Med School Diaries: Adjusting to the Pace

How to Increase Student Engagement and Performance

As an Educator you inspire and fill students’ minds with valuable knowledge every day. Many educators already know that Picmonic increases the effectiveness of what they teach by helping a new generation of students remember more of what they learn. And students agree!

After interviewing hundreds of educators we’ve learned that they are using Picmonic because their millennial students:

  1. are not doing the assigned reading
  2. come to class generally unprepared
  3. are consistently distracted by social media
  4. expect instructors to provide “edutainment”
  5. struggle to retain what they learn in class

Successful students are the product of dedicated and committed faculty and staff. Our “picture-mnemonic” videos with built-in recall and spaced-repetition-based quizzes have been research-proven to improve learning, supporting educators across the country by increasing student engagement, confidence and performance. Educators can sign up for free Premium Trial access.

Who can resist wacky characters, outrageous pictures, and a humorous story that ties them all together, especially if they can help students remember and recall important information up to 331% longer?

Here are a few ways that educators use Picmonic to increase student engagement and performance:

1. Better student preparation for class: Share Playlists with students

Both educators and students have told us that reviewing a topic before attending class can help students

  • Get familiar with the terminology that will be covered
  • Have a brief overview or “scaffolding” in their brain to help them learn the material better while in class

And with Picmonic they can accomplish this “pre-learning” in a fun and engaging way.

A Playlist is a group of Picmonic lessons (like a deck or a set) that you would like students to learn, normally in a sequence to help students follow along with their assigned reading, your course syllabus, or lecture slides. Picmonic Playlists are premade to group together topics by Courses, Body systems, or to follow the most popular Textbooks page by page.

Educators can easily assign these Picmonic Playlists to students. You will find instructions to do this by downloading our “How to Share Picmonic Lessons with Students” PDF guide.

screenshot showing how to add a picmonic to an active playlist

Educators can also customize Playlists to perfectly map to their course syllabus and share these with the class. Students often create Playlists and share them with each other from within the Picmonic app.

share playlist

When you create the perfect playlist for upcoming course content or an upcoming exam your students can benefit immediately. Make Picmonic available as a supplemental tool, and students can access it on their own anytime.

As an option, if your school uses a Learning Management System (LMS), individual Picmonic lessons or Playlists can be added to LMS assignments.

2. Increase classroom engagement: Play Mnemonic Videos in Class then Take the Quizzes as a group

Many educators play Picmonic videos in class, to introduce a topic in a visually interesting and memorable way. Following the Picmonic videos, each Picmonic lesson provides a ~10 question quiz, which your students can participate in together as a group.

If you’re able to integrate Picmonic with your school’s LMS like Canvas, Moodle or Blackboard, assigning Picmonic videos and subsequent quizzes to your students is easy and you can even see how they scored!

It’s easy to get started. With over 1,000+ topics, find a Picmonic related to the content you’re teaching tomorrow. Playing a Picmonic video at the start of your lecture to kick things off in a fun way provides the edutainment your students crave!

3. Easily add visual memory hooks to your lecture: Embed Picmonic characters in your slides

Don’t have time to play Picmonic videos and quizzes during classroom instruction? You can easily embed our colorful characters into your lecture slides to provide visual memory anchors for your students that create a mental scaffolding proven to improve retention, enabling the conceptual understanding you’re providing to stick. Then add links back to the Picmonics so that your students can review the facts and take the quiz on their own time.

Download our quick guide on how to do this.

4. Create handouts or PDFs: Printing Picmonics

With your free Premium Trial access to educators, you can print any Picmonic. There is an option to print them with or without a section to write down notes, and you can print out a 2 or 3 card note view. You can print Picmonic “handouts” as quick study cards for students, providing a great way for them to brush up on the content they’ve already learned.

You’ll find the Print & Go option in the More (“…”) menu within any Playlist in Browse or Search.

“My tutoring students rave about Picmonic, saying, “Everything on the exam I reviewed with Picmonic I got right.” They express less stress while studying, more confidence in knowledge, and longer recall of information studied. I would absolutely recommend Picmonic to students, especially visual learners.” – Julia Young, Delaware Technical Community College

For schools that want insights into student performance, a real-time educator dashboard and unlimited access to all content and features for students, Picmonic Premium Institutional Licenses are available. Please contact us and we’ll help you determine which option will best suit your needs.

Integrate Picmonic with your institution’s Learning Management System (LMS)

On a mission to support educators with these challenges, Picmonic now provides a FREE Learning Management System app (Canvas/Moodle/Blackboard/D2L Brightspace) enabling you to embed highly effective and engaging Picmonic content in your assignments. Students love these mnemonics, the short video format with quizzes and a comprehensive Daily review quiz, and by providing your students easy access through your LMS they will come to class more prepared, they will be entertained, and they will remember the critical knowledge required to pass exams and excel as competent healthcare professionals! Even better, this app includes full LTI functionality, Single Sign-On & Grade Book data syncing.

For an overview of Picmonic that you can share with your colleagues, download our Overview Guide to Picmonic.

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