Ed Tech Blog
Generation Z—those born after the mid-to-late 1990s—are digital natives who have grown up in a world of smartphones, social media, and constant connectivity. To engage this dynamic generation, education needs to be as interactive, collaborative, and tech-savvy as they are. Enter game-based learning, a potent aspect of educational technology (EdTech), perfectly suited for engaging Gen Z. Let's explore why.
1. Immersive Experiences:
With game-based learning, education transcends traditional lecture-based instruction. Games can take students on historical adventures, scientific explorations, or mathematical quests, captivating them with immersive experiences, storylines, and challenges.
2. Boosts Engagement:
Games by their nature are engaging, and applying that to education has the same effect. Game-based learning mixes fun with instruction, keeping Gen Z learners invested in their educational journeys, thereby improving their concentration and intrinsic motivation.
3. Enhances Retention:
Game-based learning promotes active participation, pushing students to apply the information they've learned to solve problems or reach in-game goals. This process improves knowledge retention and understanding of complex subjects.
4. Encourages Collaboration:
Multiplayer educational games foster teamwork. Gen Z, known for valuing collaboration and social consciousness, can work together, share strategies, and learn from each other, promoting a healthy, collaborative learning environment.
5. Instant Feedback:
Most educational games provide immediate feedback, making learners understand their mistakes right away and learn from them. This immediate reinforcement is effective in bettering concepts, improving skills, and promoting a growth mindset.
6. Develops Essential Skills:
Aside from subject-specific content, game-based learning also promotes the development of essential 21st-century skills. These include problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, digital literacy, and adaptability, all within a low-risk environment.
7. Personalized Learning:
Game-based learning naturally offers personalized instruction. A student progresses through the game at their pace, tackling challenges that match their current level, creating a personalized, self-paced learning journey.
8. Promotes Inclusivity:
Game-based learning...
In our present digital era, data has become a fundamental element for smart decision-making and strategic planning across all sectors, including education. As an invaluably effective tool, data analytics in education has the capacity to dissect and analyze complex data sets, revealing significant insights regarding student performance, teaching methods, and curriculum efficiency. This investigation takes a deeper look into the vast and transformative impacts of data analytics upon the world of education.
1. The Advancement of Personalized Learning:
Data analytics has revolutionized the way we approach education by allowing for a highly customized learning experience. By analyzing complex algorithms from data sets, educators can tailor curriculum and learning paths that cater to individual learning capabilities, pace and performance. This breakthrough in adaptive learning provides an effective way to enhance the teaching process and offers students a more rewarding and personally tailored learning experience. Moreover, personalized attention to student needs has the potential to foster greater student engagement, thereby promoting an increased retention of information.
2. Proficient Tracking of Student Progress:
Data analytics sheds light on student progress over fluctuating periods, offering an unparalleled insight into student development. Not only does this help educators pinpoint specific areas where a student may...
Read more: Breaking Down the Transformative Impact of Data Analytics on Education
Short-form video and social media content is arguably the dominant source of communication for many young people today. With the rise of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram reels, students today consume exorbitant amounts of content. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey revealed “Almost half of US teenagers aged 13-17 say they are online ‘almost constantly’”. This raises concerns among educators about media literacy and whether students possess the skills to understand how social media is constructed. Because of this, secondary educators may consider integrating social media content creation as part of student assessment. One tool to help empower student creators is Canva.
Canva is growing in popularity among individuals, teams, and a wide range of industries as a tool for constructing professional communications. The site offers design capabilities so anyone can create products from logos to presentations to social media with ease.
Canva for Education is loaded with resources and tutorials to help teachers and students alike. The site has continually evolved over the past few years to meet the needs of remote teaching and learning. One stellar communications platform that they offer is their talking presentations. The design and template library offers teachers eye-catching aesthetics that are bound to...
Read more: Using Canva to Empower the Next Generation of Content Creators
Standardized testing is meant to give an unbiased report of every student’s learning progress which in turn makes the scores comparable. Although currently, standardized tests have become anything but standardized. In this post we will go through reasons why standardized testing has become the bane of students, we will also talk about some alternatives to standardized testing that you as a teacher can apply in the classroom, and finally, we will talk about how technology can help students perform better at standardized testing.
What’s Wrong with the Way We Do Things Currently?
If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Many people go with that adage for most things in life but there are many cons when it comes to standardized testing that you really need to pay attention to.
Teachers are meant to teach students and anything straying from the most efficient teaching in the classroom is a step in the wrong direction. When standardized testing is introduced in the classroom, more time is spent preparing the tests rather than preparing for lessons.
When everything a student does hinges on the test results being good, it can cause students to be stressed. This was even more pronounced during the pandemic...
Classrooms around the country are gravitating towards Book Creator as a tool to give voice, design authority, and ease of sharing to students and educators alike. With over 100 million books created on the platform, it’s clear that Book Creator’s intuitive platform and educator-friendly features provide an asset to K-12 classrooms.
Essentially, Book Creator is a content creation tool specializing in eBooks. Like many design platforms, Book Creator offers a free and paid version, depending on your needs and budget. Teachers can create eBooks for students to access and read during a lesson, or students can create their own books for assessments and demonstration of learning. The platform offers a plethora of templates ranging in comic book style to a more sophisticated magazine aesthetic for developing young writers looking to add something dynamic to their portfolio.
While there are downloading and printing capabilities to create permanent artifacts for teachers and students, most Book Creator users take advantage of the audio, visual, and hyperlink opportunities for interactive digital products. The site and app’s bank of shapes, graphics, and fonts takes off some of the design pressure, but users can also enjoy importing their own photographs, audio, and video to customize their...
Read more: Book Creator Empowers Educators and Students to Share with Pride
Social-Emotional Learning is gaining momentum in schools worldwide. This educational method is meant to be integrated into the curricula to provide teachers and parents with tools to support the mental health and well-being of students. Research on SEL shows telling evidence of improved academic performance and behaviors among students.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a leading organization dedicated to making Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) part of education, defines SEL as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”
The organization identifies five core competencies that comprise SEL, which are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. All five are critical for the success of students in and outside the classroom. While there are multiple ways to integrate SEL into the curricula in traditional ways, many apps, games, and web resources can make SEL more engaging and effective for students.
Here is a list of excellent tools and resources that will help you address the five core competencies...
Read more: Helpful Online Tools to Teach Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)