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.