Teaching your students in an interesting way is easy, but it is not the same when it comes to online teaching. Teaching via a webcam requires more effort to make your students attentive throughout the class. Since students are sitting in the comfort of their homes and are surrounded by many distractions, they would easily lose their focus on your teaching.
However, by following some useful strategies, we can make the online classes more interesting and keep your students engaged with your lecture. This blog will look at some useful tips on how to make online teaching more interesting.
Consider the opinion of the students.
Teaching the only way you like without considering the opinion of your students would make them less interested. Instead of making your students feel your teaching is happening one way, you can ask them suggestions on choosing the topic to teach, what makes them more interested to learn, which method of teaching they like the most, etc.
Interacting with your students this way and learning what interests them the most will help you make your teaching liked by your students. Collecting weekly or monthly feedback for online classes from your students will also help you change your way of teaching if needed.
Set goals for you and your students
It is a human tendency to postpone things if we are not given a deadline to finish by. The same goes for the students too. Set goals for yourself and your students at the very beginning of every academic year. For example, say to them that you will finish teaching the first chapter by this week, and they have to learn it and complete the associated assignments before the next week.
Setting goals like this will keep them motivated and help them complete the tasks on time. By doing so, they won’t feel burdened in the end. Don’t forget to appreciate the students when they accomplish their goals on time. You can also try giving them rewards for their accomplishments. This makes them encouraged to achieve more.
Live sessions for interaction
Conducting live sessions for discussing important topics is important. At the same time, don’t use live sessions only for teaching. Instead, use one or two live sessions per week for interaction. Plan an activity for that session that requires students to interact among themselves and with you. It helps them get to know more about their classmates even though they study in an online classroom.
By attending these fun sessions once or twice a week, students would feel less stressed and might get a chance to socialize with their friends. In addition, these activities make them more interactive, and they will be interested in attending your classes regularly.
Also, make sure to present yourself neatly with a non-diverting background to make your students interested in listening to you.
Seek help from technology
Students would find themselves more interested in traditional classrooms than online learning because of so many reasons. First, it’s because they miss the live interaction they had with their friends and teachers in offline teaching. However, some ways make online learning more interesting.
Technology helps you a lot in making online learning more interesting for your students. Instead of showing the boring pages of the textbooks, you can create cool presentations with attractive slides.
You can download some fascinating pictures from the internet that are relevant to your topic and add them to your slides to grab their attention. You can also use some cartoon videos or students’ favorite movie characters as an example to demonstrate the concept in between your lectures. These things make them listen attentively and are not possible in offline learning.
There are a lot of drawing tools available online that you can use while teaching online. Instead of using only the words, drawing the concepts in the drawing tool will help them to listen and grab the concept easily.
Give them regular breaks.
Students are known to listen to a topic attentively only for about 5 to 10 minutes. Forcing them to listen continuously for about 1 to 2 hours, especially during online classes, would make them feel exhausted, which makes them get diverted.
To avoid this, give them a break at least once in half an hour to get them refreshed. Since the study materials have also become digital, the screen time usage of the students is gradually increasing nowadays. This may affect their health and focus if not given a chance to take breaks.
Giving them regular breaks during the teaching and study time will prevent them from feeling overwhelmed and increase their focus.
Since online teaching may seem challenging for the teachers at first, they can make it more interesting with constant effort and patience. By adopting some useful and useful strategies as mentioned above, teachers can make online teaching more effective for their students and help them use the most of it. To get more help, platforms like Classplus help teachers with their own app and build their online brand and handle all online teaching works together in one app.