Engaging Students:

Interactive Teaching Tools

By Michelle Demel, Instructional Designer and Connor Bryant, Instructional Designer

What do you do in your face-to-face classes to check on students and get them engaged? Do you give a quiz over the reading? Pause to ask questions during a lecture? Break students into groups to discuss, then have them summarize their main points? These are all examples of formative assessments that help students track their understanding. Some are formal, some informal and some use peer interaction. Each type is important to consider when transferring your course to an online environment, and there are several tool choices in Blackboard to help you:

Engage Students in the Content

• Blackboard test tool – Design quizzes with automatic feedback and explanations. In this feedback, you can direct students back to content or guide them through supplemental content.
• FeedbackFruits (FBF) Interactive Document and Interactive Audio – Integrate your quiz into the content itself. Stop students with objective and open-ended questions that they must answer before continuing with the reading or listening activity. Allow students to make comments and ask questions, too.
• FBF Comprehension Tool – Let students annotate a document individually or as a group.
• PlayPosit and FBF Interactive Video – Stop students with questions while they watch your recorded lecture or any other video you assign.

Engage Students with You

With some of the interactive tools above, you have left a piece of yourself and your expertise behind in things like automatic feedback, guiding questions, comments and more. But more direct engagement is necessary sometimes, particularly where you want to follow-up on tough or interesting topics. Try:

• Synchronous discussion with Blackboard Collaborate Ultra; or
• Asynchronous discussion in Blackboard Discussion Boards or the FBF Discussion tool.

Engage Students with Peers

Build on the interactions from the tools above and give students opportunities to apply their knowledge through an evaluation process. Both of the tools below are especially useful because they manage the assignment for you. They also each provide the option for student reflection at the end.

• FBF Peer Review tool – Students often see errors or issues more easily in the work of others, raising their awareness and understanding so they can better apply it to their own work in the future.
• FBF Group Member Evaluation – Make the outcomes of group work easier to gauge for yourself and students.

Note that these and other FBF tools have a feature called Configurable Grading that assists with grading. Customize the way you want points awarded for various parts of an activity.

With each of these interactive tools, you are not checking for mastery. You are making sure students are engaged with the content, but also with you and peers over the specifics of that content. This variety of connections helps them build a robust skill and knowledge base. Work with an instructional designer to come up with a sequence of activities that includes some of these tools. Don't be afraid to experiment a little this summer—you might find something you want to continue using in the future!