Tip #6: You don’t always need tech for active learning.

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I admit, that was just a provocative title. I know that you know teaching doesn’t require technology. But sometimes the shiny new thing is just so tempting that we forget that plenty of low-tech and no-tech activities work just as well.


If you like Kahoot, Chime In, or other quick poll activities, Carrie Miller, an instructional designer here in The Center for Excellence and Innovation, suggests using colored index cards instead. Assign each color a meaning (yes/no, ABCD, etc.), ask a question, and have students to hold up the color that corresponds to their answer. A quick look around the room is all you need to collect their data.


Michael Manderfeld, our other instructional designer in The Center, says you can’t go wrong with Think-Pair-Share. In traditional Think-Pair-Share, the teacher presents a problem and gives students a few minutes to think of a response or solution and commit it to paper (or computer). At the teacher’s signal, they pair up with a classmate and discuss their ideas, then share their best idea with the rest of the class. Michael also likes to add a technology twist by having students use audience response systems for their initial response.


Michael also suggests circulating a list of questions prior to a lecture, discussion, video, or guest speaker to prime students for the activity and guide their attention. As you move through the class, they can answer the questions you gave them or add new ones for the class to think about. The questions could then become a study guide or a way to measure participation or track attendance.

Simulations and demonstrations can also be low-tech ways to help students learn concepts. When I taught an introduction to microcomputers course in the early 2000s, I was always looking for ways to make that large lecture an active learning experience. In one activity, we learned how email and web pages are transmitted across the Internet by having a student in the back row divide a message into pieces, writing an IP address of a student in the front row, and passing the pieces forward, left, or right. We watched the “packets” of information pass through our “network” and get reassembled on the other end. I could have shown them a diagram (and probably did), but the activity created an opportunity to talk about why problems happen and how the network handles them (and why your emails sometimes go missing).

What no- or low-tech solutions do you use to make learning active?