Luckily for teachers who regularly use lectures to teach, we have many options to create engaging lectures for our students. No longer do we need to rely on embarrassing ourselves by singing and dancing to engage students. While I still sing and dance in my class, I’ve also added some interactive lecture tech tools for the days I can’t hit the high notes. Interactive lectures not only engage students with the content but allow teachers to collect data to check students learning and progress. For most of us, our psychology class is a students first exposure to the subject matter, so class lectures are inevitable. Most of our students even enjoy psychology lectures because the content is so applicable to their lives. So, if it is not broken, why fix it, you ask? Because we want to make sure our students actually know the content and participate in metacognitive skills. We want our students to leave the class knowing how to process information about their own thinking and understanding. Including assessments in our lectures allows teachers to collect data to improve learning and teaching, assessments are even sexier when they are embedded in an interactive lecture.
There are many new tech tools online to create interactive lectures. An interactive lecture technology tool allows teachers to give direct instruction with built-in quick activities for students during the lecture to keep them engaged. One of my favorite interactive lecture tools in Pear Deck, which can be added onto Google Slides.
You can use Google presentations you have already created and add pre-made slides from Pear Deck to your lecture.
Pear Deck has blank slides organized by placement in the beginning, middle or end. In psychology class, you could give a lecture on the neuron and then check for understanding by having students draw a neuron and label the parts. Another tech tool that I use in my classroom is the poll feature. During Social Psychology, I will poll students on different situations.
I can share with students the poll results which often leads to a great discussion. Students who do not like to talk in class can add to the discussion by typing their ideas into Pear Deck. Pear Deck is a neat tool because it does keep all students engaged in the lecture and allows the teacher to check-in on every student. My friend, Trevor Fritz teaches AP Psychology at Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Illinois and uses Pear Deck at the start of class so students can share how they are feeling. Some days, Trevor uses it as a way to understand how they are feeling about the content and others days to check-in with them personally. If a student isn’t feeling great, this lets Trevor know to ask the student what they need. I plan on trying that this year to help me build more positive relationships with my students.
Another interactive lecture tech tool to consider trying is Poll Everywhere. It’s an easy tool for students to use on their phones or computers. With Poll Everywhere you can embed an interactive slide into Powerpoint, Google Slides or Keynote. Back in the day, Poll Everywhere was just a polling tool. Now, Poll Everywhere has many options that engage students, check out the “examples” page on the Poll Everywhere’s website for ideas. If you are not using a slide show to guide your lecture, you can use Poll Everywhere during natural breaks to interact with your classes. They have pre-made templates for ranking people, or my personal favorite, brain parts.
Teaching psychology has brought me so much joy in both my personal and professional life, and I am so grateful to share my love of technology with the psychology teaching community. Have a great 2018-19 school year!
