In our second Spotlight Series, we wanted to take a moment to recap sessions that occurred as a part of Top Hat Day a few weeks ago. As with all of our Spotlight Series, we recommend that you subscribe to our blog so you can follow along with the posts as they go live this week and contact us if you have any questions or concerns about the presented content. At the end of the series, we will recap the week’s worth of posts and include all the links to the information we share over the week. Try bookmarking it and saving it for later when you have a chance to start playing with the tool.
What is Top Hat?
Top Hat is a tool designed to assist with student engagement and feedback in your classes, prominently featuring polling functions for live class sessions. However, this tool can assist in other course elements like low-stakes testing or larger assignments. At Penn State, Top Hat integrates seamlessly with Canvas, allowing students to access the engagement platform through their enrollment in the course after some Top Hat account setup steps. Instructors can leverage this tool in combination with Canvas to provide more robust learning experiences in their classes.
For new users to Top Hat, it is strongly recommended that they check out the Altoona-hosted Top Hat website that helps with initial setup steps. On that website, you can also find student instructions that can be downloaded and used in your courses tomorrow. Additionally, instructors can view more centralized resources provided by Penn State Knowledge Base and Top Hat Support to get started with the tool.
When working with instructors, the question of when to use Top Hat versus Canvas often comes up. Top Hat has provided a nice graphic to help understand how best to utilize the tool and can be seen below. Generally speaking, this tool is optimal for engagement strategies during live class sessions, but also has affordances in the realm of discussions, assignments, assessments and OAER options.
Top Hat Day at Altoona
In collaboration with Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), Penn State Altoona – as well as Penn State Harrisburg and Penn State Hazleton – hosted a daylong event highlighting the numerous features of the tool at the end of February. In the planning of the event, it became clear that hybrid sessions would need to be offered to allow for instructors to attend from other campuses and to meet the needs of our own faculty, half of which are based in our downtown campus.
While Top Hat Day at each of the campuses was mostly the same, Altoona hosted the following sessions for our faculty and staff:
- Ten Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Top Hat
- Faculty Panel: Use Cases and Experiences
- Top Hat’s Open and Educational Resources Book Fair
Each of the sessions above offered unique opportunities for instructors looking to utilize Top Hat in their courses. In order to give them their own spotlight, there will be a post each day this week highlighting the major takeaways from the sessions as well as some reflections on what was discussed.
Come back to the ALID blog throughout the week to learn more about these Top Hat Day workshops!
