With the rise of technology and the internet, teachers have adopted ingenious trends in the classroom to take advantage of the new ease of virtual communication. Teaching poses a number of challenges, but among the greatest is the difficulty of bringing a class together so that learning is a collective experience. In the worst cases, struggling students fall far behind and end up frustrated that they are not engaged with the class’s progress, while accelerated students are bored and sometimes end up disengaging just as much. The entire class suffers if any one student checks out. These modern teaching trends have the potential to bridge the gap between the struggling and the accelerated, and between the teacher and the students, creating a cohesive and effective classroom experience.
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Gamification
Gamification is exactly what it sounds like. Many lesson plans can be turned into interactive games in which students compete with one another. A math class, for example, could be divided into teams of several students each. The teams compete with one another to solve problems based on the day’s lesson the fastest. A history class could similarly be turned into a trivia game. Class debates are particularly effective since they require students to think critically about the topics in order to construct convincing arguments for their case. Gamification is a powerful teaching technique because it engages students’ reward systems and turns learning into a social experience.
Flipped Learning
The basic idea of flipped learning is to invert the usual style of teaching so that students watch lectures or presentations of the material online on their own and do the “homework” in class. There are several advantages to this approach. First, watching lectures online allows each student to take in the material at his or her own pace. Students can pause or replay parts of the lesson that they did not immediately understand. Second, doing the practice work in class allows for students to receive the help that they need when they need it. For most students, the meat of the learning actually takes place while engaged in the problem-solving process that homework provides. Flipped learning shifts the focus accordingly. As evidenced by Khan Academy, the method has been a major success.
Social Media
Social media has become a basic part of the way students interact with their worlds and with one another. It has the potential to distract, but with some strategizing, it also has the potential to increase students’ engagement with their classes. For example, social media can be used to keep channels of communication between students and teachers open after school hours. It can also be used as a means for students to communicate from home while working on group projects. Social learning is nearly always more effective than isolated learning, especially for high school students who are in a critical stage of their social development.
Digital Textbooks
Some schools have adopted the trend of providing each student with his or her own tablet loaded with the students’ textbooks. The idea sounds preventatively expensive, but it actually has the potential to save money. Textbooks are expensive, and the cost is only rising. Schools also need to replace their textbooks every few years because of the combination of wear and tear along with advances in fields like the sciences. In addition, students who have all their textbooks on tablets don’t have to lug several pounds of paper around on their backs 180 days a year.
Big Data
Big Data has been leaving its mark in industries ranging from healthcare to technology, and its power can even be harnessed for education. With big data methods, teachers can track their students progress. If students are struggling with a virtual homework assignment, for example, teachers can use the instant transmission of data to zero in on the problem students are having. Big data can also update teachers immediately if a large portion of the class has fallen behind. Essentially, big data is a means to open additional lines of communication between students and teachers so that teachers can be closely involved with the students’ learning as it is happening.
Bringing a class together so that the students and the teacher are on the same page is a tricky balancing act for teachers. Each student – and each class – has distinct needs that call for flexible methods. These trends in classroom technology have the potential to be game-changing additions to any teacher’s toolkit.
