#2: KAHOOT!

Another gaming experience is Kahoot! Even though Kahoot! has a very elementary school feel to it, we found it works great inside higher education. For all these tools, and Kahoot! in particular, don’t let the branding and marketing toward a younger audience influence your opinion of how engaging they can be for your students’ learning experience.

Like Gimkit, Kahoot! is a game but is used more for synchronous competitions. You create some questions about a particular topic, for instance about the elements of the business model canvas. You post these questions live and then students will see four options on their screen to choose from for each question.

As students answer the particular question, you will see the number of students who pick each answer in real-time. This provides real-time feedback on what students know (or don’t!) about a specific topic. After each question, you have the opportunity to engage students by asking why they chose certain answers and encouraging them to dialogue with each other about why a particular answer is correct or incorrect. The program shows a leaderboard, which changes based on correct and incorrect answers, which will again tap into your students’ natural competitive spirit to keep them very engaged in the learning process.

Here are a few specific ways to use Kahoot! to deeply engage your students:

1. Test whether students are consuming material (lectures, reading, videos, etc), and whether they understand the logic and use of attitudes, skills, and tools you introduce in your course.
2. Ask an opinion question that will spark a natural discussion, which you can use as an icebreaker, or to dive deeper into a specific element of your course.
3. Test students’ knowledge before you introduce a certain topic. In this scenario, students must take a risk by guessing about a topic they know little or nothing about. This is an opportunity to spark a discussion between students who got it wrong and those who got it right, so students teach each other!

USING KAHOOT! IN EXEC

In our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC), we have a set of customer interview cards (we have digital cards and physical cards). Our interview cards are digital cards that take the form of a spreadsheet and students will individually sort different questions about customer interviewing into “good” and “bad” questions. We then have a Kahoot! game they play in groups to test their knowledge of these customer interviewing questions.

Students first take a risk individually and make their best guess about whether certain customer interviewing questions are “good” or “bad.” We then use Kahoot to engage students in collaboratively discovering the correct or incorrect answers within a competitive environment that keeps them very engaged.

If you are interested in learning more about this, and other, exercise check out the ExEC preview.

#3: EDPUZZLE

Our third tool, Edpuzzle is a way to turn any video into a quiz or formative assessment tool; you can check if students are watching your videos, how many times they’re watching each section, and if they’re understanding the content. You accomplish this in Edpuzzle by placing interactive content into pre-existing videos.

Using Edpuzzle, you can

• Assign a video to students and quickly measure whether or not they watched it with a few basic questions you embed in the video about the video content.
• Ask a question before the answer is revealed to students. This requires them to reflect and think about what the right answer is, which could spur some engaging dialogue.

Imagine you create an Edpuzzle interactive video for your students summarizing a discussion topic. We actually do this in the asynchronous online version of ExEC, in an exercise called “Launching Is Easy, Selling Is Hard.”

In this exercise, students work in what we call reflection groups to develop their reasoning behind why people spend far more money on lottery tickets than they are actually worth. The answer has to do with the emotional value people attribute to the lottery ticket.

Students get together in asynchronous breakout rooms in their reflection groups and decide why people spend more money on lottery tickets than they’re worth. Students then post their answers to the discussion group and then we determine which team has the most comprehensive response and thus wins the prize – an actual Powerball lottery ticket!

We record a video using student responses as the basis to actually summarize the main talking points and to highlight any misconceptions that may have come up. This provides a rich path of learning – students post information/opinions in your LMS, then they watch a video summary you make of all responses that have questions embedded in it, then you can have them respond asynchronously in your LMS discussion boards, or synchronously in a face-to-face session.

The nice thing about Edpuzzle is you don’t have to create your own videos. You can use videos from Youtube, Crash Course, or tons of other sites, or you can use someone else’s videos from the Edpuzzle library, or you can upload your own videos to create these tools.

#4: NOTE.LY

Our next tool is Note.ly. This is a virtual post-it note board where you and your students can build a collaborative post-it note wall. This is a great way to leverage activities like think-pair-share discussions. For instance, we use this approach in our Fear, Curiosity, and Failure lesson plan.

Students brainstorm their biggest fears and curiosities about life after they graduate from school. They write them down individually on post-it notes and then we have them partner up to share. They then share from their pairs with the rest of the class.  The instructor takes all the post-it notes and builds out problem clouds / a post-it note wall. They basically take all the different post-it notes and groups similar themed responses together, thus building problem clouds around different themes that come up.

The instructor uses these themes as touchpoints for introducing the entrepreneurship syllabus to make entrepreneurship relevant. This way of introducing the syllabus enables students to understand that even if they don’t want to be an entrepreneur these skills that they will learn in their class will help resolve the fears and curiosities.

Exercises like that are a great way to leverage tools like Note.ly and to have deep discussions because these students share their ideas through post-it notes and you invite them to expand on their notes and get students engaged in learning about each other and the course plan.

#5: MINDMEISTER

The next tool is MindMeister, a mind mapping tool. Mind mapping is a powerful technique that helps you visualize your thoughts and communicate them to others. Mindmeister is a tool with which you can collect a lot of information, organize it, and share it. This tool is perfect for project-based learning because it helps students visualize and organize their thoughts and research findings. 

You can also use this tool to divide and conquer a jigsaw approach. For example, student pairs or teams have some topics they’re covering and then they write up some notes. They can map their notes into a mind map that represents an organized and visually engaging collection of information. With a tool like Mindmeister, you can easily conduct jigsaws, and students researching topics on their own can write them up and easily teach classmates about the topics.

For example, you can imagine nine nodes in a mind map, one for each element of the Business Model Canvas. Students can fill out each node with all kinds of information about the respective element, and teach the rest of the class about each element, thus increasing engagement through peer-to-peer instruction.

#6: MURAL

Mural is another great tool, basically, a digital whiteboard that also has mind mapping capabilities. Much like Note.ly and Mindmeister, Mural provides the opportunity for real-time collaboration. Mural can accomplish the basic functionality of Note.ly and of Mindmesiter, but it can also provide a shared whiteboard capability.

One example is to use one of the many built-in templates in which students can click and drag around post-it notes. In our ExEC, we do something like this with our solution ideation exercise. Students brainstorm a number of different solutions to problems they validated through their customer interviews.

Students brainstorm using a convergent-divergent process where they think of potential solutions to the problem they’re solving, and then we guide them through a series of prompts, for instance asking them to come up with solutions if they had an infinite amount of money, or if they could implement illegal solutions, or if they had no money. We then ask them to brainstorm solutions inspired by those “crazy” ideas.

We could easily use Mural for this exercise by having students place their ideas into a Venn diagram of sorts, or by mapping ideas onto a 2 x 2 matrix, and sharing an engaging visual representation of their multitude of ideas.

Now we will move on to a few tools that you can use for video discussions.

#7: FLIPGRID

Flipgrid is a discussion group where people comment, except everything is a video. In Flipgrid, your students create videos to create deeper engagement than our LMS text discussions offer them. Flipgrid allows students to have fun with their videos as well, using filters and hats, etc.

Flipgrid will get students talking, especially if you’re running an asynchronous class or if you’re running an exclusively online class. Replacing those static text-based discussions with engaging video discussions is now a snap! With the video format, you will find students, and you, creating a deeper connection with each other because they are seeing faces and movement, not just words on a screen.

#8: LOOM

Loom is another amazing tool, which we use all the time in ExEC. This tool makes it easy for students to simultaneously capture their screen and their webcam at the same time using a simple Chrome plugin. We literally have thousands of students who are using Loom because it is free and very simple to use.

Our students produce submission videos, where they complete digital worksheets that become part of a slide deck they submit for grading. Their submission is a Loom video where they screen capture their slide deck as they are explaining via a video the slides they are showing. Loom creates a link for the video, which they can share in their LMS, and instructors can easily view the student’s screen and webcam with one click, play it back, speed up, etc.

If you want to see more about how we use Loom to enable students to create engaging submissions and how we assess these submissions with simple rubrics, check out the ExEC preview today!

#9: PEAR DECK

The next tool to review is Pear Deck. This tool helps instructors use live slide presentation tools with Google slides and PowerPoint to create interactive surveys and game-like questions. This approach creates an engaging experience for the students, and the instructor can see an individual student’s participation.

Pear Deck is a combination of many of the tools we’ve reviewed here but it is embedded in your presentation itself. There are six different types of tools:

• You can ask students for a number. Perhaps something like the optimal price point for a product or service. Pear Deck will put this in a range for you and you can ask students within the presentation so it basically becomes an embedded quiz type of tool
• You can solicit feedback – for instance, showing students a website they can explore and report back with their feedback
• There is map functionality in the tool
• You can use the drawing functionality where you can show something in your presentation, and students can use a whiteboard collaboratively and you can share out student designs
• You can ask multiple-choice questions.

If you’re doing a fairly involved session and you want one all-in-one tool, Pear Deck could work well instead of having to use multiple tools we reviewed here, such as Mural plus Kahoot. You could use just one tool like Pear Deck and it automatically integrates with your presentation software.

#10: NEARPOD

Our final tool to review is Nearpod. This tool is very similar to Pear Deck in that it helps you create presentations and slides that integrate different components to increase online student engagement. Nearpod has some discussion functionality, some quiz functionality, and what they call bellringers, which are small interactive exercises.

You can import existing lessons in a variety of file formats and adding virtual field trips, collaboration boards, quizzes, or polls to them to enhance online student engagement. In your presentation, you can embed questions, quizzes or polls to assess whether your students understand the material, and can view student answers individually or as a class in real-time, or generate post-session reports.