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“What can you say in six seconds?”Imagine if you had a message that everyone needed to hear, but you only had six second to say it. How would you get it across? How would your communication skills be tested? How would your creativity be stretched? How would you engage and inform?
Vine, a new app from the makers of Twitter, forces users to answer these questions. Vine is a micro-video application. Vine allows the creation and sharing of any six-second video users can think of. While this paradigm lends itself to a variety of comedic stunts, it holds huge potential in the realm of education.
Throughout our schooling, we’re taught the value of concision. To impress, say more with less. Services like Vine and Twitter put this principle to the test. What valuable information could students and educators possibly say in six seconds or less?
- For English and writing contexts, flash fiction will always challenge students to convey potentially deep and complex narratives in as few words as possible. Translated into Vine video, these stories gain the human element that often only comes with live readings.
- Vine can be used to demonstrate any procedure that doesn’t require a lot of extra explanation. The virtue of video is that visuals can convey a lot more than written step-by-step directions. This can make explaining cumbersome procedures tidy and quick.
- A large number of science teachers and parents already share fun and exciting experiments on Vine to demonstrate basic scientific principles. These sorts of experiments tend to be easily duplicated and expanded into a larger lesson.
- Vine can also be used to provide clever and entertaining refreshers on commonly-used equations and formulas. Vine videos are great for simple math problems, grammar rules, or any rules of thumb that you want to engrain in your students.
- For any short message (due dates, schedule changes, reminders) you want to blast out to parents and students over social media, Vine is a great tool.
If you’re looking for more great tips on how to use mobile technology to engage your students, have a look at our very own signature course, Technology Driven Classrooms (TDC). TDC is bursting with unique ideas and strategies that will keep your students looking forward to learning.
“Students want to be able to study anytime, anywhere.”The tablet and smartphone revolution is here to stay. Mobile technology provides an excellent opportunity for teachers to invigorate their curricula by adjusting to the learning styles of today’s students. Students want to be able to study anytime, anywhere, and at their own pace. Integrating mobile technology with education gives students the media-rich and on-demand learning experiences they crave.
By enabling students to take control of the pace and location of their learning, mobile technology gives them free reign to learn in their preferred style. Whether that means switching between numerous browser tabs (learning materials, entertainment, and social networking), or focusing on a single learning activity, students are empowered to learn in a manner most effective to them. This freedom falls in line with the relatively new trend of student-centered learning, which gives students increased independence and responsibility—qualities they will need for the real world.
Students’ immersion in mobile technology means that they are “always on.” Rather than seeing this as a detriment, you can use it to your advantage. Reach students on their preferred medium. Just as entertainment and media companies can constantly push content to students’ mobile devices, so can you! Blasting out learning materials or lessons through social media outlets is a surefire way to engage students who are already on their mobile devices. Taking the learning to the students rather the students to the learning is the new paradigm presented by mobile learning.
Use social networks to blast out lessons!In addition to engaging students through social media, you can also use a multitude of polling or quizzing apps to receive instant feedback and assessment from students. One such app is Socrative, which enables teachers to swiftly quiz, poll, or assess students. This heightens the potential for gamifying your students’ learning and staying constantly connected.
There are plenty of professional development courses that are tailored to showing teachers how to enthrall learners through the use of mobile technology. Have a look at our very own signature course, Technology Driven Classrooms (TDC). TDC is overflowing with innovative strategies and techniques specifically designed to enthrall learners through the use of mobile technology.
Also, make sure to keep coming back to this blog as we continue our weekly posting series on engaging digital natives!
“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”How do you play the game of life? You may say, “Life is not a game,” and many may agree with you, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be examined as if it were. At least that’s what game theorists have been doing since the first half the 20th century. Game theory has examined social interactions from the standpoint of decision-making: how will agents make decisions in given situations according to potential costs, benefits, and available knowledge. Consider the following examples:
- Economies can be examined as massive games involving huge numbers of players, all competing or cooperating for wealth.
- The perks, benefits, and titles that employers confer are akin to reward systems that exist across a wide range of games.
- The modern grading system establishes a hierarchy that students may climb for the sake of pride, self-improvement, and competition. This could be viewed as a preliminary game that introduces young players to social, economic, and bureaucratic position.
- The social norms presented by courtship rituals are often viewed as game rules that participants must satisfy in order to achieve success (partnership).
Economies are the largest games there are. Even if you don’t look at life as a series of games, that doesn’t mean you can’t apply the model of gaming in a constructive fashion. In the context of education, what if a teacher’s lessons could engage students as much as any video game? With gamification, they can. Gamification is a newly recognized trend in education that harnesses the motivational features of games in the service of productive activities. In the case of education, gamification takes advantage of people’s competitive, self-expressive, and altruistic drives by using them as motivation for learning.
By turning your lessons into games, you keep your students engaged. While this may not seem new, gamification is beginning to formalize the tactics and strategies of gaming that educators have been creatively applying in their lessons for years. There are scores of articles written about how to turn some of your lessons into games. However, they all seem to share some common attributes:
- Determine the overall learning outcomes for the game
- Formulate an overarching theme or idea to drive the game
- Sketch out the phases of the game
- Focus on gameplay (It needs to be fun)
- Generate specific learning activities that will support the learning outcomes
- Assign teams if applicable
Though these are great guidelines for producing your own games, you may wish to purchase one of the widely-available apps that are specifically designed to help gamify your lessons.
Gamification is on the verge of becoming a massive trend as educators continue to look for innovative ways to enthrall their students. This is likely just the beginning, so the sooner you get started, the better!
If you’re looking for more ideas on how to engage your digital native students, check out our signature course: Technology Driven Classrooms (TDC). TDC is an eight-week long professional development course that provides educators with essential teaching techniques, ideas, and suggestions for educating and inspiring today’s students.
Also, be sure to check back next week for another post on engaging digital natives!
Students are already on social media outlets! Use them!There is a competition going on for everyone’s attention. Teachers often lose the battle for their students’ attention because they refuse to compete in the arena of new media. Modernize. Engage students where they already spend so much of their time.
You’d think by now that most teachers could see the value of creating social media accounts for the purpose of interacting with their students, but so few seem to take advantage of the opportunity.
Look at it this way: Any social media account (whether YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter) is like having your own TV channel. Students can “tune in” whenever they want. Americans spend a huge percentage of their internet time browsing social media websites. By creating your own social media outlets, you can capture students’ attention and get them thinking about learning when they least expect it. The more time they spend outside of class considering associated topics, the more likely they are to perform well in class.
“Never underestimate the value of a smiling face…”Believe it or not, students often find it cool when teachers interact with them on social media websites. It can reduce any sense of authoritarianism in teacher-student relationships and cultivate feelings of familiarity and amiability. Even if you don’t want to directly “friend” students with your personal Facebook account, you can still create an account purely for professional reasons. You can even create a Facebook “page” or Twitter account just for the sake of blasting out education-related messages or short lessons.
If nothing else, you can share semi-relevant, humorous, and entertaining content that will keep students in good spirits, which in itself helps with engagement. By going as far as making a YouTube account and posting videologs, you can begin to interact with your students on a more “real,” personalized basis. Never underestimate the value of a smiling face looking directly into a camera.
With the new media of smartphones and tablets spilling over into the classroom, it’s time that teachers allow their content to overflow into the media of the home (not just through homework). By creating valuable, interesting content and posting it on venues students are already using, teachers shift to the new paradigm of communication. Engage students in settings where they naturally gravitate: engage them on social media outlets.
Still hungry for ideas on how to engage digital natives? Our professional development course: Technology Driven Classrooms (TDC) is designed specifically for you. TDC provides educators with essential teaching techniques, ideas, and suggestions for educating and inspiring today’s students.
Remember to come back next week for a new tip on engaging digital natives! And if you didn’t catch it, have a gander at last week’s post on the power of “Prezi!”
“Turn it up! Where’s your sensory threshold?”Have you ever been to a concert that was so loud, that once you left, all you could hear was a massive ringing? After events of such intensity, we struggle to hear. We may ask our companions to speak louder. We may turn up the volume on our devices. And, in general, we may try to make everything louder when we should be taking the time to let our auditory system rest. Otherwise, we risk getting caught in a spiral of continuously pumping up the volume.
In Western psychology, there’s the idea of a sensory threshold. A threshold is the level of intensity required for something to be detected. After a rock concert, you could say that your auditory threshold is much higher because you’ve become temporarily desensitized. You can’t quite hear all the nuances that you did before the concert. In the United States, our culture of high-stimulation and constant interactivity promotes a very high overall threshold for stimulation. We seek greater levels of intensity because our thresholds for stimulation are so high.
The way students approach education is no different. There’s a reason why so many students are disengaged. There’s a reason why the old system of education isn’t working as well as it did. The reason is that humans (especially those in younger generations) are developing higher sensory thresholds. As time passes, humans can process more and more information, largely due to shifts in how we communicate. “The medium is the message” has never been truer.
We are the in the digital era, where teachers and students alike are immersed in media. Despite swimming in a sea of information technology (IT), it seems that very few educators are managing to successfully integrate the most valuable IT tools into curricula.
What can be done? Let education evolve with students. It’s the only way.
In order to help you adapt with modern students, every week, we will post a tip on engaging and inspiring “digital natives.”
For this first week, we show you how to enthuse your students by taking advantage of a very important, but infrequently-cited psychological state: “Flow.”
Tip #1: Take Advantage of “Flow”
“Go with the flow!”Have you ever been “in the zone,” “on point,” or “in the moment?” Of course you have! And when you were, you were probably in “Flow.” Flow is a state of being so totally immersed in an activity that everything else seems to recede from your consciousness. It’s like you become one with the activity. Flow coincides with peak performance. Any activity or skill that provides a challenge, requires great focus, and uses a lot of your sensory bandwidth can put you in flow. Whether it’s sports, videogames, drawing, dancing, or driving, if it requires a lot of focus, you can probably go into flow doing it.
Consider the potential for flow as you create lessons and activities for students. If they are accustomed to being in flow due to their highly interactive personal lives, how are they going to feel when a learning activity is simply stop-and-go and doesn’t require sustained focus? Distraction and boredom will abound.
In general, there seem to be three qualities that that will keep students in flow when engaging in an activity:
- The activity has definite goals and progress points. These provide a clear focus that students may work toward.
- The activity has nearly instantaneous feedback that prompts the participant to adjust to real-time changes in condition. This level of feedback is common to most flow-prone activities. How much real-time feedback does a person receive when navigating through traffic? How much feedback do students take in on the playing field when they coordinate with team members and react to opponents? If you can integrate this level of feedback into learning activities, you can keep students focused and on-task.
- Activities should be challenging but not too challenging. There is a sweet spot. The participant needs to have confidence that they are capable of doing the task, but they must also be somewhat challenged or they risk falling into the bored state. The fulcrum of flow is between overwhelming challenge and underwhelming boredom.
Need some help thinking of creative ways to promote “flow” in your students? Consider taking our signature course, Technology Driven Classrooms (TDC). It will redefine how you interact with your students.
