Photo: Stanford EdTech
The University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has already identified strategies to get the best learning outcomes through the use of LectureTools. Using interactive activities to engage students with material and using student responses to start classroom discussions goes a long way towards making students more engaged and attentive during class.
The CRLT also highlights a few statistics about the impact of LectureTools. LectureTools is only a means to the end result of student learning, engagement, and attentiveness. Accordingly, here is our list of the 3 most important numbers to know about LectureTools in the classroom:
1. 13% more students feel their laptop helps improve learning
When comparing classes using LectureTools against the control group, 13% more students reported that their laptop enabled them to learn more. In the LectureTools courses, 53% of students agreed or strongly agreed with the issue, compared to 40% of students from the control classes. This was a statistically significant different to p<.01.
This difference seems intuitive, given Carl Wieman's findings that more interactive teaching styles improve student learning.
2. Student engagement increases by 21%
60% of students in the LectureTools courses agreed or strongly agreed that their level of engagement increased due to laptop use. Only 39% of the control group students felt the same. This is a differece of 21%, significant to p<.001.
3. Student attentiveness due to laptop use jumps 12%
When presented with the statement "My attentiveness has increased due to laptop use," 37% of LectureTools students agreed or strongly agreed, a 12% jump over the control group, where just 25% of students agreed or strongly agreed. Through deliberate engagement of laptops and an easier path to communication with instructors and teaching assistants, it only makes sense that more students find incentive to pay attention and interact with lecture.
Read More About U-M CRLT's Findings
Download the occassional paper "Use of Laptops in the Classroom: Research and Best Practices" from the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching to learn more about LectureTools' impact on several U-M classrooms, and tips for beneficial laptop use in the classroom.
Download the CRLT Paper (PDF)
Wondering more about the image quiz activity type inside of LectureTools? Here are four ways to use these activities that might fit in with your class:
Test for Understanding with Basic Identification Questions
Basic recall questions are great for checking whether your students remember important information they will need going forward. These types of questions are related to multiple choice questions written to test vocabulary or recollection of simple facts. In the image quiz context, students would be presented with an image and would simply have to click on the point representing the correct answer.
A biology class might quiz students on where the nucleoid is in a diagram of a cell, while a history or geography class might quiz students on which country the Netherlands is on a blank map. This allows you to make sure students are remembering key information that is essential for new material that requires students to build on "old" material.
Encourage Critical Thinking with Multi-Dimensional Questions
Unlike basic identification questions, multi-dimensional image quizzes require students to do more than recall certain pieces of information. Instead, these questions have students engage with material in class that requires them to identify the appropriate concept and apply it to a problem they have never seen before.
Asking students in a biology class where in the cell ATP is produced, for example, may require them to remember both that mitochondria produce this energy as well as where they can find a mitochondrion in a cell. In a class about weather, showing students an aerial image and asking them where they would expect temperatures to be the hottest requires them to understand what conditions cause hotter surface temperatures to make an educated guess. These questions are more conceptual in nature, and are a great way to test whether students are making the bridge between reading information in a textbook and being able to apply it to a variety of situations.
Spark Discussion with Spectrum Questions
Open your class up to spectrum of possibilities, rather than confining it to a predetermined set of multiple choice answers. Spectrums can range from a simple strongly-agree-to-strongly-disagree scale to more philosophical or theoretical spectrums specifically drawn from course material.
We’ve already written about how Mika LaVaque-Manty, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, uses LectureTools to pose questions geared towards humanities. Most notably, he used the image quiz feature to present a timeline to his students and ask them, in their opinion, when the United States became a democracy. The question generated a discussion, as some students chose important historical dates like the Emancipation Proclamation, women’s suffrage, or the Civil Rights Act. Other students indicated that the US had not yet achieved this ideal. Open-ended questions such as these force students to think on their own and to develop arguments for a wide portfolio of choices. Spectrum questions have no correct answer, but rather, force students to think critically in the context of your course. They are also great for preparing students for exams with open-ended essay prompts.
Introduce New Concepts with In-Class Experiments
Student response systems need not only test students’ knowledge. They can also introduce brand new concepts like regression. A blank set of axes with two defined variables makes for a great image quiz question, as students can plot their data point. The results of the activity would then be the aggregation of the entire class’s data, which could be a good way to introduce regression as a way to measure correlation by drawing a line of best fit and labeling the β and error terms.
Have another idea for image quiz questions? Leave your idea in the comments!
Making the Switch: How 4 Professors at Michigan Embraced Laptops and Made Class Interactive
Download our free ebook to learn how professors at the University of Michigan are using LectureTools, an interactive presentation tool, to provide an in-class learning platform for student laptops.
Get the eBook
It's difficult to get students to raise their hand, interrupt your lecture, and ask a question. The deer in the headlight approach is one way to identify potentially confused students. We've made it a bit easier and introduced a more engaging way for you to read their minds.
Anonymous Filter Enables Instructors to Verbally Address Questions During Lecture
If you want to show your class questions submitted from other students during class, just open the instructor dashboard. The names of students that digitally submit questions will be hidden from the class.
LectureTip: The Instructor Dashboard is located in the present tab and enables instructors to draw on slides and monitor student questions and comprehension, taking advantage of classroom engagement strategies.
Create an Account to View Live Questions During Lecture.
Ready to upload PowerPoint slideshows, add activities, and create multimedia slides? Create a free instructor account to begin making your lectures more interactive.
Get Started with an Instructor Account Now
One of our main goals at LectureTools is to constantly refine our software to provide the best possible experience for our users. We’ve made some fairly significant updates to the instructor interface. The end result is more screen space dedicated to the tasks you spend the most time on.
Space-saving top navigation integrates a variety of settings
To give the interface more vertical space, the course tabs and the help button now live with account settings and other administrative functions in a common header, providing a noticeably more efficient utilization of space.
The course menu displays the course you are actively viewing. Expanding the menu allows you to select a different course, or to create a new course.
For many sessions, users worked only on setting up or presenting a single lecture. To reflect this, the lecture dates menu now displays the selected date. To present or edit content from a different lecture, or to set up a new lecture, simply select it from the menu. Lectures that have already been configured display with their title, while an entry with only a date denotes a lecture that has not been configured yet.
Click your name to logout, access typical account settings or manage the courses you teach. Find support documentation or submit a request using the Help menu.
An open canvas for your lecture content
In addition to the new top navigation, the second major change you will notice is the absence of the Prepare, Present, and Assess tabs on the left-hand-side of the instructor window. To provide a more continuous workspace for your material, they have been moved to the upper-left-hand corner.
In Prepare, the other drop-down menus might look different, but they function exactly the same as the ones you are already accustomed to.
These changes also mean your slides get more space in the Present window as well. A new set of presentation controls behave as before, with the movement of the Presentation Dashboard toggle to this group, which eliminates the space-hogging bar of the old version.
We hope that you enjoy these changes. The best way to learn is always hands-on, so login or create an account now!
Need Help?
You can read more in-depth information about how to use our new interface by visiting our support documentation. If you are still left scratching your head, please email support so we can help you get on the right track.
Instructors aren’t the only ones who received an interface upgrade. We have also renovated the student interface, making it easier to use and opening up more space for slides and notes.
Navigating lectures is a breeze with the new top menu
Like instructors, students will now find all of their account settings and course management functionality built into a common top menu.
Selecting the lecture date through the top navigation allows all remaining space to be dedicated to slides, activities, questions, and notes.
Usability enhancements
Our developers managed to sneak in a few usability tweaks amongst the aesthetic changes. Students can now ask a question while viewing slides without having to go to the questions tab.
Additionally, when students are navigating through slides, they can use their arrow keys to quickly move ahead or backwards in the presentation. The shortcut works as long as students aren’t using the notebook, indicated by the lack of a cursor in the text area.
The Browse Slides tool also received a tweak that enables students to scroll quickly through the slide thumbnails. By using the native horizontal scroll bars from students’ browsers, students can horizontally scroll using their laptops’ trackpad.
Still Confused by the New Designs?
If you are having trouble getting things done within our new interface, please email support@lecturetools.com or call (734) 794-3012 for support. We will be happy to get you back on track.
Email Support
Are you being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, or are you dancing with joy when you find a new and cool education technology?
Either way, LectureTools offers a fantastic and easy solution to flip your classroom. Some of you may ask what I mean by flipping a classroom, check out my last blog: The Flipped Classroom: Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century.
Have you been thinking about how to flip your classroom? Are you not sure what technology to use? Let’s take a look at how LectureTools can help support your flipped classroom.
LectureTools is an interactive student response system. It was designed to connect instructors with students in a synchronous face-to-face interactive environment. However, take a new technology like LectureTools mixed with bright innovative teachers, and, voila! You have an awesome and easy way to FLIP YOUR CLASS TODAY!
You may ask “what is so special about LectureTools?”
LectureTools offers everything the instructor needs to present materials to their students for a flipped class.
- EMBEDDED VIDEO - With the ability to embed both native (your own recorded video) and YouTube videos directly into the lecture slides students can seamlessly review their lecture, video clip to slides, then back to video clips.
- ORGANIZED NOTE-TAKING - LectureTools also offers a very organized place for students to type their notes along side the lecture slides. This keeps everything together in one neat place.
- INTERACTIVE ACTIVITIES - LectureTools was designed to be an interactive student response system, so there are interactive activities that the instructor can insert to test the students’ understanding as they are going through their lecture. Teachers can assess any misconceptions and address them in the next in class session. These interactive activities are multiple-choice question, free response answer, re-ordered quiz, and our all-time favorite, the image quiz.
- QUESTION & ANSWER INTERFACE - Finally, one of the greatest features that LectureTools offers both students and instructors is the question interface. As students sit in their lecture (whether real time or synchronous) they may type in questions to their instructors. All questions will be answered and shared anonymously with the entire class. This is the virtual way of raising your hand and hoping to be called on, however in this format students’ questions can always be recognized.
Sign on to see what my flipped lecture of the study of the cell looks like:
Go to: https://my.lecturetools.com/ and use the following credentials:
email address: icon20@lecturetools.com
password: icon2011
Hello,
It's LectureTool's first visit to Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (CES 2012) and so far so good! Higher education reps and corporations were excited to see the education offerings of our presentation, student response, and note-taking tool. It's also the first time we've publicly displayed our LectureBook etextbook product and our upcoming iPad application.
(From left to right, Rich Boys (Director of Customer Experience), Zach Wick (Software Engineer), Bret Squire (Software Engineer), and Jason Aubrey (Director of Sales of Marketing).
Our team knows the competitive nature of CES and what's being presented, so we thought we'd play along and show the world how cool education can be, too.
We took this opportunity to show a sneak peak of the first student response and note-taking iPad application. The app allows students to use the Apple iPad to respond to activities, swipe through lecture slides, ask questions, and the other things students can do on LectureTools. The plan is to allow for online and offline access to LectureTool's materials for students. As long as they have their iPads, they have their course materials.
Stay tuned as we'll be officially launching our iPad application in the near future, available for all students with LectureTool's subscriptions.
From Las Vegas,
The LectureTools CES Team!
Booth 73305 in the Venetian Ballroom
If you want to show video clips or play audio for your class, you can now insert multimedia directly into your slide deck using new audio and video slides.
You can embed videos from YouTube, or upload an audio or video file from your desktop by selecting “Audio/Video Slide” from the Create Interactive Activity menu.
When presenting, the multimedia items will show up in their own slides with a full suite of playback controls. Your students will also be able to play the media when they are reviewing their notes after class. Just push play!
LectureTip: Wondering how to use multimedia to further improve student engagement? Try following an audio or video slide with an interactive activity to get your students to think critically about the material.
Create an Account to Add Multimedia and Interactive Activities to Your Lecture Slides
Ready to upload PowerPoint slideshows, add activities, and create multimedia slides? Create a free instructor account to begin making your lectures more interactive.
Get Started with an Instructor Account Now
Not every in-class activity needs to be presented in the same way. Our new activity slides integrate the question and the polling results.
This eliminates the need to have an activity and its responses show up as two separate slides in the slide carousel.
The Finish button acts like the previous interface’s “Show Results” button. Pressing it closes polling, makes the results visible, and displays the correct answer. But you can also control each of these functions individually using the expanded suite of controls.
On each activity slide, you are able to control whether polling is open, whether results are shown, and whether the correct answer is identified.
This means you now have the flexibility, for example, to keep polling open while displaying the results in real-time. Or to close polling and move on to the next slide without revealing the answer.
Alternatively, you have the option of pressing Reset to erase all student responses and switch to the initial question view. This would allow you to repoll students without creating a duplicate activity.
As an added bonus, the slides better handle multiple choice questions with many choices and the responses to free response questions for both you and your students.
Add a Question to Your Lecture Today to Try the New Activity Slides
Login or create an account to make your lecture more engaging with an interactive activity. Choose from multiple choice, ordered list, free response, and image quiz activities.
Create an Interactive Activity
Ask questions with images and engage students. Instructors can upload any image, create a question, and ask students to place a dot on the image during their presentation.
The simple functionality of uploading images to LectureTools and posing a question, however, is not the only benefit of the Image Activity. When instructors pose image questions, students use their laptops or ipads to place a dot on the image and submit their answers. When ready, instructors can display results and see where students placed their answer.
It doesn't stop there. Use LectureTools to follow up with a free response activity and encourage students to think critically about their answer. Then, display the responses for discussion.
Try the Image Activity with Your Students by Creating a Free Account
Ready to try our interactive presentation tool? Create an instructor account today to begin preparing engaging slideshows for your students.
Create an Account Now