6 Ideas To Spice Up Your Interactive Activities

Imagine you've been asked more than once what more teachers can do to make their lessons more engaging, making them a joy for the students. The short story is: stop putting all your eggs in one basket. Interactive activities are a great way to spice things up and engage with students. They can also be used for non-language classes. We are leading this post with 6 ideas that will encourage you to step out of the box and try something new with your classes! You'll be surprised how much fun a language class can be when it moves beyond traditional learning activities.

1. Use Visuals to Enhance Your Lessons

Visual aids are a great way to engage students in the lesson. They can be used as part of an interactive lesson plan or as part of a Google slide presentation. Visuals can be anything from pictures, videos, and graphs to games and interactive elements.

Here are some of the ways you can use visuals:

• Use visuals to help get students' attention and create interest in what you're teaching.
• Visuals can also show relationships between ideas, objects, or events.

• Visuals can help make abstract concepts concrete or real for students.

• Visuals can make complicated ideas easier to understand by breaking them down into smaller parts.

Edform lesson builder allows you to add as many visuals as you need on the slides, but do not overdo them. The tools are available: video and audio recording, YouTube, image, text, shapes, drag&drop elements, etc.

An excellent visual aid helps students remember what you have taught them, so it is crucial to choose an appropriate visual for your interactive lesson.

• For example, if you teach about the water cycle, you could use a picture of a cloud or a bottle of water with "water" written on it. These simple visuals show one aspect of the water cycle without overwhelming the students with too much information.

2. Engage Students with Technology

The first step is to understand which tools are best for your classroom. While there are many options, we'll focus on 2 main types that can be used to enhance any lesson plan: 

• Interactive worksheets allow students to work through problems by filling in blanks or selecting answers from multiple-choice lists. They're great for practicing skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication tables, spelling, and vocabulary words. Interactive worksheets also provide a structured environment that helps students stay focused on their work without getting distracted by social media sites or text messages. 

• Interactive lessons - These are similar to interactive worksheets but are designed to teach specific concepts rather than practice skills. For example, an interactive lesson about photosynthesis might let users drag elements into place on an illustration of a leaf as they learn about how plants convert energy from sunlight into food for themselves and other organisms. Interactive worksheets can be part of the lesson and be assigned as practice for classwork or homework. Builder allows you to add blank slides to your document, ensuring you have as many as you need for your online lesson!

3. Utilize Game-Based Learning

Gamification in education is a widely-discussed topic that has been gaining attraction in the last few years. Studies have shown that game-based learning effectively engages students and gets them interested in education. It also helps them gain knowledge faster than traditional methods of teaching do.

One of the most popular ways to incorporate games into your classroom is through interactive worksheets. These worksheets allow students to practice their skills as they play a game at the same time. The best part about these activities is that they can be used for any subject or grade level!

Math Games: Math games are great because they allow students to practice math skills while having fun. They include addition problems, multiplication problems, and more advanced equations like factoring polynomials and solving quadratic equations. You can make any worksheet on the Edform platform. You only need to prepare material and a few minutes to create an interactive online worksheet with games. Explore more on Math Worksheets.

English Games: English games are also a great way to add fun to your classroom while still being educational! English games can focus on grammar usages such as verb tenses, nouns, and pronouns, along with sentence structure like conjunctions and prepositions. You can find some spelling games in the public library on Edform or create your own in the Interactive lessons builder.

4. Give Students Choice and Control over Their Learning

As a teacher, you know the importance of giving students a choice and control over their learning. Discover student-centered learning to build a genuine teacher-student connection.

The problem with traditional teaching methods is that they often need to be more engaging for students. Interactive worksheets and online education platforms like Edform allow you to create an inviting environment where students can practice what they've learned rather than just reading or listening to it.

You can use these platforms to push your students to take ownership of their learning by giving them more creative and open-ended tasks. Edform has many open-ended question-types that may give your student freedom of choice on how to answer. 

Online education makes it easier to track student progress, so if a student needs extra help, it's easy to adjust their workloads accordingly! Learn more about feedback and how to reply to your students' work here. Our monitoring system aims at easy and simple tracking of your student's performance. Everything is displayed in the reports section and can be exported for further result processing. 

5. Incorporate Student-Led Projects into Your Classroom

Students often need to be more engaged by the typical classroom lesson. They need a way to be involved in the learning process and feel like they’re adding something to their education. A great way to attract your students is through student-led projects.

There are many ways that you can incorporate student-led projects into your classroom. Here are some ideas:

• Incorporate a project into your curriculum. For example, if you’re teaching about how people lived during the Great Depression, have students write letters from those who lived in that time and collect them in an online notebook. Collect those letters using Edform using an open-ended question type and gather them together. This task will help teach students about the historical era and improve their writing and research skills.

• Have students find an exciting topic or person of interest and write a paper on it. This could be as simple as writing about someone they admire or as complex as creating an entire biography of them with pictures included. The possibilities are endless, and you can use various interactive elements in the task, such as image, video or audio response, open-ended area for their text, etc.

• Let students choose their own project topics; this might seem overwhelming at first glance, but once you allow them to do it themselves, you’ll find that they can think on their feet and come up with fantastic ideas without any help from you!

6. Get Creative with Your Presentation Techniques

Presentation techniques should be used to enhance your presentation, not to distract from it. You might be tempted to use them as a crutch or to get out of doing the hard work of creating a good presentation. 

In fact, you can use presentation techniques like audio and video clips to make your presentations more compelling and action-packed. Interactive lessons usually contain a presentation and a practice part. Create a lesson in Google Slides and upload it to the Edform Builder in a few clicks to make it interactive and clickable.

The presentations can be different; however, they might have something in common. For the presentation to stay captivating, follow these three rules:

• Be Clear

Use understandable language for your audience to maximize the comprehension of the lesson's topic. This might be helpful for complex subjects such as chemistry, math, physics, biology, etc.

• Be Visual

It is better to use visuals than avoid them. However, Be minimalistic with the choice of videos, audio, and images. Overdo visuals, and your students will be distracted for several minutes or the whole presentation. 

• Be Brief

The shorter your story is, the easier it will be to remember. Even deep and serious topics would save for longer if they were told less but with the best wording. Brief doesn't mean unintelligent; it means having the ability to shorten the speech so that the main idea is preserved.

Further reading that may help you create the best interactive online lessons: 

1. The Complete Guide for Teaching with Interactive Math Worksheets
2. The Ultimate Guide to Homework Revision With Interactive Worksheets
3. How to Create Online Lessons from Scratch
4. 5 Tips to Help You Create Engaging Interactive Learning Material
5. How to Create Interactive Lessons for Google Classroom with Edform

Create and enhance existing lessons with interactive activities with Edform right now!