Top Hat for in-class polling and out-of-class quizzes

What is Top Hat?

Top Hat is a web-based student response system that stores and marks responses in student accounts as well as enable interactive learning materials to be developed for use before, during and after a teaching session whether it is a lecture, seminar or group work session. In addition to web-based, Top Hat has apps in the Android and Apple app stores.

As Top Hat is web-based, it is accessible by any device that can connect to the internet, so no clickers need to be distributed to students. If you assign questions as "homework" or "review," students can go through them anytime, as a formative quiz.

Top Hat has six types of questions:

• Multiple Choice – single or multiple correct answers can be set from within up to 10 offered answers
• Word Answer – free text responses can be submitted by participants and collated results from an audience displayed as a Word Cloud as well as a graph
• Numeric Answer – a numerical tolerance can be set for submitted responses to be considered to match the correct answer
• Matching – multiple answers can be suggested for participants to match one-to-one with up to 10 categories
• Click on Target – an uploaded image file can have one or multiple targets for participants to click on and collated results from an audience displayed as a Heat Map - excellent for anatomy quizzes
• Sorting – up to 10 items can be sorted in rank order by participants.

Top Hat has a Presentation Tool that enables its use with slides already created as PowerPoint pptx or ppt, Adobe pdf or other file formats.  So, there is no need to alter your slides.

Who may use Top Hat?

Top Hat is available for University of Leicester students and staff.

How to get started with Top Hat

Create a 'Professor' account at Top Hat. You must use your University of Leicester email address for this. You will then be able to create a 'Course' with a number, which is the number you should tell your students to join. When you present, use Powerpoint as normal, and log into Top Hat in a browser (Chrome is recommended). Feel free to contact Terese Bird on t.bird@le.ac.uk for help getting started with Top Hat.

See the TopHat Toolkit for extensive resources for teachers and also TopHat's student resources pages