Original activity game

Most of the time, Discord automatically detects and adds a status for the games running on your computer, but you can also add more programs, by clicking Add It. You might have noticed your friends playing unreleased games, all thanks to their customized Discord status.

If you've ever wondered how you can achieve the same, it's dead easy. Here's how to do it:. Note that Discord will automatically add a program icon next to the status if it recognizes the game name. You can either choose to keep your gaming activity to yourself or add a status every time you start playing a game. Discord offers you that control, and the final choice depends on you. You can also edit the status and play not really unreleased games to leave your friends awestruck.

If you're running out of games to play remotely with your friends, check out Discord Games Lab, a server offering you a multitude of casual games to play while chattering on voice channels. Discord lets you play games and watch YouTube directly on your voice channel.

Find out how you can use this to add more fun to your servers. He writes informational guides on Linux, aiming to provide a blissful experience to all newcomers. Not sure about movies, but if you want to talk about technology, he's your guy.

Enable the Activity Status on Discord The Discord status comes in handy especially when you want to live stream a game in voice channels or simply let others know that you're busy gaming.

Do you have less energy for class than you used to? Do you find student grades declining? We spoke to two college instructors, Chris Merlo and Monika Semma.

Their strategies for interactive classroom activities will energize your class and get the discussion moving again. Similarly, to a lot of students today, experiences like team exercises and flipped classrooms, while foreign to many instructors are not new. But now, in my forties? Not so much. Semma, a humanities TA, found that the chalk-and-talk approach failed on her first day in front of a class. I dropped the eraser on my face whilst trying to write my name on the board.

While nearly silent in class, my students were rather vocal in the endless stream of emails that flooded my inbox. That way I knew they wanted to learn. I also knew that I had to find a way to make tutorials more engaging.

From these experiences, Merlo and Semma now share some interactive classroom activities for students and for teachers that can turn a quiet classroom full of people unwilling to speak up to a hive of debate, making the student learning experience more collaborative for everyone. Energize your college classroom and get discussions flowing.

I remember a class a few semesters ago that started with nine students. Due to a couple of medical conditions and a job opportunity, three of the students had to drop the semester. The problem was that these three students were the ones I counted on to ask questions and keep the class lively!

Once I was left with six introverted people, conversations during class seemed to stop. By luck, I stumbled on something that got the students talking again.

This one simple question led to twenty minutes of discussion involving all six students. A truly successful classroom activity. When I teach computer science, I will make up a program that, for instance, performs the wrong arithmetic, and have students find the bug.

In a particularly quiet or disengaged class, you can incentivize students with five points on the next exam, or something similar. One of my colleagues devised a great exercise: First, give students about half of their class time to write instructions that an imaginary robot can understand to draw a recognizable picture, like a corporate logo, without telling students what will happen later. After a few minutes, introduce a specific student who can share their results with the class, then ask their partner to share the initial instructions.

This exercise teaches computer science students the difficulty and importance of writing clear instructions. I have seen this exercise not only teach pairs of such students meaningful lessons but encourage friendships that extended beyond my classroom. Specifically, if you leave the review in the hands of your students, you can get an easy and thorough assessment of what is being absorbed, and what is being left by the wayside. Students will have a tendency to pick the terms that they are most comfortable speaking about and those left consistently untouched will give you a clear assessment of the subjects in which your class is struggling, and where comprehension is lacking.

Once your class has narrowed down the list to just a few terms, you can switch gears into a more classic review session. Bringing a bit of interaction and fun into a review can help loosen things up during exam time, when students and teachers alike are really starting to feel the pressure. Monika Semma: Do you remember the pure and utter joy you felt upon seeing your professor wheel in the giant VHS machine into class?

Technology has certainly changed—but the awesome powers of visual media have not. Making your students smile can be a difficult task, but by channeling your inner Bill Nye the Science Guy you can make university learning fun again. A large part of meaningful learning is finding interactive classroom activities that are relevant to daily life—and I can think of no technology more relevant to current students than YouTube. A crafty YouTube search can yield a video relevant to almost anything in your curriculum and paired with an essay or academic journal, a slightly silly video can go a long way in helping your students contextualize what they are learning.

Even if your comedic attempts plunge into failure, at the very least, a short clip will get the class discussion ball rolling. Watch the video as a class and then break up into smaller groups to discuss it. Monika Semma: In the humanities, we all know the benefits of close reading activities—they get classroom discussion rolling and students engaging with the material and open up the floor for social and combination learners to shine.

It is particularly effective in getting students to move away from the general and engage more with specific details or ideas. And while this technique is often employed in the humanities, classroom activities like this can be easily transferred to any discipline. A physics student will benefit from having an opportunity to break down a complicated equation in the same way that a biology student can better understand a cell by looking at it through a microscope.

In any case, evaluating what kinds of textbooks, lesson plans and pedagogy we are asking our students to connect with is always a good idea. Group size: 10 students minimum. Course type: Online synchronous , in-person.

This activity helps build rapport and respect in your classroom. After you tackle a complex lecture topic, give students time to individually reflect on their learnings. This can be accomplished through guided prompts or left as an open-ended exercise. Once students have gathered their thoughts, encourage them to share their views either through an online discussion thread or a conversation with peers during class time.

Collaborative concept mapping is the process of visually organizing concepts and ideas and understanding how they relate to each other. This exercise is a great way for students to look outside of their individual experiences and perspectives.

Groups can use this tactic to review previous work or to help them map ideas for projects and assignments. For in-person classes, you can ask students to cover classroom walls with sticky notes and chart paper. For online classes, there are many online tools that make it simple to map out connections between ideas, like Google Docs or the digital whiteboard feature in Zoom.

Group size: Groups of 5—10 students. Propose a topic or issue to your class. Ask the groups of students to come up with a few arguments or examples to support their position.

A natural next step is to debate the strengths and weaknesses of each argument, to help students improve their critical thinking and analysis skills. Ask your students to focus on a specific chapter in your textbook.