Teachers play a crucial role in the successful use of edtech in the classroom, especially now, when every classroom is either hybrid or virtual. Those who manage to achieve great results understand the importance of finding the right edtech, align it with students’ learning objectives, don’t overlook the hardware side of edtech, and are active in their edtech communities.
Edtech alone does not replace teachers’ work, and it doesn’t automatically improve the student learning experience; but when used to enhance the work of educators and to improve the quality and quantity of educational content, learners will thrive — either in the hybrid classroom or in the virtual one.
With the job to provide entertainment to people who can switch a channel any time they get bored, talk-show hosts know how to gain their viewers’ attention. There is no reason that educators can’t adapt some of these techniques, such as the games they play with their guests, for the classroom.
The effects of confinement and isolation are already beginning to show. Public health specialists worn about the new epidemic of mental health issues caused by isolation. Pets (even virtual) might be the help we need! Let’s make our online classes pet-friendly and help our students become more empathetic and more socially engaged.
Designing personalized learning paths for students is still a work in progress, with so many variables that affect the degree of personalization. As education technologies develop in this direction, educators will be able to improve their work further and achieve better results
2020 made us realize how things could change in the blink of an eye. But there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. We are still teachers, still doing what we know best, but in very different conditions. However, let’s try to end this year on a positive note, with some teacher memes:
The hexagonal approach to learning is worth considering. Using the visual shape with six sides, teachers can create successful learning experiences, and students benefit from a clear structure to assign to the content they study by connecting hexagons that include different notions or aspects to form new ideas.
Myths have a way to infiltrate our collective knowledge because they appeal to our intuition, become very popular, get overhyped by being repeated over and over. Shedding light on some popular education myths guides us towards much better, evidence-based practices. So let’s explore some popular educational myths that we’d rather forget about in 2021:
Teaching is a wonderful job that is under constant change. That’s why it’s paramount to understand the capabilities, benefits, and opportunities of edtech, ask for the support you need to embrace edtech and be confident in your abilities to implement it successfully in your classroom, whether online or face-to-face.
Staying onscreen all day may not be the solution we hoped for, unless we can focus more on transforming that time into quality interactions that increase physical movement and mental engagement than on extending the minutes students are watching the screen.
While all students are different and require a certain degree of individualized attention, each of them can change the way they think about success and failure, replacing inaccurate and unhelpful beliefs with more realistic ones. Optimism isn’t about being positive all the time but learning how to recover from setbacks and being more at ease with challenging tasks.
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