Social annotation is becoming increasingly popular as it is an effective tool that achieves great results. As we know, traditional classroom practices emphasized student's individual learning, but social annotation encourages our students’ participation in a more supportive community of learners.
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Engaging students in our instruction, their learning, as well as their assessments is a high priority for every teacher at every grade level with every student. And we find that our methodologies to engage students that work with one group of students, may be different from one class to the next.
Most times we think about the content of our instruction, student learning, and assessment, and if our students will deem it interesting enough to want to engage and do well.
However, I have found when teaching in my classroom as well as co-teaching and coaching in teachers’ classrooms that if we appeal to the human nature in each student, we have a higher probability to for most if not all students to WANT to engage in our classroom, course, and our content.
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One of the clever ways teachers are getting their students’ attention is by integrating the Alexa™ Artificial Intelligence (AI) inside of their instruction, student learning, assessment, and even classroom management and classroom routines. Teachers have become experts overnight using Alexa™ AI in ways that make it feel like they have a virtual teaching assistant inside the classroom right along with them, helping with instructions, lesson parts, classroom management, motivation, and incentives. Read to find 10 BEST Quick Tips to begin integrating the Alexa AI in your classroom to engage students!
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On both my blog and podcast, I write and speak about student engagement in the classroom. The reason why I put so much emphasis into student engagement? I have found, in my eighteen years in the classroom either as a middle school or high school educator, or an educational technology instructional coach the past five years, if students are engaged in our instruction and their student learning activities, and assessments, student performance rises. It’s almost a given.
When I observe a student immersed in a classroom activity, the student chose to place the student’s attention, focus, and activity inside the learning instance. And what usually happens as a result? The student either achieves a high score or a higher score compared to a learning instance where the student did not appear to be engaged in the learning episode.
Why is student engagement the powerhouse of student success in our classrooms?
In my recent blog posts, I talked a lot about what engages our students in our classrooms. You learned that community, technology, instructor presence, and more are real game-changers when it comes to engaging our students from the start of our lessons to the end. But in today’s blog post, I’m going to talk about what prevents student engagement from happening if it’s not included in your classroom.
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Whether you are a teacher who uses a lot of technology in the classroom, or one who uses a small amount of technology in the classroom, I believe we can all agree, technology in our classrooms is here to stay, especially since the situation we all found ourselves in March 2020 when everything we did in our classroom had to turn digital to reach our students. Let's go over today five of the main reasons why media has the power to empower our students’ learning and their education in ways no other elements give it any competition.
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As teachers, we participate in many professional development sessions about instruction, student learning, and assessment. In our college courses, we learned about instructional strategies, assessment approaches, and classroom management.
I believe it is safe to say, that professional development around the topic of instructor presence may be small if not for some teachers, non-existent. In this post, I’m going to share with you the power instructor presence has on student engagement and strategies you can use to capitalize on that positive energy in your classroom
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