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Quick Tips: Pedagogical Uses of Top Hat
What is Top Hat?
Top Hat is an active learning platform that provides instructors with several options for engaging students in real time, including asking questions, presenting polls, giving quizzes, and launching in-class discussions. It’s a powerful tool for engaging students and making classes more interactive. For example, you can quickly check student understanding, ask students to make a prediction and follow along on a class experiment, or offer a ‘back channel’ for student questions and comments.
Top Hat is a bring-your-own-device solution, meaning students can use any web-enabled device (laptop, tablet, smartphone) to participate. Students with feature phones (cell phones without Internet access) can text responses using SMS.
Top Hat is now available to all UW–Madison instructors and students under an enterprise license, eliminating out-of-pocket costs for students.
How can I use Top Hat to engage students?
You can use Top Hat’s Classroom functions to:
- Test students’ ability to recall knowledge of facts, such as checking their comprehension of a reading or lecture.
- Engage higher-order thinking skills through questions that assess conceptual understanding.
- Apply ideas through decision-making scenarios or predictions about outcomes.
- Expose students to their peers' opinions and see how they fit into a larger group.
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Quick Tip 1: Use questions for knowledge and progress checks
Quick Tip 2: Use questions to reveal common misconceptions
Quick Tip 3: Use questions to prompt discussions
Additional resources
- Top Hat – Overview
- Top Hat – Getting Started
- Using Top Hat to Present Questions to Students in the Classroom
- Support Resources for Top Hat
- Sample questions
Who can I talk to for more information about the pedagogical uses of Top Hat?
If you have questions or would like additional support on this topic, please contact the CTLM. We look forward to working with you!
More from the CTLM
- Visit the Instructional Resources KnowledgeBase homepage
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