Body
Getting Started for Students
Getting Started for Instructors
Getting Started
Blackboard
Canvas
Presenting Content
An overview of the types of content you can present using Top Hat.
- Presenting your Slides
- Directions for presenting a slide show within Top Hat.
- Asking a Top Hat Question
- A guide on how to embed questions within a slide show and how to present questions to students on the fly.
- Using Discussions
- How to engage your students in real-time virtual discussions using Top Hat.
- Educator: Guest Mode
- This feature allows users to participate as students in Top Hat presentations without needing to log in or create an account.
- Guest mode can be enabled by selecting the drop-down arrow next to the present button within a course.
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.
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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