Report: Students’ tech use remains infrequent

Students’ use of digital tools and other learning technologies remains relatively sporadic, according to a new study.

Based on direct classroom observations of 140,000 K-12 classrooms across 39 states and 11 countries, the study by the school improvement organization AdvancED found there are still relatively few classrooms in which the use of digital tools and technology is a regular part of a student’s school experience.

The findings come from an analysis of three years of data from AdvancED’s learning observation environments observation tool, eleot, which measures and quantifies active student engagement through learner-centric classroom observations, to determine how extensively technology is being used to engage students in learning.…Read More

How 2 simple role-play games can transform students into active learners

Role-play enhances engagement and subject matter mastery. It’s also a lot of fun

role-play-game-deskStudents learning about the code of Hammurabi by acting as a council trusted with applying it

Maybe you’ve seen them interacting at Comic Con in fantastic costumes or reenacting decisive Civil War battles down to the smallest detail. Whether you realize it or not, you’re probably more familiar with role-playing than you realize. In education, role-play-as-learning is a unique experience which enhances student engagement, social skills, interest, and mastery of subject matter. It’s an approach that can have some major benefits for students.

At its core, role-play involves spontaneous, co-creative, contextualized, personally involved learning, and one of the best ways to introduce the concept to the classroom is though LARPs. Short for Live Action Role-play, LARPs are one part acting, one part historical immersion/interaction, and one part systematic modeling. It conceptualizes major concepts interwoven within human narratives that inspire students to enjoy and retain their knowledge within their experience. It leverages emotion as a mechanism for students to personalize key knowledge, processes, and concepts. And it involves embodiment and situational modeling, guiding students to not only learn the material but to experience it in context.…Read More

Do online charter schools measure up?

A three-part research study indicates that online charter school performance may be underwhelming

online-charter-schoolsNew research offers evidence that online charter schools post weaker academic performance and struggle more to maintain student engagement than their conventional brick-and-mortar peers.

The National Study of Online Charter Schools, released Oct. 27, analyzed online charter school operations, policy environments, and their impacts on student achievements.

The three-volume study, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, and the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, describes the achievement effects of online charter schools.…Read More

Brain-wave sensors: The answer to student engagement?

New technology could help educators monitor student engagement in real time, allowing them to adjust their teaching accordingly

measuring-engagement
The headsets read the user’s brain-wave signals and run them through an algorithm to measure the student’s attentiveness.

A Florida-based start-up firm called Nervanix is working on an idea that, if successful, could help educators find the “sweet spot” to effective teaching: maintaining active student engagement.

What if you could tell whether students really were engaged in a lesson or activity, rather than just pretending to be interested or going through the motions?

Furthermore, what if you had a tool that could measure a student’s brain-wave activity in order to develop a profile for the type of content that most engages that student? And what if this tool then could suggest specific content to match the student’s engagement profile?…Read More

Getting students to engage — not just comply

I have students in my mainstream ninth-grade English and in my English as a Second Language (ESL) classes complete a simple “Reading Log” every Friday, the Washington Post reports. It has five columns — ones for the day, title of the book, the number of minutes read, space for a student signature and one for a parent signature. Though I leave it on for a reason, the “parent signature” box has remained blank for years. I tell students at the beginning of the year that I expect that they will read a book of their choice at least two hours each week, and that if they promise to me that they will tell the truth on the log — even if they read less some weeks — that I will eliminate the requirement of a parent signature…

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Engaging learners through games: Help or hype?

Select games that allow room for self-paced exploration and experimentation, the author writes.

“Engagement” has become a popular buzzword, as educators increasingly cite disengaged students as a problem that needs to be fixed. In this context, games are often trumpeted as the perfect tool for creating student engagement. But what do we really know about how engagement works? What opportunities and risks do games present as tools for increasing engagement? And how can educators judge whether a game product truly helps drive student engagement or is merely hype?

There is no standard for what “engagement” means. As in the parable of the blind men describing the elephant, each expert perceives different aspects of student engagement: academic, behavioral, cognitive, emotional, institutional, intellectual, psychological, and social. Likewise, “games” are a broad and varied content category. This article will use “games” in the sense of interactive, student-initiated activities of inherent entertainment value that are played on an electronic device. The attributes “student-initiated” and “of inherent entertainment value” are keys to the success of games as learning tools.

How student engagement develops…Read More

24 iPad apps to support Bloom’s Taxonomy

Many iPad apps serve to boost student engagement and collaboration.

Bloom’s Taxonomy, introduced in the 1950s as a system of organizing learning objectives into a pyramid, traditionally has started with creating at the top, followed by evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering.

Some educators today are flipping the triangle so that remembering is on top, followed by understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating on the bottom.

During an edWeb.net webinar, educational technologist Kathy Schrock presented a variety of apps for iPads that can boost student engagement and collaboration, and that can be used for teaching and learning according to Bloom’s Taxonomy.…Read More

Tips and take-aways from a successful mobile learning program

Student engagement saw a boost from the mobile learning program. (Photo from http://www.smriders.net/Mobile_Learning)

Starting small might be the key to success when it comes to deploying a mobile learning initiative, according to two educators whose district has implemented a successful mobile program that now reaches 500 students.

“We felt that if it was something that was going to catch on, we wanted to be sure that we started small and that it was as group of people who wanted to work at this,” said Kyle Menchhofer, technology director for the St. Marys City Schools district in Ohio. “Starting small was a very strong and successful part of why we are where we are at this time.”

In 2008, before smart phones caught on, the district started its pilot by purchasing personal digital assistants (PDAs). Eight teachers—two each from third, fourth, and fifth grade—and two resource teachers signed on to begin the program.…Read More

Social learning networks promote student engagement, global awareness

When students engage with other classrooms around the world, their effort is ‘through the roof.’

Think about it … what do kids want? What do you want? How about the chance to be masters of tasks, have lives with purpose, and have the choice of when, where, and how when it comes to engagement in learning and teaching?

The classroom is no longer a physical place. Perhaps it never has been. Learning is experiential and it occurs, usually not on schedule, but 24 hours a day. What does this mean in an age of Common Core standards and high-stakes testing? The Common Core standards seem to fit well with students’ need for critical thinking and higher-order thinking skills. I doubt that the high-stakes testing philosophy fits well at all. As a teacher, I can’t help but ask if it even fits anywhere!

One of the goals of a social studies curriculum is to ensure that students are aware of different cultures and geographies—including how these are similar to or different from their own. Social learning communities make this easy. They offer a window to the world.…Read More

Readers: Five ways to motivate students

“Students need to know that someone truly cares about them when they are in a classroom,” said one reader.

We recently highlighted a report from the Center on Education Policy that looked at how schools can motivate students. Now, here are some of the best ideas from our readers.

We asked readers: “What are some ways/tactics/activities you implement to motivate students?” Their advice ranged from “be there for your students and let them know you care about them,” to “entice them with technology they use with their friends.”

Here are five of the best responses (some comments have been edited for brevity). What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any stories of your own for how to motivate and engage today’s 21st-century learners? Be sure to leave them in the comments section!…Read More

ISTE 2012: Educators seek the brass ring of student engagement

Robinson pushes for more personalized education.

“Redefining horizons: Encouraging students’ passion to achieve” is the theme for this year’s International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference—but in what looked like a scene that was more appropriate for a rock concert than an ed-tech show, it was educators’ passion that was evident in the overflowing crowd that appeared for the opening general session on June 24.

Though ISTE traditionally has been the largest educational technology conference in the U.S., with dwindling school budgets and the growth of online options, attendance has been down at national education trade shows in recent years.

But at ISTE’s 33rd annual conference, held in San Diego, the surging crowd and squished-in volunteers holding signs reading “Hey, it’s crowded” outside the opening general session suggested that educators are eager for new ideas in their classrooms.…Read More

University research will evaluate physical data to gauge teacher effectiveness

GSR technology could give an advantage to 'tyrannical' teachers, Ravitch says.

A student’s physical reaction to a classroom lesson soon could be used to judge how successful—or unsuccessful—an educator is in keeping students engaged.

Researchers and Clemson University received a nearly $500,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in November to study Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets, which house sensors that measure a student’s physical reaction to learning—such as increased sweating—and uses the data as a way to grade an educator’s performance.

Wireless sensors produce readouts showing whether students are alert, anxious, bored, or excited in the classroom, and as Clemson researchers determine the reliability of this experimental technological gauge, many in education are skeptical of the GSR bracelets as a mainstream classroom tool.…Read More