Speaker 1: Today, we're looking at five tools that can help you make your online lessons more engaging and more interactive. It's time we stop just lecturing through Zoom or Google Hangout and actually engage our students in activities and make our sessions more interesting and more interactive. And my hope is that by the end of this tutorial, you will be able to do that. The tools will work equally well for Zoom, Google Hangouts, or any other video conferencing software that you are using. So the five tools that we are looking at today are Wooclap, Online Stopwatch, No Hands App or Classroom Screen, Quizzes, and PowerPoint Games. Wooclap is an amazing tool to use to make your virtual lessons more engaging and more interactive. And this is what it looks like when you run a typical Wooclap activity with your students. This is what it looks like from the teacher's end. I've already created an account. I created a series of questions for my students to engage in. So all I need to do is click Start and then paste this link onto my Zoom session. My Zoom session is right here. I have myself here and I have three students. So what I'm going to do, I'll simply paste this link to my students. Let's quickly switch to students view to see how they will participate. I'm going to click on Chat, open the Wooclap, and this is how easy it is for students to join the Wooclap. So my first question would be, where in the world are you? Here students need to point to the area and click Submit. Once they've done that from the teacher's side, I can click and show the results. I have three responses from my students. What I can also do as a teacher is share my screen with the students so they can see the responses of other kids. Let's quickly move on to the next question. You will notice that once students start answering the questions on Wooclap, I as a teacher can see the results. Our last question is, how do they feel about starting a new school year? If I type good here, the good will appear in the middle of the screen. If I then take another student and type okay, this will appear on the screen as well. And now I have one more student who will say a bit sad, and this will appear on the screen as well. If you're interested to learn more about the Wooclap, there will be an in-depth tutorial as to how to set things up, how to create an account, how to create the questions, and how to run the Wooclap with the students. So all this will be in the in-depth tutorial. The link will be in the description to this video. The next tool that will make your online lessons engaging and interactive is going to be Online Stopwatch. To access this tool, all we need to do is search for Online Stopwatch, and this is the website that we are looking at. So let me quickly show you how I normally use it, and then I'll give you a couple of recommendations. Once the stopwatch is loaded, you need to click on open the stopwatch in full screen, because there are quite a lot of advertisements on the website, so we want to click on super full screen, and that's the user interface that I personally like. What I normally do after that, I go to Zoom, then click on share my screen. And then I can ask a question to the students to think about. Let's say I want to review the content of a previous lesson, and I want to give them one minute to just sit and reflect or remember. From the student's end, this is what they see. They have my screen, which is the countdown, which will give them time to think. Very straightforward and very easy tool. Another thing I really like about Online Stopwatch is that it just has tons of other materials and resources. There are random name pickers, there are different classroom timers, dozens of different designs. The Online Stopwatch resource is pretty straightforward. It has lots of tools that you can use. I personally like quite a few of them, and I'll be doing an in-depth tutorial as to how I personally use and use this in my online lessons. No Hands app is by far my favorite classroom management tool, and this is what it looks like. It's just a tray window that will generate random names of students. I would like to suggest just one way how you can use this tool with your students. This is a Google slide that I created for my class. It has a little story and some of the questions. What I will do, I'll go back to the Zoom, I'll click on screen share, share my screen. This is one of the important things we need to do when we use No Hands app. We need to share the entire screen. Click present, and here you go. This is what the students see now. They can see my screen, they can see the story, and the No Hands app generator. I will pose the question to the students, who are the characters in the text? And then what I will do, instead of asking students to volunteer, I'll quickly click on No Hands app, and this will generate a name of the student to answer. First thing it does, it keeps your students engaged because at any point during the class, their name could come up and they will need to answer. The second thing is just an engaging way to call on students rather than asking them to raise their hands or wait for volunteers. We have another question. What is the genre of the text? I will again click on the name, and as you can see, the No Hands will pick another student. I will have another question, then pick another student, and this is the beauty of the No Hands app. It's simple, it's straightforward, but it's very engaging. If you want to know how to set it up, where to get it, I will leave the link in the description. Follow the link, and everything will be super clear. The biggest downside of this software is that it only works on Windows computers, but luckily, we have a similar app that will work on Mac computers as well, and this is what we're going to talk about now. The app that I'm referring to is called Classroom Screen, and that's the website classroomscreen.com. Another beautiful platform to use, not only to select random names of students, but just generally a really nice tool to use whether you are teaching online or offline. In this tutorial, we'll just look at one of the features, which is random name. It works nearly the same as the No Hands app. First thing we need to do is to input the names of the students, and it will basically generate a name. Again, you will need to share your screen and then run this application alongside your PowerPoint or Google Slide. Classroom Screen name generator is not as simple as No Hands, but it's at least a substitute when you are working on a Mac computer. All right, moving on, we have Quizzes, another amazing app to use during your Zoom or Google Hangout lesson to engage and interact with your students. This is the website we're looking for, quizzeswithdoublezend.com. Once you've created your quiz, all you need to do is to copy the link to your Zoom chat, which I'm doing right now. Once it's there, all your students will need to do is simply click on this link right here. They will click on this link and input their name. Now I have three students who joined my quizzes, and I'm about to start the game. This is how the quizzes start. This is what we see from the students, and all students have different sequence of questions. Once I start answering those questions from students, and you'll notice that as a teacher I can see progress live. You can see what's the accuracy level, how many questions have been answered correctly, and also the lineup of your students, and again, how many questions they are answered incorrectly, how many questions they answered correctly. Another interactive aspect of quizzes is that students are able to see their standing in comparison to other students in their classroom, which plays on their competitiveness and again increase the engagement and interactivity. You're not delivering lessons online. It's still a great app to use to engage your students and make your lessons more interactive. PowerPoint games are just an amazing tool to use to make your lessons more engaging, more interactive, regardless of whether you are teaching online or you're teaching face-to-face. It's just an amazing resource. However, many educators have forgotten about these tools because now we have Kahoot., we have quizzes, we have Quizlets, we have so many things online that good old PowerPoint games simply got forgotten. But I'm here to revive them a little bit. So what I'm going to do today, I'll demonstrate one of the games that I've created when I was teaching English as a Foreign Language, and this is what it looks like. I will actually play this game now to demonstrate to you how you can use this game with your students. So first thing you want to do is to share your screen with your students. So I'll run the PowerPoint and click on Microsoft PowerPoint Share. So once you've shared your screen, either in Zoom or Google Meet, your students will see the PowerPoint Monsters and Dinosaurs. This is where I will explain the rules that in this game I, as a teacher, will ask questions. It could be revision questions or any kind of questions relating to the content. When a student or team answers the question correctly, they will have a chance to pick a square. And this is what it looks like. These are the squares that they will be picking. When they pick the square, there could be four different outcomes. If they see a dinosaur, that means they just scored two points. If they pick a square and there's an angry minion hiding behind it, that means they can steal or take one point from another team. If they pick a square and there's a happy minion, they score one point. And if they pick a square and there's a rotten orange, they will lose one point. And this is how the game goes. The first stage, I will ask a question to the students. Let's say I'm following up on the food chain activity that we've just did in Quizlet. So I will say, describe a consumer. I will then pick a student or a team using No Hands app. Once they answer the question correctly, they will be able to select one of the squares. So let's say a student selects square B3. Once they selected the square, they will see a happy minion, and this is what they see on the screen. And that would mean they just scored one point. I will then move on to the next team, or again, use one of the tools that we've talked about previously, No Hands app or classroom screen, which will enable me to pick the student or a team to answer my question. I've used this game with elementary, middle, and high school students, and all those times the game went with a blast. Really cool game. I will leave the link to this PowerPoint in the description, and then I will be doing another follow-up tutorial on other PowerPoint games that I think lend themselves really well to online instructions and then can be used to make online lessons more interactive and more engaging. Today, we've looked at five simple tools that you can use to make your Zoom lessons more engaging and interactive for the students. The five tools that we've looked at were WooClap, Online Stopwatch, No Hands app or classroom screen, quizzes, and PowerPoint games. If you like this episode, you might check out my other tutorials on educational technology, and I will leave a couple of links in the description. Thanks for taking your time to check out this tutorial. I hope it was helpful, and I'll see you next time.