Increase student engagement with classroom.cloud
Making sure that students are present in the classroom with you (and not just physically present) is a daily problem for teachers. What you really want is students who are present, quietly thinking and contributing. However, with multiple digital distractions in the mix, it’s tough! It may even prompt you to think about working without technology…
As a teacher, you’ll know that student engagement alone does not equal learning; you also need to get them to participate in class. You can design your lessons to encourage both of these things though, and having the right technology tools can make your design far easier to run at pace.
This is where classroom.cloud comes in. Here are eight ways it can support student engagement and participation in your classroom.
1. Check understanding in real time
If you wait until the test to find out who hasn’t grasped something, it’s too late. Dylan Wiliam’s work on responsive teaching shows that you cannot adapt a lesson to what you cannot see. Black and Wiliam’s research found that strong formative assessment produces some of the largest gains in attainment we have evidence for. You can check your students’ understanding while there is still time to act on it.
With classroom.cloud, you can fire an instant multiple-choice or open question to every student device and watch the responses come back live, so you have an immediate read of the room. Asking every student for a response fixes the weakness of hands-up questioning, where the same confident few answer while the rest quietly opt out. You can see the misconception form, and you can reteach on the spot instead of discovering the gap a fortnight later. The whole loop – ask, see, adjust – happens inside a single lesson.
2. Use random select so everyone stays ready
Hands-up questioning rewards the same students every time but randomly selecting who answers changes that. When students know that anyone might be picked, attentiveness rises across the room, and participation broadens beyond the usual voices.
classroom.cloud’s random select tool does this without you having to track whose turn it is or who has been quiet for too long. And if you pair it with a few seconds of thinking time first, so the student who is chosen has had the chance to gather an answer, you’ll find that it builds confidence rather than catching people out. Cold calling has a strong evidence base for lifting on-task behaviour and taking the bias out of who gets asked is what makes it fair.
3. Reward students to recognise effort as it happens
Motivation responds to timely recognition, and so, if you reward a student the moment they do something well, it carries far more weight than praising them at the end of a lesson. Send a star straight to their screen and tell them how they earned it. “You stuck with that problem after getting it wrong twice”, tells them exactly what to repeat.
Praising effort and strategy rather than ability is well supported in the research on motivation, and recognising it visibly strengthens the working relationship between you and your class.
4. Run surveys to plan around real misconceptions
Polls catch understanding in the moment – and surveys close the loop across a sequence of lessons. Gathering structured feedback shows you where the gaps sit before you plan the next session, so your teaching is shaped by what your students actually find hard rather than what you assume they do.
You can build a survey in classroom.cloud, send it to the class and review the responses to inform what comes next. This also signals to students that their understanding drives the lesson, which in itself can help to improve engagement.
5. Show screens to make great work visible
Sharing a strong piece of work with your class does two things. It recognises the student who produced it, and it shows everyone else what good looks like. As teachers, peer modelling is one of the most effective tools at our disposal.
Sharing a student’s screen with the whole class enables you to celebrate excellent work and spark wider discussion without the student having to read their work aloud or come to the front. If you use it deliberately to highlight the finished excellence and the sensible attempts and worked-through thinking that did not quite land, your class can see the process and not just the polished result.
6. Build in peer assessment for deeper thinking
Peer assessment is one of the most powerful ways to lift the quality of thinking in a room.
Asking your students to assess each other’s work against clear success criteria deepens their understanding. The reviewer applies the criteria at a higher cognitive level than simply completing the task, and the student receiving feedback hears it in language close to their own.
Using classroom.cloud to share a student’s digital work with the class for structured peer review makes this easy. You can model the process first, while keeping the criteria visible.
7. Open a chat channel to give every student a voice
A chat channel gives the student who will never put a hand up a way to contribute. Both you and any student can start a conversation with each other without disrupting everyone else, which makes it ideal for discreet support and for drawing out those who have plenty to say but rarely say it aloud.
For students with SEND or anxiety, the option to type rather than speak can be the difference between contributing or staying silent every lesson. Participation from everyone is important, and this is one of those features that is essential for some and useful for all.
8. Blank or lock screens to protect attention
There are moments when you simply need every screen down and every face up – to share a key explanation, safety point or transition. Blanking or locking students’ screens gives you immediate control of the room, then hands the devices back when the moment has passed.
The research on attention is consistent, telling us that removing the pull of an open device improves students’ focus and retention. Being able to clear every screen in a second, without walking the room or repeating yourself over the noise, is what makes that practical with a full class.
Routines
Engagement is not a single intervention – it is the marginal gains and repeatable habits of checking students’ understanding early, having everyone ready to answer, recognising their effort, sharing good work, hearing everyone’s voices, and protecting their attention. The teaching does the heavy lifting while the right tools let you run the room without breaking your flow.
This is why we built classroom.cloud – to bring instruction, safeguarding and IT management together in one place. It puts these participation and engagement strategies at your fingertips in every lesson, so that you can spend less time wrangling the room and more time teaching in it.