What do we consider success when it comes to learning? No matter what your current situation is in the classroom, whether you teach online, in-person or follow a blended approach, education and learning go hand in hand. A class is a class, regardless of its location, and it always involves an exchange of information: communication and an active interaction between teachers and students. Want to know how to apply interactivity to your lessons? This post is for you. We will learn how interactive visual communication can be our greatest ally for remote and blended learning as well as in-person instruction and training techniques.
What is interactive learning?
Communication is at the heart of the learning process. If we think of distance learning, communication and interaction become even more relevant because they will determine successful learning outcomes.
For this reason, visual communication and interactive learning are key to help you achieve those learning goals and engage your students. Why? What do we mean by interactive learning?
Choosing an interactive learning strategy will allow us to implement creative and innovative ways to connect ideas. Education trends combined with technology can help us incorporate rich interactive experiences in our daily teaching and leave old routines behind!
Educators bring their learning materials to life, making their classes fun and engaging while increasing the participation rate among students. Lessons are presented in a new, interesting way, and students are motivated and absorb the information better. This results in teachers having more time to give students the personalized attention they deserve.
The benefits of using interactivity in the classroom
Let’s take a look at the benefits of using interactivity in the classroom, I will go over 5 reason why interactivity adds value to your work as a teacher:
Increase independence
Thanks to interactivity, information becomes easier to understand and to process. We take teaching to the next level by distributing information in interactive layers to break it down for students. This way, students can choose how they’d like to explore the information we present them with. This helps increase student motivation to learn as well as their autonomy and participation both in and out of the classroom.
Create new pathways for learning
Regardless of your teaching style, interactivity allows us to break the structure of more classic structures and lines. Strengthen visual communication to strengthen your message.
We learn the language of visuals intuitively and visual communication cuts through the noise. Making your visual elements interactive helps ensure that they’re effective in communicating what you want to and creating incredible learning experiences.
Engage our students
Create an immersive environment where your message can captivate its audience. Do you want your students to play an active role in their learning? Would you like them to take the time to fully digest what they learn? Interactivity is the answer!
By adding elements such as quizzes to your lessons, we can make reading information more interesting and stimulating for students.
Make information memorable
Making our learning materials memorable and significant is easier than you think. Interactive environments don’t just engage students in the moment but achieve a lasting impact. Our students can browse through our material and that virtual exploration makes it easier to remember concepts over a longer period of time.
Teach as you always have and watch students learn better than ever
Digital tools allow you to create interactive spaces which you can insert all your favorite tools into to enrich in-person, online and blended lessons. We can, for example, create an interactive test with Wooclap and insert it into any genially we’d like.
Once the Genially creation is ready, we can share it via our favorite LMS, whether it be Moodle, Canvas, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams or any other one. This allows us to harness the combined power of all our favorite tools, allowing us to create custom reports of our students’ development throughout the year.
In other words, with interactivity, we can create communication experiences that help us connect in any space and that presents information in its context, maximizing memorization, critical thinking and creativity. This, in turn, increases participation, customized learning and class motivation.
Allright, are you ready to see some real-life cases? Let’s take a look at uses for interactivity in the classroom.
What is interactivity useful for?
Sometimes, it can be hard to communicate successfully with our students, especially when we have had to adapt a model of blended or mixed learning when we are used to teaching in person.
We’ve already seen why it’s a good idea to apply interactivity in these situations. Now we’ll look at some real use cases of interactivity in the classroom that can help us with our day to day work as instructors:
Personalize learning
Interactive tools are useful for evaluating the previous knowledge our students have of the material in a new unit. For instance, let’s have a look at this quiz that checks math knowledge.
Additionally, we can use Wooclap to embed a short self-correcting quiz which can be completed during the lesson or beforehand. It can help us to identify the most frequent misconceptions and address them accordingly, giving our students a personalized experience.
Strengthen concepts
What about ending a lesson with a game-based activity? In the example we’ll show you, we’ve proposed an activity to check comprehension with an interactive quiz where our students must locate each body part, using either a phone, a computer or a tablet to solve it. This way, on top of obtaining valuable information for our own use, we engage our students with an activity that might, in a different format, seem more tedious and thus be less effective.
Develop emotional intelligence
If we want to go beyond the curriculum content, we can also introduce the use of interactive tools to help us understand how our students are managing their emotions. Changes in their routine, and being isolated from their peers can have a negative impact in the life of students.
That’s why it is so important to design activities that can help us keep track of our students’ emotional health. In this example we are sharing an infographic with 15 principles to raise and educate happy children (by Maria Montessori). This could be an excellent resource to share with parents and other teachers.
We could even embed a Wooclap where students would be prompted to share how they are feeling. This type of exercise relies on visual communication to get the conversation on emotions started and develop a new pathway for the exploration of emotional intelligence.
As you can see, the integration of interactive digital tools can help us improve our flow of communication and obtain information about how well our students understand the material in real time. Now, how can we get the most out of all of this? In other words, how can we apply interactive visual communication in our class?
How do I use interactive visual communication?
Now we’re going to present you with two tools that allow you to take interactive visual communication with your audience in your day-to-day activities. We’ll look at how to apply interactivity through the combined power of Genially and Wooclap.
Wooclap
Wooclap is an online platform for creating interactive questions. If we use this tool with different classroom strategies, it can help engage your student sduring online and in-person lessons.
The tool Wooclap is simple, interactive, and can be made part of a teacher’s toolbox as they insert questions into their presentations and other Genially creations as we’ll see next. These quick surveys and quizzes help to keep your students’ attention in classes, check to make sure they’ve understood the material that you’ve covered, and increase their participation during classes.
Genially
You already know about Genially, the leading platform for the creation of interactive content that brings your lessons to life and allows anyone to create stunning content that’s interactive and animated.
So, I’m sure you want to learn how these two awesome tools work together for effective communication that’s visual and interactive? Check out the webinar video to learn how to collect student and audience responses with Wooclap and how to integrate this option into a learning environment designed with Genially, where you can see your responses in the context you’ve created. This will help us keep all our instructional materials in the same place. This way, we can create a didactic unit that includes a space where you can add complementary or optional materials along with the official unit material and a self test. All in the same place. Without needing to send dozens of links to our students.
We hope you’ve liked this post, where we’ve seen how interactive visual communication can be our ally in remote learning and online and in-person training sessions.
If you have any questions or suggestions, get in touch with us via social media by using the hashtag #AskGenially or leave a comment on this post.
Warm wishes from the entire Genially Team. See you soon!
