Here are some key ways educators can use ThinkHub to enhance student engagement across various subjects
1. Enhance Interactive Coursework
ThinkHub can easily be used to foster an engaging, interactive classroom where students can actively participate in the learning process. Here are a few ways to enhance your interactive coursework:
- Dynamic Lectures: Use ThinkHub’s Canvas to enhance your lectures by incorporating diverse multimedia content. Display videos, images, documents, and web links side by side to keep students engaged. Instead of static presentations, you can zoom in, annotate, and organize the content in real time to fit the flow of your lecture.
- Build a Canvas for Each Section of Your Syllabus: As you progress through the course, create a ThinkHub Canvas for each major section of your syllabus. Start with key concepts, add notes, diagrams, and multimedia as the course progresses, and review the content before exams to reinforce key takeaways. This way, students get a visual, living syllabus that evolves throughout the term.
- Visual Problem-Solving: Use ThinkHub’s whiteboard and annotation tools to solve equations, sketch diagrams, or work through scientific problems live in class. Students can participate by annotating and offering their own solutions from their devices.
- Document Analysis and Markups: Upload documents and use ThinkHub’s annotation tools to highlight and discuss key sections with the class. Students can add their own annotations, facilitating collaborative analysis and discussion.
- Interactive Media: In creative courses, instructors can share images, sketches, or videos on the Canvas, allowing students to critique or edit the work directly. The Canvas can also serve as a digital portfolio, tracking the progression of student projects over time.
Pro Tip: ThinkHub allows remote and in-room students to contribute simultaneously, ensuring that all students, regardless of their location, remain actively engaged in the lesson.
2. Use the Canvas to Track Progress and Reinforce Learning
ThinkHub is more than just a teaching tool—it’s a platform for reinforcing learning and tracking student progress over time.
- Create a Collaborative Review Canvas: Before major exams or assessments, use ThinkHub to create a comprehensive review Canvas that includes all key concepts, notes, and multimedia used during the course. Students can contribute by adding their own insights or questions to the Canvas, creating a shared resource for the class.
- Progress Tracking: Save your Canvases at the end of each class to track the progression of lessons. Instructors can use these saved Canvases to monitor student participation and ensure that all content is covered in-depth. These resources can be shared with students after class for continued study.
- Q+A Workflow: Encourage an interactive Q&A during lectures by allowing students to submit questions via the ThinkHub Canvas. This helps create a dynamic dialogue between instructor and students.
Pro Tip: Consider saving a Canvas with key elements that you plan to revisit each class, such as your syllabus overview or lesson plan structure, so you can reduce prep time and focus on teaching.
3. Increase Student Participation
Active learning environments often involve group work and presentations, and ThinkHub is the ideal tool for facilitating this kind of collaboration.
- Collaborative Learning Activities: Assign students tasks on the Canvas, such as contributing ideas via notes, annotating images, or solving problems on the digital whiteboard. This transforms the classroom into an interactive space where students can work together to explore concepts in real-time.
- Group Work Sessions: ThinkHub is designed to facilitate digital collaboration, enhancing interactivity in group work. Depending on your classroom set-up, group work can be accomplished in one of the following three ways:
- Student Stations: In a classroom with student stations students can work together in small groups and share their screen to their student station, which the instructor can view on ThinkHub.
- ThinkHub Room: You can use ThinkHub's built-in groups tool to divide the ThinkHub Canvas into sections and assign each group a space to work on their project.
- ThinkHub Cloud: Students can prepare their group presentations on a ThinkHub Cloud Canvas, which they can access any time from their laptops. There they can create notes and share images, videos, pdfs, and web links to create an engaging presentation. When they are ready to present, they can share their Canvas to the ThinkHub Room.
- Student Presentations: Once groups are ready to present, they can use the ThinkHub Canvas to display their work. They can lead the class through their findings, receiving real-time feedback and making adjustments directly on the Canvas.
Pro Tip: Encourage students to save their presentation Canvases for later review or feedback. This is a great way to provide ongoing, formative feedback throughout the course.
5. Hybrid Learning
ThinkHub allows for enhanced collaboration between in-room and remote students, ensuring everyone has the same access to course materials and classroom interactions. If someone is out sick, they don't have to miss class—they can still follow along and even participate in class assignments and group work.
- Remote Participation: Remote students can join via the T1V app, sharing content and annotations on the same Canvas as in-room participants. This ensures they remain an integral part of the classroom environment.
- Blended Learning: For hybrid learning setups, ThinkHub can be used to create a blended learning environment where in-person and online students can work together on projects, interact during lectures, and contribute to discussions.
Pro Tip: Set up a group for remote students to send in their questions or answers to assignments, encouraging them to contribute throughout the class and making sure their work is visible to in-room participants.