Start the New School Year With More Fun, Engaging Techniques and Resources Than You’ll Probably be Able to use all Year!
Are you looking for ways to integration technology in your lesson plans and courses that provide for an engaging experience for you and your students? Fans of instructional technology know that it can be fun and inviting, and engaged students are far more likely to be learning.
I believe that if you can get students involved and motivated effectively enough, you can improve their learning habits over the long term.
With that in mind, here are 10 highly engaging uses of technology in the classroom, along with dozens of tools and resources for implementation. Most of these involve free web based tools, so that's an added bonus!
The 2014 Gates Foundation report, Teachers Know Best: What Educators Want from Digital Instructional Tools, indicates that teachers want tools “supporting student collaboration and providing interactive experiences”. These types of tools are fun and engaging, and they support 21st century skills like collaboration, communication, and creativity.
Learning this compelled me to write the article, “20 Fun Free Tools for Interactive Classroom Collaboration”, which has been in the top 10 most popular posts on the site since I published it in May. We followed that in July with “5 More Cool Tools to Take Classroom Collaboration to a New Level”, another popular post. So there you have over two dozen fun free interactive collaboration tools to consider using in your classes this year!
The potential to gather structured feedback in moments is a powerful aid to instruction, and thanks to proliferation of Internet enabled devices, it’s never been easier. Hi-tech or lo-tech, it’s easy to gather student input and feedback in today’s classrooms. Here’s a number of tools and techniques for doing so:
- Surveys/Polls (using any Internet enabled device): When you use web based survey and polling tools, users can often participate from any web-enabled device. SurveyMonkey is a popular web based survey tool that provides for a small survey at no cost. Doodle, Polldaddy, and SurveyAnyplace, are a few other alternatives.
- Clickers: Also known as Student Response Systems, these devices make it really easy to gather student feedback. Click here to read a story about a contest winner we had on the site back in 2010 who used Clickers to help improve FCAT scores.
- Plickers: This is a relatively lo-tech, and highly affordable alternative to clickers that does not require students to have an electronic devices! Learn more here.
- More advanced, education-specific tools: Apps like Socrative are great examples of the maturing tool set available to educators.
- Twitter! Twitter is a unique, fun way to gather feedback when students have a way to tweet. Create a unique hashtag and have students use it in their tweets, to create a custom stream of student tweets. In this article, a College of Westchester teacher explains how Twitter helped engage her students in the course material.
Embedding Questions in Videos
Today’s students consume video like drinking water. As today’s teachers leverage this fact by using video for instructional purposes more than ever, free tools that enable educators to embed questions are powerful aid. When students are asked to consume video content outside of class, how can you help to ensure that they are really engaging with the content? Here’s an excellent approach.
- EduCanon: I recently created this ‘3 Minute Teaching with Technology’ Tutorial Video showing how easy it is to use EduCanon to do this.
- EdPuzzle (edpuzzle.com): I haven’t tried this one yet, but I heard about it at FlipCon14, and people seem to really like it!
- Ed.ted.com: This is a different approach – one that allows for the building of a quiz and other interactive content after the video is viewed.
This is a personal favorite of mine. Tech tools can be great for active learning in the classroom. Whether your preference is for Inquiry Based Learning, Constructivist Learning, Experiential Learning, or one of the vario