Want a little insight on how to become the best 21st century teacher around? Start with enhancing school makerspaces or create a new subject with social media lessons.
The Importance of the Real World in the Classroom
You hear it all the time—from educators, parents and even students themselves. It is important, nowadays especially, for a child’s education to prepare them for the real world. With all the buzz surrounding STEM education, teaching students skills that will be vital to succeeding post-education is something that the best modern instructors seek to accomplish. What they could be doing, however, is not only teaching students the skills they will need, but also putting them to the test now right in the classroom.
For starters, incorporating real-life scenarios are simple ways to spice up the nature of any lesson by adding a dash of urgency and intrigue. When learners are able to relate their experiences or hopes to what they are learning in the classroom, engagement levels increase and with that, so too does productivity. This works for both traditional forms of teaching as well as our recommended method of eLearning. Immersing students directly into the material should do wonders for increasing retention and future preparation by amplifying how much of the teacher’s words actually stick with them going forward.
Some tips for engaging learners through real implications include keeping the students at the center to pull information to them, amplifying knowledge retention by embedding emotion and relative importance and getting learners excited by pushing content that they can directly relate to. Those are some good starting points and for those teachers who are looking to push their students a little more, there are a couple of ways to increase real-life preparation. Start by testing them with immediate application of the knowledge they’ve gained by putting them in daily real-life situations and giving them power to strategically make their own decisions and work with the outcomes. Try this in your class and students will become much better prepared for the future!
An Update on EdTech Use in the United States
Earlier this week, eLearning Infographics released an eye-opening infographic on the state of education technology use in the United States. The report offered statistics surrounding EdTech use and context supporting student opinions of integrating tech into classrooms. According to the report, there are 48 million public K-12 schools in the United States and 13.2 million computing devices being used in those schools (a ratio of 1:3.6). Of those 13.2 million devices, desktop computers still comprise the majority (4.7 million) while notebooks (3.9 million) and tablets (2.3 million) are catching up in the classroom.
While we know that EdTech devices are becoming more and more common every day, it is valuable for educators to know if they are really working or if they are even wanted. Not surprisingly, however, 81 percent of students surveyed stated that tablets in the classroom allow them to learn in the best way for them while 63 percent said they would like to learn with mobile devices more so than they currently are. Further, of the students surveyed, 51 percent realized that it is important for their schools to provide integrated lessons with EdTech products to provide them with a more modern education and prepare them for the future.
While the ideal EdTech scenario for many teachers is to have one device for each student in the class, because of financial constraints, this is often impossible. Whatever schools can afford, however, they should adopt. Group work centered around a device is still monumentally beneficial for students in the modern world. Thankfully, there are hundreds of ways for teachers to receive discounts on products, such as laptops, notebooks, Chromebooks and tablets that students can use in class to build their awareness and technical skills. Give it a try!
New Ideas for Starting Making in the Classroom
We’ve covered this topic before, but like in every other aspect of education, when innovations are discovered, we like to give those a try! So, in an effort to keep up with the rapidly changing world of EdTech, we thought we’d provide an update on the very latest trends and tips. Hopefully teachers are pouring over lesson plans for September and can’t wait to get back into the classroom to try some of them out!
One of the best things you can do is create a makerspace that’s not only a makerspace, but a truly digital makerspace. This can be done with something as simple as a blog on the class or the teacher’s personal website that serves as a place for collaborating on ideas and sharing results. Teachers can post challenges and working together or on their own, students can bring them to the makerspace when they’re complete. Keep the grading out and assure students that their creations are just for their own fun and development and they’ll surely enjoy the ride without the pressure of needing to make the grade.
Another suggestion is constantly asking for student feedback to gauge what’s working and what they’re not too fond of. Teachers can even send out emails to ask for parent advice as well! On top of that, try what’s known as ‘reverse engineering.’ This is when students find some rusty old technology products that can be tinkered with and taken apart. They can make new artwork out of old stuff, functioning robots or anything else they can think of! We’ll bet you and your students have piles and piles of old junk lying around that you can turn into an awesome MakerEd creation. Good luck!
Why Social Media Should be Taught in Schools
It’s been a hot topic in recent years and now we have an official ruling on why schools should teach social media to students. Could it be that kids are always using it anyway so we might as well teach them the most beneficial ways to use it? Not exactly, but there are, of course, some wildly useful ways to use sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. The main reason it’s important though: it’s not going away anytime soon.
We live in a social world and that will not be changing in the foreseeable future. Logging onto social media sites are a daily, if not, hourly task for most of us. More importantly, teachers, including college professors, routinely use social media to update their classes, post assignments and start discussions. If students know the proper ways to engage in online chats, they will have a much simpler time participating. Leveraging social media channels in the earlier grades provide students with new and exciting ways to learn—especially if they get to use a mobile device in the classroom!
More generally, the practice of teaching children social media is synonymous with preparing them for the future—socially and professionally. Think about it; many people acquire jobs and start careers because employers are able to find them through sites like LinkedIn. If a new graduate isn’t familiar with networking in the proper ways, they are potentially literally harming their chances of achieving success. In completing their education, students are expected to learn the knowledge and skills they need to succeed as adults and, in today’s world, social media is one of those skills.
eLearning Benefits More than Kids in Today’s World
Let’s take a moment to regroup and think about things from a slightly different perspective. All year long, we preach about the importance of EdTech in bettering education and subsequently the lives of today’s school children. Of course, using technology in school from an early age can have tremendous intellectual and developmental effects on kids, but what about the people teaching them? That’s right, we often don’t think about the results teachers achieve when teaching with 21st century technology.
Since its inception, eLearning has continued picking up steam and has reached a peak by making use of modern tools. The future that it has in store is not entirely clear, but predictably can be assumed to be bright. By challenging the traditional methods of teaching—practices that had been in place for hundreds of years—students have gone from passive bystanders to engaged sponges, soaking in the vital information. When teachers decide they truly want to give their students an advantage by immersing them in eLearning, not only are they challenging the kids, but in return, they are challenging themselves to be better, to find new, innovative and exciting ways to meaningfully teach with technology.
When engaging in online learning, students can interact with each other as well as with students from other schools. Teachers can do the same. They’re able to acquire real-time feedback from other educators—most of whom have already tried what they’re implementing—and make the proper adjustments as they go. There are so many educational technology platforms available for download and most are designed for easy integration with teachers in mind so that they can get comfortable right away because without them being able to continue teaching effectively, they can use all the technology they want, but their students wouldn’t be going straight down the 21st century path to achieving a long-lasting STEM education.
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