Essential question Week 4

How can you engage all students?

By assigning group work:

Students generally like to do their work in groups as they can share ideas and learn new ideas and thoughts from their friends.  Teachers can form buddy groups in the beginning of the semester and create project ideas where the entire group is involved.  If the project is done if form of groups every student will have an opportunity to get themselves involved in the work as the teacher is not directly involved.  Google presentation is a great tool for this purpose where students can all work on the same topic from their own homes.

By understanding the needs of variety of students in class:

It is the responsibility of the teacher to analyze the pattern of students in the class and prepare lesson plans accordingly.  If the class has lot of visual learners, then along with presentations, teachers can show videos through you tube or they can make their own videos through animoto.  This will help students to pay more attention in class and will remember the concepts through visual clips .

By asking students to blog and tweet each other:

When students blog about a particular topic in class other students can read it and share their comments on it.  This will help students to express their opinions and ideas about the question asked in class and at the same time, it helps other students to learn new ideas which they never thought of.  Every comment being posted can be given a grade for encouragement.  By creating twitter accounts students can follow one another and get lot of useful information through articles that are posted on web.  Students can be given extra credit points if they share one useful article they found on the web every week.  This will engage them in a way that they do their work but at the same time get extra grades for it.

But, in order to achieve everything said above first of all we need to make sure that all the students present in class are comfortable in using technology.  If the majority of the class is not, then special training sessions can be conducted in school followed by using these tools in class. 

Thus, by encouraging the students , awarding them with extra credit points, by performing collaborative group work and finally by making sure that all students know how to use technology , students can be engaged in the learning process.