Keeping your students listening and engaged during online teaching will be a lot easier with these online teaching ideas.
Despite many things slowly returning to “normal,” virtual learning remains a reality for most. Keeping your students engaged can seem nearly impossible as different challenges are presented for all age groups when trying to maintain attention through lengthy online classes. Here are some simple online teaching ideas for fun and engaging classes that you can easily implement for that extra flair.
Online Teaching Ideas To Keep your Students Engaged and Entertained
1. Prioritize visuals and audio
As with regular, face-to-face classes, you should always make sure to put your best foot forward. With online classes, you and your background must look presentable.
If you have a messy background, it can be distracting to your students and take away from the professionalism of your virtual class. ManyCam offers features like background blur effect and virtual backgrounds so that you can quickly fix the issue and focus, instead, on presenting the best lesson you can.
As for audio, it’s vital to ensure you don’t have any background noise. Some microphones have built-in noise suppression features, which you can check out as a quick fix.
You also have the option of adding sound effects, music, or other similar external audio, if it enhances your presentation and adds to your message.
Plus, you can create audio playlists on ManyCam and add videos to your background. So, you get to control both auditory and visual background noise and keep students focused.
2. Use technology in your favor
By now, it’s pretty safe to say we’ve all grown a little more accustomed to technology and online tools compared to this time two, or even one year ago.
All the apps, software, and websites created to help in specific contexts, picking the right one can feel a little overwhelming. Then, the challenge continues when you need to learn all the different tools and shortcuts.
ManyCam offers one of the simplest user interfaces, making it easy to understand and implement into your virtual lessons.
It’s important to try to hold the attention of your students and deliver memorable lessons to them that will keep them excited to learn in your virtual classroom. Don’t shy away from all the possibilities you have to get creative with your virtual lessons!
3. Find out what keeps your students engaged
Monitor what tricks and tools particularly manage to hold your students’ attention by tracking results from each lesson in the form of:
- Questions asked and answered
- Understanding of the lesson objectives
- Performance in online tests, homework, or otherwise
ManyCam offers many tools such as drawing, 3D masks and effects, virtual backgrounds, video-in-video, and a virtual whiteboard that you can switch up and use to your advantage. Ask questions and find out what they enjoy (or don’t enjoy) about the tools. It’s an opportunity to get suggestions on how to best utilize each one on your lessons.
4. Keep it interactive
Besides just presenting, and speaking, keep students engaged (and awake!) by implementing interactive lesson interludes.
Surprise them with a quick pop quiz now and then – it doesn’t have to be complicated for you or even hard for them. Consider using just one or two multiple-choice questions here and there to bring the focus back to the class. An opinion poll is also an idea. Interactions can help make them proud of their progress and show that their opinions are valuable to you!
5. Present and stick to a lesson plan
A great tip is to present your students with a lesson plan at the start of the presentation, just to break everything down, and make it easier to digest for them.
In other words, running through the key points at the start of your lesson shows them what to expect. But, it also holds you accountable to stick to your plan and hit certain time marks.
In addition, it gives your students a chance to ask beforehand if a topic seems too complex or puzzling for them. Sometimes they may need you to focus more on specific aspects of the lesson that you hadn’t necessarily accounted for.
6. Whiteboard teaching
It’s super important in this day and age, not just to keep your students listening and engaged but also to involve them in your lesson plans.
One great tool many virtual teachers find important is the virtual whiteboard feature offered in ManyCam.
Besides just using it yourself, students can download the software and have their own whiteboards.
Note: The whiteboard isn’t a collaborative tool in itself. Each user would have their own.
One of the best online teaching ideas to increase engagement is to ask students to split into groups, learn a specific topic in-depth, to present it to the whole class afterward. And they could easily present using ManyCam.
This method is proven to increase engagement and retention and keeps students on their toes. It also has the opportunity of giving them a sense of accomplishment for having taught something to their peers!
7. Make your students feel valuable – ask for feedback!
As discussed in point number three, getting your students’ feedback is super valuable to you and should always be accounted for.
Don’t be afraid to check in here and there with students. It’s an opportunity to get their opinions on your performance as a teacher and the effectiveness of your lesson plans.
Be sure to make their opinions feel valued by centering the questions around them and their reception to the lessons, rather than specifically about your execution.
Ask them for their own ideas about how you can keep things fun and improve involvement, and consider actually implementing these ideas here and there in your lesson plans.
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