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5 Ways to Make Your Classroom Student Centered

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5 Ways to Make Your Classroom Student Centered

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Group 1 - read the following article.

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5 Ways to Make Your Classroom Student-Centered (Opinion)

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Teachers can build on student interests and increase engagement by developing these five “teacher strengths,” says educator Marcia Powell.

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Group 2 - read the following article.

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Editor's Note: Paul Bogdan was once an old-fashioned lecturing teacher centered secondary math teacher who left teaching for 14 years to build computer systems. He has come back and is reborn as a student-centered teacher trying to make a difference and trying to figure out what works in today's classroom. (Updated 01/2014)
Education in our middle schools and high schools these days is rapidly changing. The old notion of a classroom where the students are sitting quietly and neatly in their seats, while the teacher is up front pouring pearls of wisdom and knowledge into their brains is absurd.

Reality in the 21st century is quite a different story. Students seem to know that once a teacher stands up in front of the room and starts "teaching," not only is their life going to get very boring very quickly, the end result will be that there will be more quizzes and tests to fail and more opportunities to end up feeling dumber and dumber. So, how do they cope? They text their friends or get some sleep, or interrupt the teacher with a myriad of cleverly constructed distractions. The teacher who intends to stand in front of a high school or middle school class and "teach" is in a constant battle.

Unfortunately, not all problems have easy solutions. Our students come into the classroom with the same attitudes and expectations as the society in which they live. How could it be otherwise? For many people in America, the Dream Job is one in which they are required to do very little work and get paid mega bucks for doing it. The main objective at work for some people is to avoid work. By example, our youth are taught these same values, or lack thereof. They simply do not understand that education will not occur if they don't get involved. They don't understand that their education is both their responsibility and their right.

The good news, however, is that not all students are so unaware. More and more of society at large, and consequently many students, are demanding an educational system that works for and with them. These students are not bored. They are very curious, eager to learn, and willing to do whatever it takes to learn. I believe that the student-centered learning environment enables an educator to deal effectively with all types of students in the same classroom. A student-centered learning environment encourages students to become independent learners and ultimately to be in charge of their own education.

Are teachers obsolete? Absolutely not. But, an educator's role is changing from the traditional "imparter of knowledge" to that of coach and consultant. There are many exciting examples of successful strategies and programs in which the students are not only allowed, but encouraged and required, to take responsibility for much more of their learning than ever before.

Do-it-yourself, student-to-student teaching, project-based learning, and student-centered learning environments are some of the more encouraging programs. Also, the integration of technology into every subject and at all grade levels allows unprecedented levels and types of exciting collaboration and learner to learner connectivity.

The following are some links to posts by authors who have written about these methodologies.

Do It Yourself (DIY)

Student-to-Student Teaching

Project Based Learning (PBL)

Student-Centered Learning

Integrating Technology

"I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." -- Albert Einstein

It takes a giant leap of faith for a teacher to think that their students can learn the material on their own. Teachers become teachers to teach. It is natural for the teacher to want to force the student to learn. But, this is similar to trying to force the proverbial horse to drink. Think about how many video games people have learned and won, on their own! No one had to "teach" them how; no one had to force them to play. Tina Barseghian wrote a great article about video games and the wisdom that educators can glean from them. In this article she writes the following.

REDEFINE TEACHERS AS LEARNING DESIGNERS. Game designers create well-designed experiences and social interactions. Teachers are designers of learning, and can create experiences tailored to suit their outcome. If we "re-professionalize" teachers as designers, they can create their own scripts for what they want students to learn.

When educators can design learning environments well enough, students will be able to learn mostly on their own. In an environment where the educator is respected for their expertise, and appreciated for their faith in the student's abilities, they will be asked for their help, encouragement and clarification when the student needs it. In turn, the students are appreciated for their willingness to take responsibility, become involved, and do the work needed to succeed. Mutual trust and respect is created rather than confrontation. Change is inevitable and there is a bright new hope on the educational horizon.

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Student-Centered Learning Environments: How and Why

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Editor's Note: Paul Bogdan was once an old-fashioned lecturing teacher centered secondary math teacher who left teaching for 14 years to build computer systems. He has come back and is reborn as a student-centered teacher trying to make a difference and trying to figure out what works in today's classroom.

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8 Engaging Ways to Use Technology in the Classroom

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8 Engaging Ways to Use Technology in the Classroom

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Group 3 - read the following article.

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Dozens of free web tools and ideas that can pack a technology integration punch and kick those lessons up a notch

Are you tired of delivering the same old lectures on the same subjects year after year? Are you using the same lesson materials over and over and wishing you could make learning in your classroom more interactive?

While lectures and lessons can be informative and even â€œedutainingâ€ when delivered with passion and good materials by knowledgeable experts, sadly many traditional lectures and lessons are boring, and even worse often ineffective. The good news is that the Web is loaded with great free tools that can enable teachers to bring a sense of fun and engagement to their lessons.

Of course, you do need devices with Internet access to give these tools a try. Even if you donâ€™t have computers or tablets available in your classroom, the fact that an increasing number of High School and college students have smartphones is making it easier than ever to leverage technology to create engaging, active lessons students enjoy working on. For younger grades, if you donâ€™t have access to devices with Web access, perhaps you can access a computer lab by request, or use devices in your library.

Hereâ€™s a whole bunch of ideas for leveraging technology to kick those lessons up a notch!

1. Incorporate Student Input & Gather Feedback

There are many applications that allow students to provide live feedback. A lot of them can be used from smartphones. You can also gather feedback by creating a â€œback channelâ€ using Twitter.

Quick, easy Polling Applications: PollDaddy and PollEverywhere are two of many applications that make it quick and easy to create simple polls that can let you gather feedback from students â€" determine if they are struggling with a topic, if they know the correct answers to questions you ask, and so on. They can often participate in these polls using a smartphone.

Take it up a notch with Socrative: Socrative is a powerful free app that lets you go well beyond simple polls to more elaborate quizzes, or just use it to gather quick and easy feedback. Learn more here.

Plickers: This is a pretty cool lo-tech approach to collecting student responses during class that doesnâ€™t require students to use technology. Learn more here.

Twitter: Twitter is a great way to gather input by creating an easy to use â€˜backchannelâ€™. This is great for students with smartphones (they will need the Twitter app and an account). Simply create a unique hashtag and have students post feedback to Twitter using that hashtag.

2. Gamify It

Leveraging gaming mechanics that can make learning more fun is probably easier than you think. Any time you bring competition or levels of achievement to a classroom exercise, youâ€™re adding an element of 'gamification'. For a simple example, in one recent assignment in my classroom, I had students search through an interactive computer history timeline for specific facts. The first student to correctly identify a fact (like â€œwhat was the first computer bug?â€) that I had them seek out â€œwonâ€ for that question! Of course, gamification can be leveraged in much richer ways.

Hereâ€™s a variety of resources and ideas for using gaming in the classroom:

3. Let Students Create

There are so many fun free tools and apps available today that can let students create all kinds of awesome digital content. Below is diversified set of different article and resources that share different tools and ideas for students (and teachers) to create digital content â€" presentations, interactive digital posters, eBooks, videos, and more. In the spirit of creating in the classroom, we also included an article introducing the burgeoning Makerspace Movement in education.

4. Get Interactive

Many teachers enjoy using interactive tools with their students. Hereâ€™s a few tools and ideas to consider.

Online Interactive White Boards: Did you know that there are several good free interactive whiteboards available online? If you have a computer and a projector, you can make them work a lot like a â€œsmart boardâ€. Some of these applications even allow students to log on online and collaboratively edit content. Check out these 6 Online IWBs to explore this idea further.

Bounceapp (bounceapp.com): You can review, notate, and share any web page with Bounceapp. Just paste a web page address into the â€œappâ€ and it turns it into an interactive screenshot where students can jot ideas.

Interactive apps that work with Smartphones: Many of the tools in this article work on smartphones!

If you happen to have a physical white board in your classroom, get more out of it with these creative ideas.

Explore additional tool and ideas in this popular article that we published earlier this year.

5. Have Students Collaborate

Getting students to work together as partners, in small groups, or maybe even as one large group, teaches them about team work. Collaborative work can be fun. It is even possible to collaborate with students across the world thanks to many of todayâ€™s technologies.

Here are a number of tools and techniques for classroom collaborations.

Share writing and encourage feedback with NewsActivist: NewsActivist is a free tool that lets teachers set up their students with a private area where they can write about selected subjects. You can enables them to share what their write with just their classmates, or with the larger audience of students from across the world using NewsActivist. Students can then provide feedback on other studentsâ€™ writings. Learn more in this brief article.

Collaborative Document Editing with Google Drive (drive.google.com): Google Drive lets you share and collaboratively edit Google Docs with anyone else who has a Google account, for free. This is a powerful capability.

Collaborative Mind Mapping with MindMeister (mindmeister.com): This applications lets users easilyÂ create mind maps that can be edited collaboratively.

Collaborative Research: Working in pairs or small groups to find, assess, summarize, and present content in specific topic areas make for a great learning experience and assignment.

6. Project Based Learning

When students apply what they are learning to projects that they undertake, the topics they are learning about can take on a much deeper meaning. Not only does the activity and the increased sensory exposure of project work help to stimulate the mind, the extended time often required of project work, and the visible, tangible results further reinforce learning.

Here are two excellent, rich resources for further exploration of PBL from TeachThought.com:

7. Simulations

Simulations can be a powerful addition to the classroom. Since they tend to be somewhat complicated, they are typically suited towards high school, college, or post-graduate or professional studies. Here are some examples of simulations being used in education:

Economics: This site, Economic-Games.com, offers free online classroom games for teaching economics.

Marketing: Have you ever wished you could give your Marketing students the chance to practice different e-marketing skills and techniques? Check out Simbound.

Medical: Simulations have been a significant teaching and learning tool in the medical field for many years. Harvard Medical School has even created a web site focused on their use of Simulations.

Business: Business Simulation Games are a great way to bring active, applied learning into Business courses.

8. Bring in a Guest or Two

With the power of video conferencing apps like Skype, Google Hangout, Facetime, and others, our ability to connect with people all across the world has never been better or less costly. Teachers have been using Skype and similar tools to being guest lecturers, experts, students, and others into the classroom for years. Nothing breaks up the monotony of â€œsame old thingâ€ like an enthusiastic subject matter expert from another county or a room full of students from another continent!

Check out this great video about Skype in the Classroom. This is a perfect way to wrap up this post about leveraging tech in the classroom to make lessons captivating, fun, and exciting!

Be sure to tell us about some of your favorite ways to make lessons more fun with the help of today's powerful instructional technologies!
Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
10 Pretty Awesome Things You Can do With PowerPoint
Add Voice Over to PowerPoint Presentations in 5 Easy Steps
20 Fun Free Tools for Interactive Classroom Collaboration

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8 Engaging Ways to use Technology in the Classroom to Create Lessons That Arenâ€™t Boring - Emerging Education Technologies

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Dozens of free web tools and ideas that can pack a technology integration punch and kick those lessons up a notch Are you tired of delivering the same old lectures on the same subjects year after year? Are you using the same lesson materials over and over and wishing you could make learning in your [...]

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Teacher Recommended: 50 Favorite Classroom APPS

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Teacher Recommended: 50 Favorite Classroom APPS

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Group 4 - read the following article.

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Educators and students are quickly becoming more comfortable with classroom technology, allowing them to shift from thinking about the technical side of integrating a new tool to focusing on how it improves learning. While the sheer number of education apps is still overwhelming, increasingly teachers have found what works for them and are sticking to them.

"The conversations I had were radically different than they were a year ago," said Michelle Luhtala, the librarian for New Canaan High School and host of an Emerging Tech webinar on edWeb. She tapped her professional learning network of educators, teaching all grades and located all over the country, to share their favorite tech tools.

'If it doesn't feel different than it did a year ago, that's alarming. It should feel the same, but better.'

"A year ago people felt like it was this new thing that was so overwhelming," Luhtala said, "and now it really seems much more comfortable."

Educators have become proficient with their favorite classroom apps and are getting more creative with using them to achieve teaching goals. "You are giving them an opportunity to improve their own expectations because they aren't just dealing with the technology," Luhtala said. "They are thinking about how to best integrate the innovation with content."

Rather than picking an app and trying to find a place for it in the classroom, Luhtala is hearing educators and their students describe what they want to do and then how they chose a tech tool to make that happen. "They're talking about what kids are doing in the classroom far more than they are about the devices and the apps," Luhtala said. "That's where we want to be."

Luhtala has also noticed some app fatigue among her colleagues. If they are using something that works well, they'll probably stick with it, even if another slightly better product comes along. Learning is hard and change is even harder, so once teachers have found a tool that meets their learning goals, they are unlikely to shift without a good reason.

"It's hard to get the teachers on board with this at all, so to say we're going to do it differently next year is a tough sell," Luhtala said.

The list of apps that educators favor this year shares some commonalities with last year's favorites. Teachers tend to drop apps if they become too expensive or sometimes if the updates are so overwhelming that they no longer know how to use the product. Luhtala explained it's a delicate balance: "If it doesn't feel different than it did a year ago, that's alarming. It should feel the same, but better."

The repeat apps that have made it to this favorite list added functionality without doing so too quickly. They also tend to target younger students - high school students mostly use their phones for personal computing and their laptops for school. The emphasis in the higher grades is still on reading and typing - teachers give students fewer opportunities to express their learning in creative ways, so the tools of choice tend to be basic. High school kids use Google Apps because they can easily collaborate.
APPS TO ACQUIRE INFORMATION APPS THAT HELP MAKE MEANING
The apps in this section help organize or share information that students or teachers have already found. "This is when we start shifting the knowledge around and owning it," Luhtala said. "It's not just ingesting knowledge, it's manipulating it."

Evernote and Notability: Both these apps are often mentioned. Evernote is free and cross-platform, but tends to compartmentalize. Notability has a charge associated with it ($1.99 per download) and is only for iPads. However, that allows it to integrate elements of Apple apps into the experience. Luhtala's sophomore students experimented with both apps and liked Notability better for school work. Luhtala believes the apps could have separate purposes, and users don't have to choose one or the other.

ClassDojo: This tool is a fun and easy way to keep track of student behavior, allowing teachers to take attendance quickly and give positive or negative reinforcement, depending on a child's actions that day. Each student gets a critter and some teachers find it very effective. It works on iPhones and iPads, as well as Android phones and the Web. It is free.
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER APPS
"Kids have ingested information, they've found ways to manipulate the information, and now they are ready to create something," Luhtala said.

Adobe Slate: While similar to its competitor Microsoft Sway, some educators reported this presentation tool to be more engaging. "When I did this webinar a year ago, I didn't feel there was a presentation tool that worked for me," Luhtala said. "Now there are." Adobe Slate works on iPads and is free. Microsoft Sway is free and Web-based.

Teacher Recommended: 50 Favorite Classroom Apps

Author

Katrina Schwartz

Katrina Schwartz is a journalist based in San Francisco. She's worked at KPCC public radio in LA and has reported on air and online for KQED since 2010. She's a staff writer for KQED's education blog MindShift.

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Teacher Recommended: 50 Favorite Classroom Apps

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Educators and students are quickly becoming more comfortable with classroom technology, allowing them to shift from thinking about the technical side of integrating a new tool to focusing on how it improves learning. While the sheer number of education apps is still overwhelming, increasingly teachers have found what works for them and are sticking to them.

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Student-Centered Learning: It Starts with the Teacher

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Student-Centered Learning: It Starts with the Teacher

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Group 5: read the following article.

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Student-Centered Learning: It Starts With the Teacher

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Teachers encourage student-centered learning by allowing students to share in decisions, believing in their capacity to lead, and remembering how it feels to learn.