Essential Digital Tools for Student Engagement

Engage your classroom with a free random name picker that spins like a wheel of fortune to randomly select students, boosting participation and eye contact.

Use a simple timer to manage a one-hour class, set per-activity time, and have students pace themselves to improve classroom and time management.

Learn to use Padlet, an online digital notice board, for icebreakers, formative assessment, collaborative research, and group activities, and share results on your learning platform.

Leverage smartphones in the classroom with Mentimeter to design interactive activities, including multiple choice, image choice, word clouds, quizzes, scales, and open-ended questions with real-time feedback.

Set up a word cloud in Mentimeter to run an interactive activity, including signing up, creating a presentation, choosing audience pace, and sharing or embedding results for live feedback.

Explore how Mentimeter lets you create open-ended questions to engage students in higher-order thinking, collect concise, 140-character responses, and display results on screen in class.

Use mentimeter to create a 1–5 scale question ranking the importance of 21st-century skills, and visualize responses with a chosen layout.

Explore Mentimeter's additional activities with templates and use cases to engage students in workshops, classrooms, meetings, events, and conferences, guided by real user feedback and practical scenarios.

Explore poll everywhere, a free classroom response system that lets you post questions and display student responses live on screen via text or the web for class and workshop engagement.

Learn to create polls or quizzes with poll everywhere, including multiple choice and image-based questions, sign in, design items, activate the poll, and monitor live student responses.

Learn to use Poll Everywhere to run an icebreaker that builds classroom community by sharing personal interests, activating open-ended questions, and collecting multiple responses.

Use Poll Everywhere to create a word cloud from students' brainstorming responses, turning input into a live, visual discussion that boosts student engagement.

Create a rank order activity with pool everywhere where students drag and drop options from highest to lowest on phones or laptops, then view live results for discussion.

Create a clickable image activity in Poll Everywhere that lets students mark locations on an image, test understanding, and spark discussion using stock or uploaded images.

Create and manage a Poll Everywhere poll to collect student slogans on green technology, enable upvote voting via any web device, and display results as a bar graph.

Learn to create a survey with poll everywhere by sequencing multiple poll types, and see a four-question example including multiple choice, open-ended, clickable image, and ranking.

Discover creative icebreaking ideas using poll everywhere templates for introductions, team building, and informal sessions, with ready-to-use questions to engage students.

Explore ten word cloud activities for the classroom to boost engagement, brainstorming, and discussion, using live word clouds and poll tools to capture ideas and emotions.

Close with two core digital tools, mental meter and pool everywhere, to design interactive activities that engage students cognitively and help them construct their own knowledge and meaning.