lesson methods
There won’t be any changes to the facts and figures from history, but you can use a different approach to portray them. Rather than using the same PDF files every single time for explaining the chapters, it is better to use some innovation. For instance, you can record a video explaining certain complex topics to make it easy for the students to understand.
The institutions can create infographics for long stories to make them easily memorable for the students at every step. Develop engaging presentations with different animations to hook students’ attention. If there is something important you want the students to remember, you can create a poster to draw their attention. On top of these, there are plenty of other classroom engagement strategies that you can utilize as an individual educator as well as an institution. The next time you think about what student engagement looks like in the classroom, you can get the answer to it with these strategies. This was all about the ways you can improve engagement, even in online classes. Now, let us jump onto some tools to help you do the same thing effectively.
Blooket
Blooket is a trivia and review games platform that allows teachers to host games for their classes. The teacher gets to pick a set of questions and decide on a unique game mode. Later on, a code will be generated by Blooket. The students can use this code to join this trivia game on their devices. As there are a wide variety of games for teachers to choose from, it becomes an excellent engagement activity for students. Students are motivated to participate and perform well through rewards for correct answers. Teaching can be effortless with the help of Blooket’s powerful Set Builder. Importing the set of questions is pretty easy for the teachers. On top of that, teachers can even utilize the excellent set of questions built by other users from the Discover page. The entire process of hosting a trivia game is pretty simple. A question set needs to be selected, followed by selecting a game mode. As the students join and answer the questions, the teacher analyzes the results based on every individual’s performance. Blooket is an excellent student engagement platform.
Presence
If your institution provides world-class learning opportunities to your students, then Presence is a perfect choice. Presence comes with an intuitive and beautiful interface. Student engagement becomes pretty simple for teachers with the help of this wonderful tool. Here, the software handles the hard part of management, and institutions only need to focus on student engagement with the help of this tool.
The entire process of education is simplified with enhanced management. The involvement of every student is trackable through smart devices and card swipes. Other than that, the customized reports make it pretty easy to identify the trends and behaviors of every student. Presence empowers world-class learning with its existence on the campus.
Orah
Orah is another platform that unifies data and actions. On a daily basis, students engage with various people around them, from teachers to parents. Now, there are different factors that affect a student’s growth, but it isn’t easy to track this growth based on multiple inputs. This is where Orah comes into play.
Orah collects data from multiple sources and provides a holistic view of students’ progress. This view makes it easy for teachers and parents to come up with ways that can help the child in the best way. It also creates a unique profile for every student to keep the data unified and organized. This data provides valuable insights into the student’s behavior and helps the staff members make the right decisions. Orah enables you to create a personalized experience and assess every student’s growth with the help of their actions and inputs.
Nearpod
Nearpod is a one-stop solution for student engagement needs. It provides various interactive tools and resources to make teaching a bit easier. It is a single platform with multiple ways of teaching, including interactive slides, interactive videos, gamification, and other engagement activities. Whether the learning is online, offline, or hybrid, you can expect engagement to increase with this platform. On top of that, Nearpod is connected with plenty of tools you are already using. With the help of these resources, it becomes pretty easy even for the institutions to use this tool. Nearpod also provides real-time insights of every student based on the interaction of students. The interaction can be in lessons, videos, and even game-based learning. The results are pretty much clear about every student’s progress with this single platform.
Google Classroom
Google Classroom is an all-in-one place tool for managing multiple classrooms in a single destination. The best thing about this platform is that it is pretty easy to use, and any non-technical faculty can also get used to it very easily. Every teacher can prepare and schedule assignments and tasks for students across multiple classes. As everything is connected with Google, accessibility, and security are not going to be an issue. There are student to-do lists and also teacher’s to-review pages marked on the calendar to make it easy for everyone to stay on schedule. The students can even submit a photo of their homework directly to the teachers. Learning is at your fingertips with Google Classroom. Google Classroom is compatible with the web version as well as applications. On top of that, students can also access all the study materials very easily. It is also the right tool for collaboration as students work in the same document. The faculty can even start a face-to-face interactive session through the built-in Google Meet option if needed.
Seesaw
Seesaw creates a powerful learning loop between students, families, and teachers. In this entire loop, the students use the built-in tools on Seesaw to capture everything they know. Teachers gain these insights from the dashboard of every student to understand every student’s progress and find out ways they can teach better. At the end of the loop are the families that take a look at their child’s learnings and can also engage with the schools to see how they can improve. Seesaw portrays various multimodal tools, such as video, collage, drawing and recording, and much more. Students can use these tools in the way that works the best for them. On top of that, Seesaw also has plenty of classroom engagement activities that every teacher can choose based on subject, keywords, and grade levels.
ClassDojo
ClassDojo is another excellent platform that connects teachers with students and their families. This helps a lot in building classroom communities. There are plenty of valuable tools in the ClassDojo toolkit. On top of that, students can develop their own digital portfolios by adding photos and videos of their work. An excellent thing about ClassDojo is that it is compatible with all the devices. This tool is completely free for teachers. If there are any announcements, the teachers can share them directly with the students as well as their parents through this platform. If a teacher wants to bring a student’s behavior to the notice of their parent, they can even privately message them through this tool. Every message can be translated into 30+ languages directly through this platform. It is a perfect tool for enhancing engagement among students.
Kahoot
Students love to have healthy competition with their classmates. Nothing can be better for enhancing engagement among students than trivia and quizzes. Kahoot is the perfect platform for hosting quizzes on any topic and in any language. It is a pretty famous name when it comes to holding quizzes. There are plenty of competitions using this platform for hosting the competition’s preliminary rounds.
It is pretty easy to host a live game on Kahoot. You only need to spare a few minutes to host the game on any topic and choose any language. You can host the game on a big screen or even provide the live Kahoot codes to all the players for joining in from their remote devices. As the students enter the PIN, they will be able to participate in the quiz. Kahoot is a pretty intuitive student engagement platform with the ability to organize trivia around various topics. On top of that, you can even allow your kid to join in the online public games to test their knowledge. As the test gets over, the teacher can see how every student has performed and work accordingly.
Remind
Remind is an excellent platform that has been developed by keeping students, educators, and families in mind. The best thing about Remind is that there is two-way communication between the educators and parents to maintain proper education and growth of every student. Another good thing about Remind is that it is pretty easy to use and get acquainted with.
Remind helps take education to the next level and not confine it to the classrooms. If there is an important announcement, the teachers can use Remind to pass it on to students and parents. Even the resources are easily accessible to students through this platform. Remind is the perfect place to make learning effective and simpler for teachers and students.
Conclusion
Students’ engagement is really important to see how they grow and progress in the class. Online classes took a hit when it came to student engagement. This is where institutions and educators decided to use student engagement platforms and utilize various student engagement strategies to make things easier. Choose the best student engagement platforms for your institution from the above list. You may also be interested in School Management Software. 8 best digital certificate maker and issuer platforms to reward students and employees.
