Enhancing your online teaching job to become interesting, especially if it’s your first, can be incredibly nerve-wracking. You don’t know what to expect, and you don’t want to disappoint your employer or the students. Luckily, there are many ways and tools to ensure that your experience as an online teacher goes well, regardless of the subject matter you are covering or the age range of your students. In this article, we look at essential tips to make your online teaching as exciting and engaging as possible to ensure that you achieve your goals and have fun too!
Introduce an Online Teaching App
What if you could easily create engaging and interactive lessons on your phone? An interactive online teaching app will allow you to create professional-grade multimedia lessons using pictures, video, text, or audio. You can even record your voice and include it in the lesson. The best part? You don’t need to be a graphic designer to create beautiful content. A reliable online teaching app will make it easy with a drag-and-drop feature that allows anyone to build multimedia presentations quickly. It’s like having an editing suite right on your phone! It doesn’t get much easier than this
On the other hand, learners love the interactivity of these kinds of lessons. Some learners enjoy doing quizzes and interacting with different components of the task. Others may appreciate the fact that they can watch what they want when they want without missing out on anything because all of their learning materials are available at their fingertips. Plus, these types of resources are mobile-friendly, meaning students can access them from any device as long as they have an internet connection.
Bring an Element of Surprise to Your Lessons
Online learning is a great way to reach new learners, but it can get boring quickly if you don’t spice up your lessons. When you bring an aspect of surprise into your online lesson, students will be more engaged and interested in online learning. That way, it will help impact their cognitive development with an enhanced opportunity for comprehension. The best part about surprises in the classroom is that they are not difficult to create!
Here are some ways to inject fun and spontaneity into your teaching;
- Have them vote on the most exciting or challenging part of a sub-topic
- Let them answer questions by using video clips instead of answering verbally
- Have some moments for brainstorming the ideas they have on a particular topic
- Reward valuable contributions with prizes like free app access to downloadable music or a free magazine subscription.
Create YouTube Videos
Creating visuals to accompany your lesson will make it more interesting for the students and keep them engaged. Post these as a separate video on your channel so they can follow along in class. That can also help when you need to recap at the end of a lecture because it is an effective way of reviewing new concepts.
Create videos that have just short clips of content from various lessons you have taught in the past. These could be helpful as supplemental material or even quizzes for the students. It is a great way to review different topics throughout the semester without having to create an entirely new video every time.
Get Your Students Talking to One Another Online
One way to make your online teaching more interesting is to have your students work together as a team on projects. You can achieve that by creating group assignments that require the students in the group to get in touch online with one another and speak about their assignments, projects, and other pertinent aspects of their course. Not only will this be good for increasing student engagement and participation, but it will also help them become better at collaborating with others.
Chat board tools like Blackboard Collaborate or Google Hangouts are great options for these types of interactions. Also, having an in-app chat board for your students where they can communicate with each other during class time will allow you to monitor what’s happening in real-time and participate yourself. That way, there’s no need to switch between different platforms. However, you’ll need to turn off chat boards after class ends so they don’t interfere with exam periods or final grades.
Use a User-Friendly Platform
A user-friendly platform will ensure that your students can easily access information for your course and the program you are using for the class. Some online teaching platforms have specific features such as quizzes, forums, blogs, and labs. It is crucial to find one that has all of these things so that students can keep up with what they need to do to succeed in your class. Some websites will even allow you to export data from them, making it easy for you and the student!
Having an adaptive user interface (UI) will also help with the learning process because it accommodates the diverse needs of learners. Teachers can personalize their lessons by changing color contrast or font size to accommodate various learning styles. In addition, many platforms now provide on-demand video tutorials and live tutoring sessions, making teaching more manageable and exciting. With these resources available, there’s no excuse not to take advantage of them and deliver quality content!
Takeaway
Developing an online teaching plan that will impact the knowledge and skills of your students is critical. However, if you want them engaged and participating, you should put in a little extra effort. By making good use of modern and user-friendly technology, there are plenty of ways for teachers to make their online lessons more interesting and engaging. That way, you will have fun with exciting and engaging lessons every day!