Ready to kick-start classroom interaction?
Discover how interactive features and components enhance student interaction in the classroom and how that empowers you while teaching. Easily add a mind map, quiz or spinner to your lesson material, all within one targeted toolkit for teachers.
Quiz
During a ‘live’ lesson, a quiz is a playful way to quickly assess student knowledge. There's no maximum limit to using quiz questions per lesson, but we suggest between 5 to 10 per lesson. As you know, too many quizzes in a row result in students feeling tired, causing them to lose their focus. The quiz question is also perfect for true/false questions.
☝Use quiz questions to maintain engagement throughout your lesson—as a lesson starter, hinge question, or as a review.
Poll
By using the poll as an exit-ticket style plenary, you can check how students feel about what they have learnt. You could ask them to choose between emojis, images or words to define how they feel. During the lesson, it can also be interesting to ask your students to choose between different options, indicate specific preferences, or answer a targeted question with a yes/no, true/false statement.
☝Use the poll as an exit-ticket or metacognitive lesson tail to check how students feel about what they have learnt, about their unique learning process, or about how they feel in general.
Drag and drop
The drag and drop question in LessonUp offers the most unique interactivity, as it physically requires students to drag and drop elements to the correct target/s. Students love it and feel positively challenged. They like that it is very hands-on, and they are known to make a real effort to provide the correct answers. In addition, you can offer different variations of learning—to inspire, engage and stimulate your students.
☝With the drag and drop questions you can challenge your student to review event timelines, activate language vocabulary, and/or connect themes and terms. They’ll enjoy the challenge!
Mind map
The mind map in LessonUp is a particularly loved interactive feature. It stimulates creative thinking and offers a number of advantages. For example, you can keep responses anonymous, or make them visible by clicking on each answer once. In that case the student's name will appear next to the answer. You can also delete inappropriate responses by dragging them to the trash bin.
☝Many teachers use it to activate students' prior knowledge. It has been proven that if you request prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson, new learning material is digested better.
Open questions
An open question in LessonUp offers the best opportunity to provide unique and engaging discussions. Whether you choose for an application or insight question, students are able to provide an in-depth, comprehensive answer. During an online class, the answers are displayed as cards, and you are fully in control—you can choose to display and discuss the answers.
☝ An open question can create new layers of depth within a subject. It eliminates the need for students to put up their hands, allowing quieter students to participate. It can also be used as an exit-ticket style plenary at the end of your lesson.
Interactive video
Using interactive videos, you can spice up your lessons! Ask questions or share information while teaching, either as a group or individually. All 10+ interactive assessment features can easily be added to YouTube or Vimeo videos. Besides incorporating interactive features at any point during the video, you can also display extra information on a video while it is playing—this is called an overlay.
☝Interactive videos are used a lot, notably in special-needs education. Overlays come in handy for highlighting specific scenes/concepts and introducing people, as seen in the news.
Photo question
By using a photo question during your lesson, you can inspire your students to create a drawing, an infographic, a timeline, or any other artwork on paper. Once they're finished, ask them to take a picture of it and upload it as their response to the photo question. After all students have uploaded their creations, you can share them with your class on the interactive whiteboard.
☝A photo question serves as a bridge between the physical and digital worlds. It's a great way to initiate a group discussion & ensure that all results are collected in the student reports.
Start now! Add even more interactivity to your lessons.
Hotspots
Let students discover an image at their own pace. Create an image slide and add hotspots to specific parts of the image to highlight them and initiate a dialogue. Hotspots are clickable buttons that you can incorporate into your slides to support your lesson, encouraging students to effortlessly absorb various pieces of information. These hotspots can display text, images, or even videos.
☝ Students like hotspots. They stimulate their innate curiosity and are the perfect way to playfully dive into detail.
Spinner
Engage your students with a spinner! A spinner is an exciting addition to your lesson. You can insert your students’ names within the spinner wheel, in order to select whose turn it is to ask or answer a question, without having to choose. Alternatively, write part of of important sentences/phrases, or a number of questions within the spinner wheel, and ask students to complete or answer them individually or in teams.
☝ When presenting themselves or a specific topic, students could use a spinner as a conversation starter.
Traffic light
Insert a traffic light to indicate if your students have to work individually in silence (red), are allowed to ask questions and discuss silently (amber), or are free to talk and work together (green). Students enjoy the clarity and the visual reminder.
☝ Communicate visually with your students and set explicit rules and limits during classroom activities.