Are your students getting it? Find out with Interactive Classroom

You spend hours creating lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, quizzes and tests, and tons of other material designed to help your students learn. But when you get down to the business of teaching, how do you know they're actually...keeping up? How do you connect with your class, share ideas, and know that they’ve got your lesson down pat? Microsoft Interactive Classroom might give you the solution you’ve been looking for.

In a nutshell, it works like this: You create presentations in PowerPoint, and Interactive Classroom helps you insert real time knowledge checks (called polls) along the way. Polls can include multiple choice, yes/no, or true/false questions, and they seamlessly integrate with the lesson you're teaching.

Students can connect to your presentation by joining an Interactive Classroom session that you create (note that your students will need a network connection). After students join—and it's easy to do, so don't worry about spending half your class time setting it up—they see your presentation and the poll question(s) you've included in their own OneNote notebook. Students can answer poll questions in OneNote, and you get real-time feedback in the charting format you choose. You can add text or draw on your slides during the session, and your students will see the changes you’ve made in OneNote. They can also add their own comments and notes on the presentation.

The best part? It's easy to install and use. If you have PowerPoint 2007 or 2010, and your students have OneNote 2007 or 2010, it's as simple as installing and enabling an add-in for both. If your students don’t have OneNote (or they don’t have their own computers in class), they can use handheld clickers to answer poll questions.

Check out this video for a quick Interactive Classroom demo.


And for a real life example, here’s a college professor demonstrating how she uses Interactive Classroom to connect with students.

To try it yourself, visit the Interactive Classroom download page and follow the installation instructions.

So…would you use this in your classroom? Why or why not?

-- Matt Shelton