Is there anything quite like actually engaging the students in a learning activity? There is a certain excitement or rush that comes from a lesson that goes the way you were hoping, when you can see the students not only doing the learning activity, but wanting to do it. It is amazing to see the type of work and the complexity of things that students can work on when they actually care about it.
In one of those kind of light bulb moments I decided that I needed something in my math class that would truly engage the students in the lessons and it came as a complete accident. As a joke when I was telling students their scores on an assessment I was doing Deal or No Deal with their scores (not for real, but it amused the students). It was interesting how excited they became by playing this game. As I sat later that week watching an episode of the show I started to make some of the math connections (probability, fractions, percentages, etc.). I decided at that moment that I was going to work out a lesson using this game. I made a Deal or No Deal board using Smart Notebook and student sheets, where half the class are the players and the other half are the bankers. We then played the game and the students loved it. Most importantly they started to make the connections with fractions and converting fractions to percents. Also, the bankers were using a formula for mean (a measure of central tendency) and rounding to come up with offers. These students were working with math concepts in real situations and were totally engaged, it was awesome.
After working with these lessons I thought about how the use of technology is often thrown out there as a way to engage the students and what I have found is that simply putting technology in the hands of the students is not a guaranteed way to engage the students in the learning that is required in our current educational system (Standards-Based). It takes more to engage the students, like making it something they can connect with on a real world level. I have branched off of this lesson and looked at statistics from ESPN and the students saw where the skills we were using in our game of Deal or No Deal were also applicable in the world of sports (statistics).
I really love the use of technology in the classroom and fully support it 100%, but in my growth as a teacher that attempts to embed technology in my classroom I feel an increased sense of responsibility in using the technology in more meaningful ways with the students. I have reached the point where it is no longer enough for me to say that the students are using technology, instead I need to be able to say that they are using it in meaningful ways. I see technology and the world of Web 2.0 as an invaluable way for students to make connections and put their learning into meaningful uses, now I must continue with the commitment to make this vision a reality in my classroom.
Web-based Tool Recommendation: Voicethread – As a little something extra I thought I would start trying to include some sort of link at the end of posts. This time I am recommending Voicethread. At this site you can upload images and leave comments about the images. The neat thing about this tool is that it gives you the option of recording a message instead of just typing a message. I see this as having great potential in the classroom to generate conversations about topics and engaging students in new ways (especially those reluctant writers).
