CANVAS

Three Potential Uses

Weekly Agendas: Create weekly agendas in your modules so that students can see what assignments and activities are coming in the near future. 

Community-Building Prompts: This activity is especially helpful for online courses. Use a weekly (ungraded) discussion board to prompt students about what they’re reading/watching/enjoying that week, a favorite restaurant they’ve tried, a breakthrough moment they’ve had in the course, etc.

Rubrics: For graded assignments, create a rubric in order to clarify expectations for student success — please note that creating rubrics is compatible with alternative grading in your class!

Generative AI

Three Potential Uses

Generate Diverse Examples. Copy and paste the following prompt:

• “Provide me with five diverse, real-life examples of [concept or topic]. Each example should come from a different cultural or national  context and time period.”

Brainstorm Learning Outcomes. Copy and paste the following prompt:

• “I’m designing a course on the topic of [x] for [# students] and want to make sure that students learn [y]. Students should have opportunities to be creative and demonstrate their knowledge in multiple ways throughout the term. Please write 6-8 learning outcomes that are specific, measurable, and at the cognitive-process level verb of “apply” or higher (according to Bloom’s taxonomy). These should be relevant to students’ lives outside of the classroom and set them up for success for a future career in their industry (and more broadly in life). They should include a mixture of conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge.”

Generate Ideas for Classroom Learning. Here are a few sample prompts you might try:

• “Explain 2 ways that the concept of [x] could be relevant for students’ future careers and lives outside of the classroom.”
• “Provide me with 3 ideas for an active, collaborative learning activity on the concept of [x]. I have # students in my course and only want to spend [x] minutes of class time on this activity.”
• “I plan to facilitate the following activity during my next class. [Paste brief explanation of the activity]. What do I need to consider in order to ensure that this particular activity is inclusive and accessible for students?”

Gradescope

Three Potential Uses

Quickly Submit and Grade Handwritten Assignments. Students and/or instructors can scan and upload handwritten assignments to Gradescope, which uses AI to recognize student writing and group questions to streamline grading. This can be extremely effective for grading paper-based assignments such as multiple-choice exams, quizzes, or problem sets.

Build Dynamic Rubrics. Gradescope allows you to create rubrics for assignments, helping ensure consistency and fairness across your grading. More than this, it also allows you to adjust point totals midway through the grading process. This can be particularly helpful if you begin grading and realize that you’ve made an error in your rubric, or that you have been unnecessarily harsh in deducting points based on a particular error. Simply adjust your rubric and all of the previously-graded submissions will be automatically adjusted to reflect the new rubric point totals.

Provide Formative Feedback. Use Gradescope’s Analytics and Statistics to quickly gather information about student learning and locate patterns. Where are your students struggling? What aspect of the question are they struggling with? Use this information to debrief with students and review particular topics and common mistakes.

Google Drive

Four Potential Uses

Collaborative Student-Generated Study Guides or Exam Questions: Create a blank Google Doc/Slides document and change editing permissions so that all students can edit the document. During class or at home, assign student groups a particular module, unit, or topic. Ask students to draft some exam questions on the topic that align with your learning outcomes, or create a one-page study guide to share with their peers.

Collaborative Reading Notes: Create a blank Google Doc and change editing permissions so that all students can edit the document. Using a lengthier assigned reading (i.e. scholarly article or book) as a guide, create prompts for each section (headings, chapters, etc). Assign different sections to your students. As students read their assigned section, they will take detailed notes under the prompts you’ve created. 

Student Check-In Surveys: Use Google Forms to create simple check-in surveys. Use these check-ins to ask students about their prior knowledge, successes, and struggles related to the course. These check-ins can also be used to provide you with feedback on your instruction, or to provide space for self-reflection and goal-setting.Use this data to debrief with students in class and make instructional adjustments as necessary.

Vision Board: Create a blank Google Slides page (make sure it’s not a title slide) and change editing permissions so that all students can add to the slide. Project a prompt for students to upload corresponding photos – this could be along the lines of class norm setting, responding to a reading, definitional work, etc.

Hypothes.is

Three Potential Uses

Reflexive Reading: If you are assigning a longer text throughout the semester (i.e. chapters in a textbook), ask your students to use Hypothes.is to reflect on what they’ve learned and where they have remaining questions. To make this a collaborative learning endeavor, you might consider asking students to respond to classmates’ annotations. 

Teach a Concept: This activity can be done independently or in groups. Upload or link a collection of readings that introduce or address relevant concepts from your class. Make sure that you have enough readings for each student (or each group) to select a reading. Students will read their selected article, then they will do independent research on the key concepts from the reading. Through elaboration, discussion questions, and definitional work, their public annotations will then serve as a guide that teaches their classmates about the concepts at hand.

Annotate an Exam: After grading student exams, annotate student answers to provide feedback. You might consider noting what steps are done correctly, what can be done differently moving forward, and what the student should watch out for when solving a similar problem.

iClicker

Three Potential Uses

Add variety to your in-class formative assessments: Use iClicker to ask your students a variety of low- or no-stakes formative assessment questions in class. Whether it be multiple choice, multiple answer, numeric, text entry, and target (hot spot) question types, building this variety into your formative assessments will provide you with valuable data to monitor student learning in real time while also engaging students via new and novel interactions. 

Think/Pair Practice Problems. Use iClicker as part of a modified think-pair-share activity. Present a problem, scenario or question in your slideshow, and ask students to solve the problem individually. Next, invite them to pair up with a peer to discuss and explain their answers. After discussion, ask students to submit their answer using the appropriate iClicker response. This activity is recommended as a simple practice opportunity rather than a graded assessment.   

Attitudinal polling: Build community and center student input by using iClicker to learn what your students thought of a recent exam, what they think of a current world event, or simply how they are feeling that day.   

Mediaspace

Three Potential Uses

Introduction Videos. Ask students to introduce themselves by creating a short 1-2 minute video using Express Capture. (Also provide students with an option to submit their introductions in an alternative format). Here are a few prompts you might try:

• Click here and answer the first question you get.
• Show something you’ve made.
• Tell us about what sparks you, what you care about.
• Tell us something unique about your hometown.
• Tell us about what you’re watching, reading, or listening to.

Video Questions or Quizzes. Mediaspace allows you to embed multiple choice, true or false, or open-ended questions directly into your video lectures. This can help make your videos more interactive and support flipped classroom approaches. Ask questions that prepare students for in-class learning and discussion to create synergy between your asynchronous and synchronous learning experiences.

“Explain Your Q & A” Assignment. Rather than asking students to submit an answer to a problem, ask students to write (and solve) a problem of their own using course concepts and real-world context. Using a screencast video, students can then walk through the problem and its solution, explaining their logic along the way. By explaining how they solved a problem and why they solved it in a particular way, students can take more ownership over their learning, as well as draw connections between course concepts and real-life social contexts.

Mentimeter

Three Potential Uses

Wordcloud Icebreaker. Open up a class session by asking students to create a wordcloud. This is particularly useful activity at the beginning of class to gauge students prior knowledge and experiences with course topics. Students can submit up to three words to the word cloud.

• “What word(s) do you associate with ‘protein’?'”
• “Describe yourself in one word…”
• “What skills are most important in the engineering field?”

Group and Sort Open-Ended Responses. Ask students an open-ended question about a course topic or concept. As responses begin to populate on the screen, use Mentimeter’s AI-assisted sorting feature by pressing  “spacebar” to group the responses and identify common themes. This can be helpful for identifying patterns in student responses, particularly in large classes. Some questions you might ask:

• “After reading the syllabus, what aspect of the course are you most excited about?”
• “What concept from today’s class are you still strugging with?”
• [Provide students with a case study, scenario, or example.] “When approaching this problem or scenario, what are a few important things to consider?”

“Allocating Time and Effort” Reflective Exercise. After introducing a major assignment (project, portfolio, exam, etc.), provide students with a list of the essential topics, tasks, skills, or concepts that will be critical to successfully completing the assignment. Using the “Ranking” or “100 points” question type, ask students to allocate their time and/or prioritize their effort to successfully achieve each item. This will allow you to see, in real-time, which concepts or tasks students anticipate to be the most challenging or time-consuming and can help students build metacognitive skills to develop a more targeted study plan or work flow.

PADLET

Three Potential Uses

Community Agreements: Display a set of classroom agreements / norms on the projector. Then provide students with 10 minutes to work in pairs to “add,” “edit,” or “amplify” certain agreements. Ask them to record their suggestions in a padlet for future reference. Return to these throughout the semester and use them as tools for self-reflection.

Co-Created Class Map Assignments. Using the “map” template, ask students to contribute to a collaborative map related to a specific topic. Quick ideas include: a writing assignment where students share a personal story about a place that means a lot to them; case studies / analyses of catastrophic engineering failures (or breakthroughs) throughout the world; summaries of various national policies related to environmental sustainability.

Muddiest Point or “Digital Parking Lot.” Create a padlet where students can provide feedback about their learning. For instance, using the “wall” template, you might create three columns so that students can respond to the following questions:

• • “What was your biggest takeaway from today’s section?” 
  • “What are you still confused about?” 
  • “What is one goal you have between now and our next class session?”