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Top 5 Resources for Increasing Online Engagement

Top 5 Resources for Increasing Online Engagement

Here are our top 5 resources for increasing engagement in your online classes:

#1: Split Screen Your Slides & Webcam

If you’re wondering whether your students are paying attention during your online lectures…they’re not.

To make your online lectures more engaging, check out these instructions on combining your slides and Webcam for your Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet sessions.


#2: Sample Online / Hybrid Syllabus

You can customize this flexible sample syllabus to work for just about any learning environment. Whether your class ends up:

  1. In-person
  2. Online synchronous
  3. Online asynchronous
  4. Hybrid

…or transitions between them, this sample syllabus will help you design an engaging and structured course.

Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus Structure

#3: Online Ice Breaker & Team Builder

You can create the most amazing content, and deliver it in the most engaging manner. But if your students are in teams that are dysfunctional, or just sleepy, their learning can come to a screeching halt as they disengage.

Bonus: The Skills Scavenger Hunt exercise is also a great icebreaker, which can be extremely helpful in terms of fostering connections between students taking an online class.

Kahoot Learning Games

#4: 10 Free Tools to Increase Online Engagement

During the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Virtual Conference, we presented 10 Tools to Increase Online Student Engagement.

Mural digital workspace

Read about all 10 tools, including:

  • Mural
  • Loom
  • Flipgrid
  • Kahoot
  • and many more…

#5: Motivating Your Students Online: Pilot Your Purpose Lesson Plan

Help your students unlock their purpose, and they will be motivated to learn the entire semester!

Pilot Your Purpose Exercise

Especially in an online environment, you can more easily engage students by tapping into their intrinsic motivation. In other words, learn how to leverage students’ internal drivers and your class sessions will buzz with energy. 


Bonus: Creating Digital Worksheets

The key to engaging students, especially online, is to make lectures interactive.

One of the best ways to do that is to create digital worksheets your students can use to apply the lesson you’re teaching in real-time. 


Experiential Online Curriculum

If you’re teaching entrepreneurship online, you can have an engaging class without reinventing the wheel.

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum Logo

Whether your online class is synchronous or asynchronous, the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) is optimized for online and hybrid classes.

If you want an engaging approach you can use online or in-person for your entrepreneurship curriculum, including an entrepreneurship syllabus template and 15 weeks of award-winning lesson plans, check out ExEC.

fall prep with Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum

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10 Free Tools for Increasing Student Engagement Online

10 Free Tools for Increasing Student Engagement Online

This past spring was a painful experience of online student disengagement. Don’t let that happen this fall!

During the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Virtual Conference, we presented 10 Tools to Increase Online Student Engagement. During this conference, we asked participant teams of educators to research each tool and write up some notes in a discussion group. This mimics how you might ask student teams to research something and post their findings and recommendations in the discussion board on your LMS.

We used the summaries participants posted as talking points for this post. You can do this with student posts in your LMS by using their posts as talking points about certain topics, so they see their post consumed and shared.

This jigsaw technique is a powerful way to leverage student desire to perform well in front of their peers to move them into deeper engagement in the material.

Below is a video recap of the conference presentation, followed by more detailed information about all 10 tools. You can sprinkle these tools throughout your entrepreneurship syllabus, or stack these tools like building blocks, to create a deeper face-to-face or online student engagement this fall.

#1: GIMKIT

This is an interactive quiz program offering virtual prizes, so students can create their own games or you can create games to deliver interactive learning experiences. When you create a Gimkit, it is basically a quiz that shows up on your students’ phone.

Gimkit - Live Quiz Learning Game

If students answer the question correctly, they receive virtual currency. With this virtual currency, students have the option to buy power-ups. The following are examples of the power-ups available:

  • To receive more currency for correct answers. If they accumulate 10 virtual dollars, they can buy a streak bonus so if they answer multiple questions correctly in a row they earn more virtual currency
  • To get a second chance if they answer incorrectly
  • To get themes to enhance the visual presentation

Gimkit is an amazing gamification experience, which has game mechanics built into a learning experience so students using it will be more bought into the process. Students have various incentives that ignite their natural competitive spirit, which will be very addictive to most of your students, so they just keep playing. And more importantly,

they keep learning while they are playing!

The idea of students creating their own games is another powerful twist to Gimkit. Imagine each student generates their own quiz for an element of the business model canvas. They post a link in the discussion group on your LMS, and then students get to compete with each other and see who understands the various elements of the business model canvas the best by watching the scores within the various games!


To see the 9 other tools that will increase your student engagement this fall with

  • Interactive quizzes and assessment through gaming experiences
  • Virtual collaboration
  • Video discussion and presentation

enter your email below!


Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus

Whether you’re teaching online, face-to-face, or a hybrid or HyFlex model, we built our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) to enable you using tools like those we just reviewed to provide award-winning engagement and excitement for your students

  • in any course structure
  • on every learning management system

Preview ExEC Now


If you want an engaging approach you can use online or in-person for your entrepreneurship curriculum, including an entrepreneurship syllabus template and 15 weeks of award-winning lesson plans, and don’t want to spend all summer building it:

Consider trying ExEC this Fall.

fall prep with Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
 

If you’d like lesson plans emailed to you directly, subscribe here to get the next one in your inbox.

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Technology Tools to Increase Engagement

Technology Tools to Increase Engagement

It’s no question: technology is shaping how or students engage (or don’t) with us.

From the apps nagging our students for attention during class to the learning management systems (Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, etc.) we and our students are asked to wrestle with, technology is absolutely altering how we interact with our students.

That said, when leveraged the right way,

Technology can be a way to increase engagement in the classroom.

In this post, we share some of our favorite tech tools you can use to flip the script on technology and use it to re-engage your students.

Active Learning vs Passive Listening

The first thing to know is that lectures are the antithesis of engagement. If your class is full of:

  • Glazed eyes
  • Distracted fidgeting
  • Lethargic discussions

Remember that it’s not that disengaged students don’t like to learn, the truth is most students love learning. They just hate listening.

Ask yourself, what do Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix all have in common? They are all visual-based technologies that our students have grown up with and spend far more time “learning from” than they do lectures.

Now ask yourself, are your bullet points genuinely more compelling than their latest Instagram story?

If the answer is no, the next question to answer is:

How do you create an active learning experience for your students?

If you’re looking to shift from a “sage on the stage” class to an active learning environment, Kahoot! is a great tool to use.

How to Leverage Kahoot! In Your Entrepreneurship Lesson

Gamification is a great way to increase engagement in class. Using technology like Kahoot! you can create multiple-choice competitions that foster engagement or as an assessment tool. 

Here’s what we love about Kahoot! in the classroom:

  • Produces real-time competition 
  • Encourages instant collaboration
  • Boosts energy with a real-time leader board that students love seeing their names on
  • Inspires discussion among all students

Kahoot! works by showing students a series of multiple-choice questions on your projector and each student (or team of students) uses their smartphone to quickly answer each question. Teams are awarded points for correct answers, and the faster they answer, the more points they get and after each question, they can see how well their team is doing compared to other teams in the class.

If you want to easily try Kahoot!, we’ve actually integrated it into our free Customer Interviewing Cards Exercise. This lesson plan was presented at USASBE 2020 and teaches valuable customer discovery skills.

Give it a shot and you’ll not only teach your students what questions to ask (and questions avoid) during customer interviews, you’ll do it in an engaging way with full class participation.

Nothing Compares to Learning by Doing

Another way to engage students is to have them teach themselves by creating a “learn by doing” experience. For example, if you want to teach students about the power of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), why not use Wix and Powtoon to have your students create their own during class?

Wix: Launch Websites (No Student Experience Required)

Wix is a free and user-friendly website creator. Some of the features we’ve found helpful when using in our lesson plans include:

  • Drag and drop editing
  • Pre-built templates
  • No technical skills required

Powtoon: Your Students Can Create Explainer Videos

Powtoon is an incredibly useful tool to make simple explainer videos fast. Here are some of the features that make Powtoon a useful teaching tool:

  • Wide-variety of templates
  • Change elements with a simple click
  • Animate a video in minutes

While you can plan an entrepreneurial lesson using Wix and Powtoon, we’ve found they can be combined for a powerful lesson. You can try our 60-Minute MVP this semester to introduce your students to Wix and Powtoon so they can see how quickly and easily they can start testing demand for new products, even if they have no tech or video editing skills.

This lesson plan was a finalist in the USASBE 3E competition, and it’s one of the most popular on our site. We hope you give it a shot – not only will it use technology to teach your students new skills, they’ll be completely engaged while they do it.

Design an App Prototype Without Technical Skills

So many of our students want to build apps, but most of them will lack the technical skills to even prototype their apps. Marvel changes that. 

Marvel is an easy to use app that lets your students quickly prototype their app designs by first drawing them on paper, and then simply taking pictures of their designs with their phone, but that’s not all!

Here are some of the exciting features you can leverage in the classroom:

  • Design easily with Marvel’s UI builder
  • Perform usability testing with a simple link
  • Get customer/usability feedback immediately

Marvel is free to use and is perfect to encourage design thinking and inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs. We created our Marvel App Lesson Plan below to introduce you to this new entrepreneurial teaching tool.

 

Click Here for Our Marvel App Lesson Plan

 

 

 

It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.

 

 

 

Incorporate Technology in Your Entrepreneurship Class

When used well, technology can transform your classroom into an experiential, fully-engaged experience for your students. If you’d like to learn more about the technologies we use in our entrepreneurship lesson plans, click to learn more. We hope that it supports the work you do in the classroom, and if you and your students enjoy, check out the full Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC).

Entrepreneurship Lesson Plans

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