Getting Started with Top Hat

Table of Contents

Students

  • Quick start guide
  • Mobile apps

Instructors

Students

Instructors

Getting started

Blackboard

Canvas

Presenting content

An overview of the types of content you can present using Top Hat.

Downloading and using applications

Attendance tracking

  • Top Hat can be used to track attendance by utilizing students' personal devices (smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc.) combined with a random 4-digit attendance code.

Ace: AI-Powered Questions

Using Top Hat in creative ways

Explore innovative teaching, learning, and research scenarios on the Top Hat Teaching Tips site.

  • Assign homework, presentations, quizzes, and more outside of class.
  • Use for attendance purposes.
  • Use for ice-breaking purposes (random question at start of lecture).
  • Use with LMS for grading.
  • Use with anonymous audiences.
  • Create content for both synchronous and asynchronous interaction.
  • Ask questions that drive additional discussion on a topic.
  • Ask for participants' opinions on a topic.
  • Personalize statistics to your local audience and then compare to external statistics.
  • Create a time for telling. Ask participants what they think will happen if or when this or that happens.
  • Check participants' understanding is where you want or need it to be throughout lectures.
  • Assess prior knowledge on a topic before entering into related content.
  • Deliver pre- and post-chapter/topic/lecture quizzes.
  • Create content on the fly that is directly linked to something that happens in the moment.
  • Anonymously monitor student progress on a project.
  • Allow for anonymous peer evaluation of group work.
  • Gather anonymous feedback from students about how a course is going.
  • Compare audience responses by demographic.
  • Structure a presentation to include competition between individuals or teams and then offer a small reward for the winner.
  • Repeat a question more than once in a think-pair-share environment.
  • Incorporate sufficient time for your audience to respond to questions and prompts.
  • If you take the time to ask the audience to respond, you must also take the time to discuss their responses.
  • Offer varied confidence level response options.
  • Include high-quality distractor responses within questions that have a correct answer.
  • Occasionally, offer participants an 'out' such as, "I need more information."

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