5 Easy Ways for Innovative Educators to Engage Students Until The End of The School Year

Looking for some innovative ideas to breathe life into the school day for you and your students even with thoughts of sunshine and summer vacation dancing in their heads? Here are some free, fun, and easy ideas for using 21st Century tools guaranteed to keep students engaged.

Create a Social Network for Your Students

Capitalize on your student's interest in social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook and create a social network learning environment for your students. Innovative educators are coming up with all sorts of creative ideas to use social networks to engage students. How about creating a social studies network with historical characters? Students can select a historical character to portray, create their personal page for that character, engage in discussions, and join groups that character would be involved in. Ning is allowing educators to create free educational social networks. For more ideas about using social networks in education visit Ning in Education. If you've never participated in a social network get the experience of participating by joining The Innovative Educator Social Network. This will enable you to have a better idea of how you can incorporate a social network into your teaching and about the value of Social Networking for Innovative Educators.

Voki

Make a Voki to breath some life into literacy. Have your students take a piece of writing they have done and create a Voki to record their work. Students can also enter short pieces of writing and pick a Voki voice to read their work. You can have students upload Vokis to any blog, website, or any online location. Click the play arrow on this Voki for an example.

Get a Voki now!

Take Classes

Most school districts have Instructional Technology departments that offer professional development opportunities for teachers throughout the year. Try to find out what your district has to offer. New York City teachers have dozens of classes available to them by simply visiting the online registration site and selecting the “iTeach/iLearn” or “Instructional Technology” department. There, as in other districts, teachers can enroll in classes showing them how to use tools like Google Earth, wikis, blogs, digital documentaries, SmartBoards and more designed to support innovative educators.

A terrific way to come up with engaging ideas for enhancing education is to tap into your personal learning network. The next two posts are ideas from two of my top personal learning network contributors The Techomnivore and The Innovative Parent.

Infuse Life into Your Lessons with Digital Gaming

The Techominivore shares a survey performed by Project Tomorrow that says that educational gaming is one technology that students use most frequently and that gaming is the one emerging technology that students would like to see used in their classrooms. Only one in ten teachers use gaming in the classroom which starkly reveals the disconnect between students and adults about the power of gaming. He poses the question, especially to the classroom teachers, are you incorporating enough gaming in your teaching? Are you? If you are not, read some recommendations from The Techominivore by visiting his entries on the Technology & Learning's Guide to Digital Learning blog.

Have You Heard of Blurb?
The Innovative Parent blog shares a fantastic resource for bringing authentic book publishing to the masses called Blurb. This allows users to download bookmaking software for free and publish these books at professional quality for purchase by real audiences for about $12 each. Amazing! You can read some of the The Innovative Parent’s ideas about using these resources to publish class yearbooks, poems, and more here.

These are just a few ideas innovative educators can implement to engage students. If (or when) you have experience implementing some of these ideas or when you have more ideas to share, please comment on this post.

5 Innovative Ideas for Student Teams that Support 21st Century Teaching & Learning

I have been helping technology-rich schools develop student support teams designed to improve a school's capacity to integrate technology into teaching and learning for about three years. Yesterday, I was at the annual MOUSE Educators Conference which inspired me to realize even more innovative ways school’s student support teams can benefit students, teachers, and entire schools in creating and maintaining a successful 21st Century environment. MOUSE is an organization that creates technology-based opportunities that motivate students to succeed in today’s information society.

These support teams are great for students because they begin developing a passion and expertise in using and teaching technology skills which they can carry with them for the rest of their lives. Students also learn about professionalism and customer service. Many Faculty advisers have students fill out applications or submit resumes for a coveted Squad position and participate in an interview. Students are given guidance and advice on how to do apply and interview using curriculum that includes videos and activities from MOUSE. These students are given special shirts at many schools and become the esteemed supermen and women of the school able to heroically fix technical issues in a single bound. But the teams are much more than just that. These student support teams provide students with a sense of belonging. In many cases, just like sports teams, members must also maintain an expected school record for classes, attendance, and behavior. After doing working with students support teams for several years I was thrilled to discover five new and innovative ideas schools can implement with their student support teams.

Social Networks

It appears MOUSE is ready to jump on the Social Network bandwagon. At the conference they had participants engage in an activity called MOUSESPACE (ala MySpace). Participants drew a possible social network for their MOUSE Squads (which I recommend are groups within one space) where squads can interact with other teams. Each Squad creates a page where they describe their squad and post a picture, provide contact info, indicate the numbers of boys/girls, identify strengths and challenges, and provide tags indicating “Stuff my squad loves” and “Values my squad” shares. I thought it was such a good idea I spoke to the program director Ted Bongiovanni about getting the ball rolling and setting up a space for the faculty advisors of student support teams right now and he gave me the thumbs up to start a group at The Innovative Educators Social Network. I encourage you to join The Student Support Team Group.

Explore Engaging Educational Games

At the MOUSE conference Karen Sideman of Games4Change and Parsons School of Design led a discussion of gaming and learning. She explained how good gaming environments make for good learning environments, and how educators can capitalize on game-play to access content and concepts from throughout the curricular landscape. While I agree this is a wonderful and meaningful direction in education, it is often difficult to incorporate in the curriculum, especially when students and teachers have not had an opportunity to test this out. What a great idea for a student support team! These team members and their faculty advisors can be the pioneers making the connections about how these games can be valuable, test them out and share the successes and connections so they may eventually be incorporated into the school day. Read more ideas about how to Infuse Life into Your Lessons with Digital Gaming in my blog entry 5 Easy Ways for Innovative Educators to Engage Students Until The End of The School Year.

Recycle Computers for Use with Your Student Support Teams

During the MOUSE spotlight a presenter shared a great idea for recycled computers! Work with companies to put together packages for student support teams to allow them to get down and dirty with equipment in ways that they are not allowed with warranted devices. They are taking computer parts and putting them in packages and a curriculum has been written to accompany this. The activities are designed to provide students with an opportunity to touch and feel the internal components of a computer. They also learn to identify characteristics and features of the devices. The “Computer in a Box” Kit is a safe way for students to experience the insides of the system unit in a safe environment. Visit the Computer in a Box Lesson to find out how to do this with your squad. Visit Lessons for Student Support Teams for more lessons written by NYC Faculty Advisers.

Create Online Tutorials
What a great idea!!! At the MOUSE Conference Dan Beeby, Associate Director of Services for Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning showed participants how to create how to's that help. What a great idea to have students create online tutorials to answer all the common things they are asked to assist with and the faculty advisor can collect these in one place (wiki, website, blog). You can find out how to create screencasts here. For samples of ScreenCasts to share with your iSquad as a model for their work or aid to their work check out http://demogirl.com/.

Have a Film Crew

During the MOUSE spotlight presenters shared that some MOUSE squads attend every event to capture photos and video of what occurs throughout the year. This is captured for many uses including posting instantly after events. Capturing for the end of the year celebration slide show collection. Capturing for the year book and more. The student support team members are further celebrated because they are the one’s often distributing the coveted Yearbooks or CDs. Some schools are using these for fund raisers too.

If you have tried any of these ideas or have additional ideas, please share by commenting on this post.