Interactive Online Activities for Students

This is the third post in a series about Fun in the Online Classroom. You can read the first post here and the second post here. 

We hear people talking about this all the time and it has become one of those overused education buzzwords: interactivity. 

Yes, we want online learning to be interactive, but what does that even really mean? Here are some awesome ways to create interactive online lessons that get your students engaged!

1. Interactive Google Slides

Okay, I put these first because I know that we all know about them. But if you don’t, here is a quick recap. Google Slides is great because you can create fill-in-the-blank, drag-and-drop, matching, or creative activities within this program very easily. 

I want to make sure that we all understand that taking an image of a worksheet and putting it on a slide with text boxes on it, does not make it an interactive activity. It is still a good ol’ fashioned worksheet.

1. Poll Everywhere

I love this program because it can do so many cool things! 

So Poll Everywhere is a lot like Nearpod and Peardeck in that it makes it possible for students to engage with a lecture and provide responses in real-time and see what their peers are saying in real-time. 

I love Poll Everywhere though because unlike Nearpod, you can run it right in a Google Slides presentation, and unlike Peardeck, you are almost unlimited in the way you can ask questions of students. There is a Google Slides add-on which is basically the best and you can create all the same things from the add-on as you can on the site. 

One of my favorite lessons that use PollEverywhere is my Thesis Statements lesson. Within the presentation about thesis statements, some questions ask students to write their own thesis on a topic. Then, because we can see things in real-time, we can look over the responses as a whole class and talk about what works well and what could be improved. 

1. Movement as interaction

Movement is like the forgotten step-sibling of interactivity. You have students interacting with the space around them! 

I always love a good four corners activity when we are in the classroom and we can see where students are moving, but obviously online doesn’t really work for that. 

So we need to get creative. I do literary yoga with my students, and we also play an awesome scavenger hunt game that they love that gets them up and moving. I have also asked students to go outside and then describe what was going on to help them understand and use imagery in their writing.

This one is the hardest I think when it comes to the online classroom, but it is also so much more essential as students are spending so much more time sitting, stagnant, in front of a computer. 

1. Partner Sharing as Interactivity

Get students interacting with their peers! Think, pair, shares can go a long way and role-playing can be super fun for students of all ages. 

We recently did a unit about listening with my 5th graders and we had TONS of opportunities to practice with random partners and they always said that they wanted more time in the breakout rooms to talk to their partners!

1. Large group discussions can be Interactive

Interaction does not need to be a solitary activity. Planning in authentic and rigorous questions during a presentation or lecture allows the students to interact with you and peers and helps to keep them engaged in the learning.

There are so many ways to make online learning interactive (and they aren’t all about Google Slides!) that it shouldn’t be too hard to build interactivity into your classroom. 

 But if you do want to learn more about using Google Slides to create Interactive Activities, you can get 50% off my course, “Creating Interactive Google Slides for Students” where we will go over some Google Slides basics and learn about some specific activities you can use in Google Slides right away!