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After another much-needed summer break, the beginning of a new academic year is upon us. Whether you are currently deciding how to engage a new group of students, setting learning objectives for your course, rearranging the seminar and lecture layout, or wondering what assessment tools to use - there is a lot to think about and prepare. To some, this back to school planning process can be a daunting task.
To make sure you’re utilizing all your resources, technologies and tools to their full potential, we’ve put together some useful tips for preparing for the new academic year, and ensuring success with your new students:
Start with interactive icebreakers
The first week back in class can be exciting and stressful for students, especially for those in their very first year of university. To enable students to feel at ease and to build a good sense of community amongst their peers, it’s a good idea to start the new academic year with icebreaker activities. This gives new and returning students a simple platform to interact and engage, immediately building confidence and helpoing those more reserved students to feel welcome and part of the class from the off.
With Vevox, there's a whole host of ways that you can run effective icrebakers that will easily engage your students. Running a wordcloud poll is a great way to visually higlight each and every persons contribution - for example asking a question such as ' Where is everybody from?' allows students to share their hometown and the wordloud allows everyone to visually see all of the different places people have come from - this instantly creates conversation and allows students to feel immediately engaged with the class.
Have a watch of one of our recent Pedagogy series webinars, in which Bruce Wight, Associate Lecturer at Aberystwyth University, discusses how he uses Vevox in class to run effective icebreakers:
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