Tips to increase student engagement
- 1. Tips to Increase Student Engagement The Faculty Center Ally Kimmel | [email protected]
- 2. Topics Covered: • Engaging Assessments • Flipping the Classroom • Using Social Media • Engaging Learning Activities • Visual and Verbal Feedback
- 3. What is Student Engagement? It “refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education.” ~ EdGlossary.org
- 4. Assessments that Promote Student Engagement • Give choices • Allow your students to choose from different assessments and assignments or ways to deliver those assignments to make them feel in control • Have them choose between: • Reading text or watching a clip • Creating a Prezi, PowerPoint, or video presentation • Taking a test or writing an essay • Use written form, video, paint/photography, or social media to develop a project
- 5. Assessments that Promote Student Engagement (cont.) • Make the content relatable • Test questions, practice problems, or projects that relate to the lives of your students help keep your students engaged • You can use Blackboard, Qualtrics or Poll Everywhere to create surveys to get to know your students • Authenticity • Require your students to complete assignments for an authentic audience • Writing a letter to a local politician or business • Blogging or posting on Twitter • Connecting with professionals on LinkedIn • Presenting in front of a non-Pace audience
- 6. Do you provide options of completing assignments in more than one medium?
- 7. Flipping the Classroom • Shift the focus from the teacher to the student • Require your students to gain the new knowledge outside of the classroom • Homework is not a way to reinforce the knowledge, but a way to gain the knowledge • In class, students should discuss the content with the instructor and with each other to master the knowledge • Students should work inside the content and not just sitting and listening to the instructor
- 8. Flipping the Classroom (cont.) Face-to-Face • Assign students to digest the content outside the classroom - this allows them to come to class prepared to discuss, ask questions, and debate. • Create groups where students ask each other questions they had on the content. • Assign a different student (or group) each week (or month) to present a summary of the content. Online • Instead of posting an announcement in Blackboard about the syllabus, use the test feature to have students answer questions pertaining to location of important information. • Create a lecture for your students to review before the Collaborate session, and use the time during the session to have the students lead the discussion based on the material. • Have the students lead the discussion(s) in the Discussion Board • Incentivize students to share resources and information they find pertaining to your course, rather than just reviewing the content. • Before the course begins, ask your students what they know about the topic and what they hope to learn. • Rather than having them memorize and regurgitate, challenge them to use audio and video tools to create screen captures, documentaries, podcasts, etc.
- 9. Example of Flipping the Classroom (Active Learning) Subject: Pharmacokinetics — the science of drug delivery Lecture or Traditional: A lot of the science of pharmacokinetics is mathematical equations and can be presented in a lecture and given examples of how they work. Flipping the Classroom: The students learn about the equations before class. In the classroom, the students work in groups solving pharmacokinetic cases where the patient gets a drug in a certain dose at a certain time, and students have to assess the action and the concentration of the drug in the blood. (This example comes from a course from Vermont Medical School)
- 10. Pre-created Content • Lynda.com • YouTube • NBCLearn • Khan Academy
- 11. Using Social Media Social Networks: • Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn • Skype • Medium • YouTube And much more Many students today communicate through text messages, video chats, or online chats, and have moved away from email or calling someone on the phone. A great way to communicate with your students is to set up virtual office hours using Skype for Business (provided by Pace).
- 12. Using Social Media (cont.) • Start out small and simple: use social media yourself for course deadlines and news • Students may need an example on how to use social media in an educational/professional way • Create a private Facebook group for your course • Post assignments • Share updates or changes • Create a Facebook page for a historical figure or topic • Answer questions • Lesson recaps • Invite guest speakers by using Skype, YouTube, or Facebook
- 13. Using Twitter in a Course • Create a hashtag (#HIS103w04) for your course where students can post tweets about the topic. • Ask students questions before a presentation for them to tweet their responses during a presentation. • Post reminders for assignments and tests. • Tweet things that happen in the news and ask students to share their thoughts. • You can have the students create generic accounts for Twitter or Facebook or instead use TodaysMeet for a more secure/private discussion.
- 14. TodaysMeet • It's simpler than Twitter and students don't need email addresses or accounts. You can enter a room without creating an account. • Instructors can create a separate room for each lecture topic and share the shortened link with their class. • Instructors can make a separate TodaysMeet room for each group in advance so their feedback is all in one place.
- 16. • Increased participation • Students who wouldn't normally speak up • Class time is multiplied • Students all tweet responses at the same time rather than waiting for one student to finish speaking • Students who work at a different pace Benefits of a Backchannel
- 17. • Require students to post blogs about the topics they are learning during the course • Ask students to tweet you their thesis statement in 140 characters or less • Create a Flicker photo album for you course and use it for projects/assignments • Give the students a choice of using different social networks to set up groups to collaborate • Ask students to create LinkedIn profiles to create their portfolios and post their work • Allow students to use YouTube to create and post video projects and then ask other classmates to make comments Social Media for an Assignment
- 18. Engaging Learning Activities • Peer reviews • Group work/Collaboration • Google Docs • Blackboard Collaborate break-out groups • All Questions Answered • Break up large readings • Synchronous sessions in Blackboard Collaborate • Poll Everywhere • One-Minute Paper • 3 or 4 questions about the lesson – given at the end of the lesson • Debates • Group Presentations and Role Play • Gamification • Student-created games • Jeopardy
- 19. Visual and Verbal Feedback GoogleDocs is a set of cloud-based collaborative tools: • Word processor • Image editor • Spreadsheet • Slides • Forms and surveys GoogleDocs has a feature for commenting on the text, as well as a chat window on the left of the screen. Talk & Comment extension for Google Chrome browser allows for verbal feedback.
- 21. Benefits of GoogleDocs • Supports all kinds of collaborative learning and writing practices • Can use it for grading and providing feedback • Works in a browser so no Microsoft Word software is needed and eliminates problems with compatibility • Can be made public to allow a real audience, but can also be private
- 22. Gamification Gamification is applying game mechanics and game design principles to motivate people to achieve their goals. Gamification helps to motivate students to move them through and engage them with content. Websites that can assist in creating digital games: flipquiz.me purposegames.com jigsawplanet.com
- 23. The Faculty Center Blog http://facultycenter.blogs. pace.edu/
Editor's Notes
- #2: My name is Ally and I work in the Faculty Center. I support the faculty with course design, Qualtrics (survey building), pedagogy, Quality Matters, and I also manage the digital studio in NYC. If you have any questions after this presentation, you can contact me by email or phone. This webinar will be recorded and posted on our website. Also, please know that these are just some tips for student engagement and may not work for everyone or every class. Also don’t feel overwhelmed by the technology tools that I will present in the webinar today. You don’t need to and actually shouldn’t try to implement all of them for your class. Stick to the ones that will enhance your teaching and that you are comfortable using.
- #4: Engagement is when students make a psychological investment in their education. “student engagement” is predicated on the belief that learning improves when students are inquisitive or interested, and that learning tends to suffer when students are bored or otherwise “disengaged.” So how can we encourage students to be more interested and passionate about what they are learning?
- #5: After the first sentence of give choices: people are more motivated and engaged when they feel they have some kind of choice and control over how they are assessed.
- #6: Incorporate authenticity At the end of slide: An authentic audience is a powerful way to get your students engaged. If a student’s essay or PowerPoint presentation is not of standard quality, then no one will know besides the instructor and perhaps some classmates, so the student may not feel motivated to produce quality work. But if a student knows that many people will be seeing or reading his work, he will likely put more effort into it. This creates accountability and Accountability is very effective at getting students motivated and engaged. Engagement is all about keeping students involved in their learning. And increasing their motivation to learn.
- #8: After 4th point, in class…: In-class time allows for mastery of the content, instead of learning of the content. All of your instructional time is active learning.
- #9: [ONLINE section] Online you are using Blackboard for your course. And blackboard has many features that allow for flipping the classroom to happen. After the first online bullet point: This allows students to figure out the navigation, the format, the structure, and the policies of the course on their own, rather than just reading your instructions, so students are not taking a backseat to the course. You can also create a synchronous collaborate session using BB Collaborate, which is what we are using today to host this webinar. After the last bullet point in online section: The discussion board is an asynchronous area where students are communicating, and in the past it was common for a faculty member to lead the discussion and respond to each student's postings. But the downside of that is a lot of your time is spent on responding to each post and the students are not engaging with each other, and it may shut down the class discussion because students may feel intimidated to respond for fear of how you would respond. So instead assign a student leader who opens the discussion and monitors the postings. And then you would be a silent partner in the discussion board, the students will be more spontaneous with their posts. [Move on to the middle] after the 2nd point in the blue middle: Ask them to identify their strengths and weaknesses. ASK if anyone wants to share how asking about your students background, likes, strengths and weaknesses has benefited or could have benefited. after the 3rd point in the blue middle: There is a tool in Blackboard called Kaltura that allows students and faculty to upload their videos to the course, do a screencapture of their desktops, and also allows them to record themselves as they do a presentation or a speech. And media in Kaltura doesn’t take up any space in your course shell.
- #10: So, those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it.