UWorld Nursing is a comprehensive learning platform that contains everything educators need to prepare their students for critical exams. However, there are great free resources out there that can enhance student outcomes, bring your classrooms together in collaboration, and add some fun and diversity to the classroom. The five free nurse educator resources below are an excellent supplement to our learning platform. They can help you make interactive videos, generate customized collaborative quizzes, visualize difficult concepts, start classroom discussions, access data in new and interesting ways, and more.
1. Kahoot
Engagement doesn’t have to be difficult. Think of Kahoot as customizable online trivia. You can create discussion prompts or interactive group quizzes and customize them with videos, images, and subject-specific content. All your students have to do is download the free app on their computer or mobile device, and they’re ready to start competing against their peers on quizzes covering anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, disease processes, or whatever material you deem important. You can even have students develop their own quizzes to review nursing content with their classmates.
When the fun is over, you can get feedback through custom surveys and real-time analytics on progress and engagement, which you can implement into your overall teaching strategy.
2. EdPuzzle
Imagine if you could customize a video from the internet and deliver it to your students. EdPuzzle allows educators to add questions, voiceovers, and other interactive elements to videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, and TED talks. Embed activities in videos to make them interactive, and add quizzes to assess your students’ understanding of the material.
Educators can use EdPuzzle to support a flipped classroom where students watch videos at home and come to class ready to discuss and apply what they’ve learned. The next time you watch an informative TED talk, you can customize it and make it part of your lesson. Add questions and content that reinforce a student’s understanding of difficult concepts, and then assess student learning with data on engagement and performance. You can even record your own lectures and make them interactive.
3. Padlet
Padlet is a visual bulletin board that allows you to post and organize text, images, videos, links, and documents. Students can collaborate in real time by sharing boards and customizing their appearance with different themes, backgrounds, and layouts. Padlet boards are interactive, allowing students to comment, like, and vote.
It’s an excellent tool for brainstorming new ideas, taking notes, working on collaborative projects, visualizing concepts, enhancing creativity, and receiving feedback from peers. For example, educators can use a high-quality medical image or illustration and have students collaborate by adding mnemonic devices associated with the material they’re studying.
4. Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine developed by Wolfram Research. Simply enter a query in the search bar, and the search engine will provide a collection of content and visualizations. You can also search for information by topic. For example, the “Health & Medicine” topic takes you to a page where you can explore information on human anatomy, diseases, medical computations, mortality data, medical codes, medical tests, health care statistics, hospital information, and more.
Educators can use Wolfram Alpha to create interactive visualizations that show the effects of different medications on the body, provide students with supplemental tools and data, give students the ability to explore medical dosage calculations, anatomy, and physiology concepts or perform calculations, and generate graphs and visualizations.
5. Socrative
Socrative allows educators to create quizzes, polls, assessments, and interactive activities and share them with their students in real-time and receive immediate feedback. You can gauge a student’s understanding with multiple choice questions, true or false, or leave them open-ended.
Educators can target student weaknesses with customized quizzes, or students can create their own. Socrative also lives up to its namesake by allowing students to participate in discussions and engage with course material in real time from anywhere.
UWorld Nursing – Your Foundation
These free resources are excellent supplements for the classroom, but you’ll still need a high-quality resource as your foundation. UWorld Nursing allows educators to present items during class for instructions or discussion, create assignments using NGN questions, traditional items, or a mix of both, and measure students’ clinical judgment with our gradebook and enhanced reporting features. Match these powerful tools with those above and you’ll develop a confident cohort that is well prepared to tackle the exam.
