If you already have lessons on Microsoft PowerPoint, it only takes a few tweaks to turn a standard slideshow into a highly engaging active learning session on your BenQ Board. Below are a few simple activities that you can easily try out for your classes.

Checkpoints are key moments during a class where you can pause your lecture to open a dialogue with your students. You can use this time to ask them questions and check their comprehension of previously discussed concepts. Conversely, your students can also take this opportunity to raise questions.

When creating your PowerPoint presentations, you can assign checkpoint slides that contain review questions or polls. When you reach a checkpoint, leave the slide on the screen so that students can refer to it while they take turns answering. You can use PowerPoint’s pen tool to note responses directly on the interactive display and then synthesize the results before moving on with the rest of your presentation. Since annotations are made using PowerPoint’s native pen tool, you can easily save the slide deck with all the notes.

If you’re teaching history or other subjects that require you to plot events on a map, using PowerPoint with the BenQ Board makes it easier for your students to visually follow along.

Say, for example, you are showing the sequence of events during a war, you can display a clean map on the screen and then ask your students to recreate the events by marking locations on the map, adding important dates, and labeling which parties were involved. You can open a browser window or media player to show related content such as video footage or images while the annotated map is in the background. This gives additional context to the timeline you and your students are building.

A way to make pop quizzes fun is through interactive games. You can set up a simple board game on PowerPoint and assign questions or tasks to each cell. You can split the class into competing teams as they take turns answering subject-related questions until one of them wins. Students can track where they are on the board either by marking their spot through annotation or moving game pieces on top of the board.

Creating healthy competition keeps students excited and attentive during class. Giving bonus incentives to winning teams may also encourage them to actively study more for future games.

This particular activity is best suited for topics that require students to identify parts of a system (ex. solar system) or process (ex. water cycle). For example, if you want to discuss the digestive system in class, you can prepare a slide showing an unlabeled diagram. During class, students can take turns labeling the main organs through annotation. As they do so, you can explain the functions of each organ and visualize the whole digestion process by drawing directly on the diagram. You can also drag related content such as images and videos onto the screen to give your students more context.

When you want to closely analyze literary work like short stories or poems with your students, you can paste important portions of the text onto PowerPoint slides. Present them on your BenQ Board and have your students pick out important details for discussion.

Leaving a blank space on the side of the slide can be helpful as it gives you ample room to write down your students’ ideas. Using the pen found on the board’s floating tool allows your notes to stay on the screen even if you switch slides. This is a good way to keep track of ongoing themes and other important elements your students have unearthed from the text.