6 Ways to Use Edtech in Classrooms for Effective Lessons

Edtech in classrooms gives us the leverage to time education to the most efficient and effective time of the day for students, and analyse students’ learning behavior to plan lessons, so that learning can be effective. Old school education is giving way to more informed way of instruction?we can each student’s performance and accordingly alter the way we teach.

Today, we have access to tools that help us deliver lessons and assignments to students, auto-mark assignments, create or curate lessons, tests and activities, analyse students? learning and performance, and plan lessons and academic year to get the best results. We have to be equipped with the new way of teaching and learning.

In this article, we have divided the delivery of a lesson in six stages, and have explained how Edtech in classrooms can be used at each stage to ensure that students understand each concept thoroughly and in real-life contexts.

Following are the six steps of delivering a lesson, and how Edtech in classrooms can help enhance them:

1. Flipped learning (through Google classroom)

Flipped learning is a way of teaching in which the learning content is made available to students outside the classroom, so that they can study a concept in advance before it is taken up by the teacher. Concept-related activities are taken up in the classroom, instead of traditional lessons.

You can assign reading material, videos and other media to students to study a concept before they come to the classroom. This lets students study at concept at their own pace, at a time that suits them best.

Tools used:

• You can use Google classroom to give access to reading material to each student. You can read more about using Google classroom to manage a class in our other article.
• If your schools has subscribed to video content from websites like BrainPop, Pixelsed, and Click View, then you can ask the students to go online at home and watch relevant videos for the concept, before you teach the lesson.

2. Formative online assessment

In the classroom, before you start teaching the concept, you can test how much a student already knows about the concept from the reading or video material that you assigned to them.

Give an online test to assess their knowledge. An online test can be auto-marked and it gives instant feedback on weak and strong knowledge areas of the students in your class, so that you can focus on teaching the concepts that most students are lagging on.

Tools used:

• Again you can use Google Classroom to create your assignments and assign tests to students. Google Classroom tools auto-mark your tests, so you get immediate result on students? performance.
• Survey Monkey is another tool to create questionnaires. The answers are immediately summarised into data that can be analysed, so that you can decide which concepts to focus on in the classroom. This tool is traditionally used to conduct research, but works as good to take an online test.
• You can also use Moodle platform to create and assign quizzes, and analyze result.

For these auto-marking tools to be used in the class, each student needs access to a computer or a digital device.

Otherwise, it’s best to take a quick offline multiple-choice test to assess the knowledge level of the students in the classroom.

3. Edtech in classrooms for teaching and activities

Once you have decided on the areas of more and moderate focus in the classroom, you can use offline and online resources to explain the concepts to your students, and you can take up activities, so that students can learn to apply the concept to real-life scenarios.

One way to explain a concept is to deliver it verbally or through media content, and another way is to take up activities with students.

Teaching: When you are delivering a concept to your students, modulate the lesson to a way that matches students? understanding. Use examples and anecdotes to get the message across, as it’s much easier to relate to real-life scenarios.

Activities: Do an activity or project to demonstrate the concept in the real-world scenario. Activities can take the form of experiments, games, class projects, etc. You can visit websites like WikiHow, Makerspaces.org, Instructables.com to select relevant activities for any subject.

4. Discussion and troubleshooting

Troubleshooting students? queries is very important. After undertaking in-class activities, encourage students to ask questions related to the concept that they might have.

Also, promote sharing of knowledge and discussion by creating discussion groups. You can ask each group to create a collective summary of the lesson.

Again, you can use Google Classroom to encourage the students of a class to post questions and answers to others? questions, during or post-school hours.

5. Post-lesson assessment

Take another test to assess the understanding of the students after a lesson is complete in the class. Use online or offline assessment tools, as per availability.

Analyse the performance of the students to understand their weak and strong areas.

6. Assign self-study material

Assign learning material as per the results of the Post-lesson assessment. Select videos, interactives or reading material focussing on the weak areas of all or individual students. Assign the study material to students to study outside the classroom.

These six steps break the learning process into easy-to-monitor stages. It’ll help you plan each step to get the best result.

This process of blended learning gives the baton of learning to students?they can study at their own convenience and pace. Teachers can focus on identifying which students lag where, and enable them to cover the lag through class discussions and activities.

Also, Edtech in classrooms or outside enhances the effectiveness of each instructional step mentioned above, and it makes learning efficient.

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