Innovative Approaches To Learning With Technology.

Learning is active, engaging, and social. Students need to be engaged and motivated in their learning before they can apply higher order, creative thinking skills. They are most engaged when they themselves are part of constructing meaning, not when teachers do it for them. By encouraging students to meet challenges creatively, collaborate, and apply critical thinking skills to real-world, unpredictable situations inside and outside of school, we prepare them for future college, career, and citizenship success.
Effective classroom instruction that embraces both high standards and accountability for students' learning can be project-based, focused on service and the community, experiential, cooperative, expeditionary ... the list goes on.

Innovative methods of teaching are a goal of many teachers. Teaching students in ways that keep them engaged and interested in the material can sometimes be a challenge. In the short-attention span world we live in, it can be harder than ever to keep high school students excited and engrossed in learning.

Why Engagement?

Why should learning be hard fun? Surely, learners should buckle down and do what they need to do to acquire the necessary skills. Perhaps in an ideal world learners would be motivated and self-directed.

I have learnt that teachers who adopt a student-centered approach to instruction increase opportunities for student engagement, which then helps everyone more successfully achieve the course’s learning objectives.

In-classroom technologies — podium-based computers, wireless, real-time response systems (e.g., clickers) and web-based tools (e.g., blogs, online forums, wikis, podcasts, etc.) — continue to change rapidly. These tools have a high potential for supporting student learning in creative and innovative ways when properly aligned with the instructor’s learning objectives and course content.

There are a number of approaches that can be used to engage the learners.  Some of them that I have come across in this lesson include;

Use of social media

Use games.

Use of stories.

I have learnt that we need to help our learners to move from being knowledgeable to knowledge- able.

So as teachers we can engage our learners by;

· involving students in significantly different ways that lead to increased student learning and engagement

· defining new outcomes for learning and designing new ways of measuring students’ progress and mastery

· creating new ways of facilitating learning and designing different structures for deploying adults in schools

· moving from a “one-size-fits-all” instructional program to personalized learning focusing on the 21st-century skills of collaboration, teamwork, problem-formulation, creativity and the ability to "learn how to learn"

· creating systems where students are partners in designing and owning their learning

·  ensuring that a student can learn anywhere he/she can access the instructional material and at any time 24 hours a day/7 days a week and 365 days a year

· creating a system of support for each student to be successful in this environment.

Game - Based Learning.

Gamified learning is a teaching methodology that creates a game-like scenario around the course curriculum and the objectives of the curriculum 

The purpose of theses game systems is to promote student engagement and motivate students to participate in the course activities. The concept of gamified education had become extremely popular with a wide range of companies that have created game platforms for many different subjects.

1. Increases Student Engagement

 Students have shown that students are more likely to spend time playing a learning-based game if you are using a reward system. Badges and points help translate the work the student is completing into a tangible benefit. By increasing engagement you’ll also see a rise in learning retention as students will be able to relate to the content easier through practice than just reading or watching a lecture.

2. Creates Enthusiasm

Gamification can be used to foster feelings of enthusiasm towards the subject-matter, especially in subjects that students struggle with, like math. In my classes, I have struggled to try to get students excited about computer programming or concepts of computer science.  By creating a gamified system with rewards, I have been able to see a difference in my classes and students are becoming excited and competitive while learning.

3. Makes Social Connections

In higher education we often find that students have trouble creating social connections with other students in their courses. Gamified classrooms, seated and virtual,  help students who have trouble with social interaction and give them a reason to work together. This is especially true if you create team competitions that require students to collaborate on challenges.

4. Provides Instant Feedback

Most gamification systems allow for instantaneous fefeedback such as  dashboards which students can use to see where they stand among their peers. This information can push a student to try the quiz or activity again to get a higher placement and creates motivation for further lesson engagement.

Does gamification address the 21^st century skills?

Since it encourages collaboration, leads to learners gaining a skill of creativity, critical thinking and communication as result of the way it engages the learners, it addresses the 21^st century skills.

Under knowledge –building gamification is very important because it helps learners drive their learning and through playing the interactive games they keep on building the knowledge by themselves.

Is it more important for learners to create games rather than playing them because, when they create the games themselves they become responsible for their learning and hence become creators of knowledge rather than receivers of it.

Digital games can be incorporated into physics, by designing and allowing students also to design   games based on the topics in Physics. These games should be engaging and promote collaboration.    

THE POTENTIAL OF SOCIAL MEDIA AS A COMMUNICATION TOOL.

My learners when asked them about the use of social media, it really excited them and their responses to the survey questions revealed that social media can be a great tool in learning.

The survey I carried out in my school revealed that, 80% of the students are already using social media though not purposely for learning.

And they know a number of social media platforms, like twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp etc.  

Those that are not using social media at least they know about it.

They really liked the idea of using social media in their learning and when I asked to imagine a class where they are allowed to come with their smartphones, they were so excited about it.  

So after the survey and sharing of ideas even with my CCTI colleagues I really see the potential of social media as a communication tool.

Why social Media?

Sharing of ideas: Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events and interests within their individual networks. Web based social networking services make it possible to connect people who share interests and activities across education, political, economic and geographic borders.

Tool of communication: Social networks are increasingly being used by teachers and learners as a communication tool. Teachers create chat rooms, forums and groups to extend classroom discussion to posting assignments, tests and quizzes, to assisting with homework outside of the classroom setting. Learners can also form groups over the social networking sites and engage in discussion over a variety of topics.

Bridges communication gap: Social media bridges the distance among different people. It offers platforms for online users to find others who share the same interests and build virtual communities based on those shared interests. With the availability of social media technologies and services, content sharing and user interaction has become relatively easy and efficient.

Source of information: Content generating and sharing sites serve as sources of information for various topics. Users can search for content, download and use the content available on these sites free of cost.

Low Costs/ Cost effective: It is cheaper to use online social networking for both personal and business use because most of it is usually free. Unlike in other forms of media like electronic or print, one has to pay a certain amount of money for a news item to get published. A person can scout out potential customers and target markets with just a few clicks and keystrokes.

Less time consuming: Social media is an effective time management medium of communication for academic purposes.

As a teacher today that has had a golden opportunity to Technology integration, I have been inspired to see that Social media is integrated in my classes.

Create social media groups for my classes, say a WhatsApp group, where I can post some questions and let students discuss them. Using these groups, I can communicate on different topics and allow students to brain storm on them even before we look at them in class.

I intend to record short videos on different topics and share them with my students using the social media platforms they prefer.

Plan projects and encourage them to collaborate using the social media platform of their choice to won these projects.

While doing this I need to make sure they are guided on social media abuse. So I need to watch their conduct. 

REAL -WORLD COLLABORATION

There has been real world collaboration in the lesson. Right from the start we have used online tools to collaborate. This has made us create knowledge by bringing different ideas together. It has actually widened my knowledge on how to engage learners in their learning. And this collaboration ignites critical thinking as members brainstorm on issues. There is sharing of resources, builds trust between the stakeholders.

We have used interesting online collaboration tools which include, the wikispace, Google doc and MindMeister.

Collaboration tools allow groups to have real-time discussions and to shape an idea or thought together.

             

MindMeister.

is a powerful mind-mapping tool, but also has the functionality of many collaboration tools. Learners can use this to craft ideas and concepts.

              

Google Docs

Sometimes we need to work on one document together at the same time. With Google Doc this has been possible. This tool allows you to create online documents, presentations and spreadsheets.

               Wiki Space

A wiki is a collaborative web site that collects and organizes content, created and revised by its users. Wikis are a way to grow a knowledge base around a particular content area.

These tools once applied to the learning of our students it can lead to real learning.

I intend to give tasks that which require collaboration, where students will be able to collaborate using wikispace , google doc and mindmeister to brainstorm , share resources and hence create knowledge concerning a topic.

These tasks should include also projects, where they have to collaborate and work on a project until they have produced something out of it that reflect their creativity , innovation and critical thinking.