5 Effective Ways to Use Vevox in the Lecture Theatre

Large classes present a number of challenges for many lecturers. Students typically sit back in spacious lecture theatres while the lecturer in front of them attempts to impart knowledge and generate enthusiasm for the lecture topic. It can be very difficult to actively engage students in such an environment and equally as challenging to gauge whether the students are actually learning anything at all.

With the revision season already approaching and students set to become particularly busy over the next few weeks, I thought it would be useful to share 5 ways of utilising Vevox to solve the aforementioned issues in engagement and participation.

1) Live and Formative Assessment

One of the most useful ways of utilising Vevox is to engage your class or lecture with a quiz. As a lecturer, you can create polls that can be used as assessment tools to get immediate insight into student understanding. You can simply create your questions using the Vevox dashboard and your students can vote using their smartphones, tablets or laptops, and the results are shown instantly.

This means that lesson plans can be quickly changed if a class needs more time spent on a certain subject and additionally, Vevox’s correct answer feature makes your formative assessment even easier. Lecturers can supply a correct answer when setting up their polls from the Vevox dashboard and once the poll is run, you have a choice to display the correct answers. This is presented on the Vevox polling projector and also the students’ devices, in real time.

At the end of a lecture you can download all of the results to Excel as a report, allowing you to review student understanding of the class. A colour coded summary tab displays the correct and incorrect answers per poll, enabling you to visualise student understanding and assess whether the class or lecture has been a success.

2) Simple Presentation Delivery: Use Vevox directly in your PowerPoint presentation

It’s common practice in many universities that lecturers will use PowerPoint as their main presentation tool. Why not download Vevox PowerPoint add-in to compliment your presentation and make your lecture really stand out? The Vevox Powerpoint add-in allows you to run polls directly in your PowerPoint presentation, creating more engaging and interactive visuals for your students.

This Vevox add-in allows you to add polls as you go, so in the event that your class or lecture energy levels start to drop, you can always re-engage your students with a poll. The polling results will be displayed to each device in the classroom. You also have an option to use the analysis slide for a 'before and after' comparison. If you want to ask your students a question at the start of your lecture and then ask it again later in the presentation, this option allows you to display the results of both polls on the same slide. This instantly makes it a far more superior presentation tool.

3) Ongoing Assessment

Why not utilise the quizzes in Vevox throughout a semester or term to determine the ongoing assessment data? When your students finish a quiz, Vevox automatically creates a report for you! You can access the reports directly through the dashboard and download the data in Excel format. This helps you to gain a completely comprehensive understanding of your lecture or class’ ongoing progress.
You can use this instant feedback to identify the areas that require improvement and determine the next steps in your instruction. Vevox’s ongoing assessment will help you determine the best teaching approach to most effectively drive learning.

4) Measuring Student Confidence

It’s common practice in schools for students to assess themselves and evaluate their own confidence levels in understanding topics. This is usually achieved through end of the class paper surveys, yet the aforementioned feature is perfect to use when questioning the student’s opinions. By giving options such as poor confidence level, fair understanding and very good understanding of a given learning topic, you can get a realistic snapshot of where your students stand in terms of confidence.

5) Q&A or Discussion

You might think that Vevox is very much a teacher-focused tool, however the ‘Discussion’ feature is the most creative when it comes to engaging with students because it encourages open dialogue and enables students to speak their mind. The optional anonymity feature facilitates an open discussion where students can ask questions without being intimidated or embarrassed of looking stupid in front of the whole class.

All of the questions and answers are automatically logged in the reports and as a lecturer you also have an optional moderation feature which allows you to approve messages before they're shown on screen for the whole room to see.

Vevox is one of the most essential apps that I would recommend to any lecturer. The look and feel of the app means that it can be applied to any age range and teaching context. It’s so simple to use that you can improve your lectures or classes with immediate effect. A lot time can be saved before and after the lecture and most importantly it lets lecturers visualise student understanding. I have no doubt you’ll find plenty of ways of using it to achieve great results.