Top Hat tips for UB instructors

Top Hat is a suite of interactive, online teaching tools designed to engage students. Instructors use Top Hat in the classroom to take attendance, design interactive polls and discussions—and students respond in real-time using their phone or laptop.

Over 180 instructors and 13,000 students in over 230 courses at UB are already using Top Hat—if you’re new to Top Hat or considering trying it, here are some tips from the UB instructors who use it most.

This tip comes from Scott Ptak, adjunct instructor in UB’s Geography department.

Most people use Top Hat to test how well students understand the class material. It’s useful for that—but it can do a lot more.

With Top Hat, you can collect any kind of information that might be relevant toward making a point in class. For instance, in teaching a course about international cultures for business, you could see whether students anonymous self-identify as a member of a particular culture, and whether they also identify with traits commonly associated with that culture.

Another example: in statistics, you could ask everyone their height and use the data to show how the heights of a group of people (likely) form a normal distribution—with a few shorter students, a few taller students, and more students toward the mean.

In any situation where you might use data to illustrate a point, Top Hat can make that point more interesting and memorable, by sourcing the data from the students themselves.

This tip comes from Troy Wood, associate professor with UB’s Chemistry department.

Since Top Hat is popular among UB’s STEM-field instructors, it is often useful to include math symbols and equations in your Top Hat questions.

Top Hat supports LaTex, a popular markup language used for creating math equations. If you’re already familiar with LaTex, then this will be the easiest way to write a legible math equation in Top Hat.

Top Hat also includes a graphical symbol selector for commonly used math, Greek and other symbols. Just hover your cursor over where you’d like to place the symbols, and a small blue ‘+’ icon will appear. Clicking this icon opens the symbol selector menu, just select your symbol and insert it into your text.

Another tip from Troy Wood, this one opens the door to more creative and engaging questions.

Images are fully supported in Top Hat questions, and you can either add them when you create a new question, or go back afterward and edit a previous question to include images.

In either case, just click ‘Attach Image’ and select an image from your computer’s hard drive. The image will then be included both onscreen in your classroom, and on students’ devices. You can also choose whether to display the full image automatically, or to display it as a thumbnail that can be clicked to enlarge.

Are you a UB instructor with tips for using Top Hat? Send your tips to ubit-communication@buffalo.edu, and we’ll share them with the community.