Using prediction in the class is useful in activating prior knowledge, enhancing student engagement, and sparking wonder and interest in the content. Research shows that students who use prediction during the lesson performed 10% better on the test. 

Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning.

Activities that spark prediction are great for opening and closing a lesson as well as being used sporadically throughout the lesson to engage students.

Key ideas to keep in mind when using this teaching strategy are:

• Stay conceptual. You do not want the answers to be too specific to where students have no prior knowledge to activate.
• Provide fast feedback. Every prediction activity should have feedback provided as soon as possible. You do not want to have misconceptions lingering too long The more immediate the correction the better. 
• Induce reflection. We remember what we spend time thinking about. So providing students with an intentional opportunity for reflection will increase content retention. 

There are various ways to implement this engagement strategy in your classroom.

• Open the course with a class brainstorming activity requiring students to pull from their prior knowledge. Reference their initial thoughts and ideas throughout the lesson and provide explicit feedback on misconceptions.
• Give a pretest on the material. This would be an ungraded assignment to give students a glimpse at upcoming learning as well as inform the instructor of the student's current content knowledge.  
• Use a classroom poll to break up the lesson and ask students questions about upcoming topics. 
• When presenting cases, problems, examples, or histories, stop before the conclusion and ask the student to predict the outcome. Allow students to pause, predict, and ponder.
• Close class by asking students to make predictions about materials that will be covered in the next session. Keep in mind, that misconceptions must be addressed as soon as possible. 

There are various technologies that can be useful for implementing this engagement strategy in your remote class. 

• Use Vidgrid to create short lecture videos. Embed predicting questions throughout the video for students to answer as they are watching.
• Use Google forms to create prediction questions. Students can answer the question and submit their responses.
• Use Mentimeter as an asynchronous polling tool. Embed it into your Blackboard course.
• Use Blackboard discussion forums to pose a prediction question before the content is released. Have students respond with their predictions and expand on other predictions posed by their classmates. As the instructor, ask probing and clarifying questions to deepen the students' activation of prior knowledge. 

        Vidgrid

        Mentimeter

        Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning.