Continuum College Instructor Resources

Increasing Engagement through Zoom

Students struggle to pay attention in long lectures and online sessions. Teachers struggle to get students to remember all of the content. Structuring class time to increase student engagement will improve your students’ learning and overall experience!

Active Learning

Active learning requires students to participate in class, as opposed to sitting and listening quietly, visit the Active Learning page for more information about the characteristics of Active Learning. In short, by actively doing things, and thinking about what they’re doing, your students make better connections with their learning.

Active Learning & Engagement Strategies

Think Pair Share/Turn & Talk

  • Try this with Zoom Breakout Rooms!
  • Students are broken up into pairs/groups of 3 and ask them to think about a topic or question, discuss with their classmates, and then come back together to the main class to share out a selection of their responses.

Jigsaw

  • Try this with Zoom Breakout Rooms!
  • Students are broken into small groups, and each group is given a different question or topic to think about. When the main class comes back together, have each group share out.

Application Card

  • Try this with the Chat feature in Zoom!
  • Ask students, individually, to take some time to think about a real world application of a concept that you have introduced. Give them a couple of minutes to complete this. Call on some students individually to share or ask students to share their answers with everyone in the Zoom Chat.

Entry Ticket

  • Try this with Zoom Polls!
  • Have a question or two ready as soon as students enter the meeting session. Use this to have students re-engage and connect with knowledge from their readings, or from a prior session.

Misconception Checks

  • Try this with Zoom Polls or Zoom Reactions!
  • Present students with common or predictable misconceptions about a designated concept, principle, or process. Ask them whether they agree or disagree and to explain why. The misconception check can also be presented in the form of a multiple-choice or true-false quiz.

Classroom Response & Polling

  • Try this with Zoom Polls!
  • Polls can be used in a wide variety of ways, including knowledge/misconception checks, gauging the temperature of the room, allowing open ended responses, and more. Online polls encourage students who may be more shy to still voice their opinions, and allow instructors to quickly gather information about how well students are understanding a topic.

Zoom Tools for Engagement

Chat

  • Messages can be sent to all participants, or an individual participant
  • Chat is supported on desktop, mobile, and is still available even while sharing your screen

Zoom Guide: In Meeting Chat

Polls

  • Single answer (traditional multiple choice) or multiple answer (select all that apply) responses
  • Should be set up ahead of time, from zoom.us under the specific meeting.
  • Can have one question or multiple in a single poll
  • Can create multiple polls per session
  • Can share out results during the session
  • Can download responses later
    • Response data is only attached to a specific meeting and does not carry forward if you reuse the poll
  • Polls can be used across different meetings. They will automatically be available for new meetings.
  • Good for:
    • Taking the temperature of a session
      • How are students feeling?
      • Do students need a break?
      • Are students finding these materials super interesting?
      • Asking if students are done with an activity and ready to move on
    • Quick misconception checks
    • Solicit feedback or opinions on sensitive subjects
    • Get feedback on your lesson, or allow students to vote on how to use the next portion of class time
    • Self-assessment (Example: ask students to rate their own understanding of a topic on a scale of 1-5)
  • Caveats:
    • Cannot automatically note if a response is correct or incorrect, the instructor would have to verbally talk about this after running the poll

Zoom Guide: Polling for Meetings

Reactions/Non-Verbal Feedback

  • Like polls, this is a quick way to get feedback from your students
  • Asking your students to reply to your questions with Reactions (in the bottom bar of the Zoom meeting) allows you to quickly gauge your students’ reactions and learning during class sessions.

Zoom Guide: Non-verbal Feedback and Reactions

Breakout Rooms & Small Groups

Student engagement can decline when they students are in larger groups, and students may feel less heard. Shy students may also feel more intimidated to speak up. You can use small groups to increase participation, and allow students to feel more heard. Small groups should, ideally, be no more than 10 people. 2-5 is excellent, 5-7 is closer to an upper limit, depending on the activity.

General Info about Breakout Rooms

  • Breakout room participants have full audio, video, and screen share capabilities
  • If a meeting is being cloud recorded, it will only record the main room, not breakout room activity
  • Participants can be moved after they’ve been assigned to a room
  • Breakout rooms can be recreated, allowing students to participate in the same discussion groups throughout the session
  • You can broadcast a message to all breakout rooms
    • “There are ___ minutes left for small group discussion”
    • “Please wrap up your conversations”
    • Provide additional insight, prompts, or questions
  • Participants of a breakout room can ask for help to invite the host into their room

Zoom Guide: Getting Started with Breakout Rooms

Zoom Guide: Managing Video Breakout Rooms

Updated 02/17/22