Most of the instructors were using some kind of quizzing or polling app, like Kahoot, Socrative, Google Forms, and iClicker to get students to pay attention and be actively involved in the class activities. While teaching at UC Santa Barbara, Heather Macias said that getting students to raise their hands "always felt like pulling teeth", so she started using quizzing apps like Kahoot and Poll Everywhere to get students “hooked into a lesson”. After students responded to questions in the app, she would post those on the screen. She said, “Everyone’s thoughts can get up in front of everyone else, and they can reflect and talk about them, or at least see it. We can share ideas and get things going in class.”

Ozcan Gulacar used NearPod in his Chemisty class at UC Davis. NearPod has a lot of individual and group activities, like digital bulletin boards, that are put together in a lesson to help the instructor guide students collectively through the material on their individual devices. He said, “[When] students submit answers [to prompts on NearPod], they like to know if they got it right. They've become more interested in learning the right answer. So it increases their ownership of learning - otherwise it's difficult to really encourage them.”

As students and Kelly posted and responded to bird photos, it became normal to make mistakes publicly and celebrate the right answers together - and this spilled over into Kelly’s lab classes with two benefits that she didn’t expect:

1. All of her students, plus 4-5 students from other sections, joined the Snapchat and came to every lab class, even though it was from 9-11pm.

2. “Our class was more connected socially because of Snapchat, because they could respond with their own birds.”

When Emma Levine taught music at UC Santa Barbara she set up a Slack class workspace (a.k.a. a backchannel) for a few reasons:

1. Because many of her students weren’t attending class, which was a large lecture course;

2. Students needed to go to community music events together as part of their homework, but there wasn’t time for students to sort that out during class;

3. The students were freshmen who were trying to make new friends, but they felt anonymous in her class.

Once Emma got the Slack channel going, class attendance rose, but there was also a suprise benefit Emma didn't expect. She described this as, “[Students] come to class because I know who they are and other people know who they are. People started moving seats in class because they had friends on Slack. They’re relaxed and there’s not an awkward silence – they talk to each other before and after class!”