Do you ever sit around and dream up ways for how classrooms can be made more exciting, innovative and useful? Just start a little inquiry, mix in a bit of cool technology and you’ll be on your way to interacting with a room of engaged students! That is the focus of this week’s Eduporium Weekly along with how you can started with project-based learning soon!
Getting Started With Project-Based Learning
Encouraging students to truly absorb not only information but crucial concepts that answer the question “why?” is extremely important to their development. Textbooks don’t quite do that. Teachers can stand at the front of the room and maybe create some poorly-designed Power Point slides, but, let’s face it, that doesn’t do much in regards to real-world learning for today’s students. Those same students will be expected to complete complex tasks on a regular basis when they enter tomorrow’s much revamped, tech-focused workforce. Their ability to memorize words, graphs and sentences from an outdated textbook won’t do them nearly as much good as will experience using technology to solve real problems.
Enter project-based learning—a specialized way of learning through hands-on practice that wholly engages kids and helps with absorption of material. By integrating PBL into classrooms or using it as a regular supplement to lectures, students—more often than not—will learn a great deal more. If this is new to you, that’s okay! It’s new to them too. There are a lot of ways to make sure that project-based units are fun while remaining beneficial to the student and using fun technology tools is a great place to start. The main goal, however, remains the same: conveying to the students what they need to know. It’s through hands-on experimenting, we believe, that they will easily and much more firmly grasp key concepts.
With that in mind, here are a few areas that are worth focusing on to try to achieve the optimal PBL experience. Each student learns differently, so incorporating components into the project that cater to specific areas you know they enjoy or have competency in will make it that much more enjoyable for them. Also, don’t just let them have at it. Make sure there are built-in assessments (not including the pressure of grades) or stop from time to time to ask critical thinking questions to ensure students are getting out of the project what you want them to. The best projects are those that foster collaborative work to solve real issues and in most towns, there are real issues. One great way to maximize learning is to set students out on a task in the real world and give them some modern technology to aid them. Make it a project they’ll never forget and the concepts and lessons will be ones they, in fact, never forget.
Should you Consider Mobile Learning?
While it’s true that providing today’s students with access to the Internet does a great deal to enhance lessons through conversation and/or video, it’s increasingly difficult to get 25 children huddled around a desktop computer. Thankfully, with advances in today’s technology and many kids already owning their own, smart mobile devices are a great way to alleviate this problem and engage students on deeper levels. Mobile learning is easy to integrate—kids will love being able to use their cellphones in class! And, on top of that, they have been shown to boost retention, increase learner satisfaction, widen participation and, with a little research, could even end up saving the school some money.
Mobile learning (or mLearning) upgrades the education experience for young students in a number of ways. First, it allows for quick and efficient online communication through avenues such as Twitter or forums set up by the teacher. The ability to be able to communicate with teachers as well as peers while accessing a multitude of online learning resources in real time plays a key role in facilitating learning. As an added bonus, today’s students can even do it on the move. As long as the school provides a reliable Wi-Fi connection, communication can continue even as children move to different classrooms. It certainly is one way to re-engage students by approaching them through a medium they are comfortable with and with proper, organization-wide planning as well as reliable tools, it can become a helpful reality.
Mobile technologies can maximize learning by making content more accessible—especially for learners with disabilities. There are specific devices that are designed to assist those who struggle with focus or comprehension and, like almost everything else, have been made mobile as well. These kids are probably familiar with using mobile technology in their everyday lives, but now they will start recognizing how they can use it to learn and better their education. Plenty of teachers have successfully built mobile learning classrooms and found a dramatic increase in engagement and retention among their students. Mobile learning can open up a wide variety of learning avenues as students can do everything from finding new project ideas to doing research on current events—all from their desk in the classroom.
Getting to Know Open Educational Resources
You’ve probably heard the term Open Educational Resource (OER) a few times now. Maybe you’ve fully taken advantage of all the Internet has to offer in terms of educational technologies or maybe you’ve hesitated in exploring what the hub is all about. Well, if you haven’t done your research yet, we’ll do it for you! We’re happy to save you some time (just like OER’s will). Open educational resources are free and openly licensed educational materials that are used for anything from teaching to learning as well as extended research and anything in between. And the best part is they’re 100 percent available to anyone who has an Internet connection.
OER’s have a lot of benefits, but for beginners, we’ll explain a few of the most significant. Any digital technology used in education can be used to personalize instruction, but OER’s allow for maximum personalization of learning experiences so that students can learn at their own pace thanks to instant access to the latest information and most engaging materials. OER’s are both downloadable and shareable so you can access them from anywhere and take them anywhere else. Their open nature also allows teachers to modify them however they see fit for optimal use in or out of the classroom.
Another significant benefit of OER’s is their ability to enhance instruction and reduce costs for schools by minimalizing the need to purchase materials such as textbooks. The amount of available OER’s is staggering and by carefully searching for what will fill the needs of your specific class, you should be able to find something that is perfect. Usually, they’re even created by educators so you know the content will be relevant, efficient and enjoyable! This form of EdTech is an excellent way to gather new ideas for lesson plans, browse interactive learning videos, tweak them to make them your own or combine with in-class instruction to create a highly enjoyable and extremely useful learning experience unique to today’s students.
The Importance of Inquiry-Based Classrooms and How to Create One
What’s one of the best ways to learn? I just did it. Ask questions. There have been movements to spark trends like project-based learning in classrooms, afterschool makerspaces and now, one of the latest, is the discovery of the inquiry-based classroom. For good reason, this approach to learning is gaining traction and popularity among today’s educators. Combined with innovative technology tools, teachers that not only promote, but require inquiry, see an increased improvement in student engagement and ultimately in learning. When they take a second to stop and think, it’s amazing how many questions (and solutions) kids can come up with.
A unique approach to learning is, sometimes, for teachers to leave stuff out. They are responsible for teaching some required standards, but oftentimes, the best way for students to remember this information is to lead them towards it then encouraging them to build their own questions that complete their journey to the information they need to know. By removing the traditional approach of telling students what it is they should know and instead creating means for them to experience it on their own whether by using technologies or not, they begin asking questions to fill the blank spaces. Just ask the first question and let kids go from there—ideally sparking a creative brainstorm of all the different routes the answer could lie on.
You could also try surprising students. Posting a document on the board (or smartboard?) and not saying what it is as they walk in the room should easily have its desired effect—they will not stop wondering what it is. This is a useful way to spice up some units that may be particularly dry for students (and even for teachers). When content is presented to kids thematically, it often opens up many paths for their inquiring minds to explore, hopefully culminating at them arriving at the big picture and the most crucial concepts. Of course, students will come up with all kinds of wide-ranging questions, but this too can be a learning opportunity. They will soon determine what is most relevant and learn from their mistakes. Correction: teach themselves more effectively from their mistakes. It all starts with a simple question.
Is there a more Innovative Way than Grades?
Ignorance has been, quite commonly, described as doing one thing over and over and expecting a different result. You may have heard that one before. When the success of a child is based on their ability to produce a satisfactory letter grade, but they keep failing to achieve it, has their education system become ignorant? Well, it’s complicated, but, in some ways, perhaps it has. By cramming material into children’s brains and then telling them that if they can’t demonstrate that they have retained it to a satisfactory degree, what’s being created is a pressure-filled environment—not a learning one. With all the helpful technology available to help students learn, can we really afford that?
Grading is almost universally practiced nationwide in our schools, but should it be? Does a letter really indicate that a student is ready to move onto the next grade? Or that they’re ready to compete for a job in today’s tech-centered world? It can be argued that grading structures and practices are hindering student progress and actually damaging their ability to learn what’s necessary in today’s world. One good point to remember is that it is slightly hypocritical to continue to preach innovation in education while, at the same time, relying on old-school methods to determine if a child is ready to advance. There’s nothing innovative about that.
This isn’t exactly a new problem going on in education. Grades fail to provide actionable feedback. It’s just a letter—it’s not something that takes a student aside and explains how to improve or offers them a chance to learn from their mistakes in a hands-on manner—one that will stick with them for the long run. When students receive a grade, they are either satisfied or dissatisfied. Either way, they probably only look at their score work once and don’t bother analyzing it. There’s usually no chance for learning from their mistakes. So, essentially, there’s little, if any, actual learning taking place. Thankfully, now there are so many tech-related options that drive student learning, make it impossible for them not to be engaged and teach them STEM skills they will undoubtedly need and use in the future. If they fail in an interactive environment, they will want to know why. They won’t just move on. This is the kind of learning method that should be used to assess student comprehension and readiness—not some high-stakes test that will produce a letter somewhere close to the front of the alphabet.
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