Education Archives | Page 8 of 8

3 Ways You Can Encourage Reflective Learning In Your Classrooms

Posted on October 2, 2018September 21, 2022 by user

It’s never too early to prioritize reflective learning in your classroom or online classes. To boost your student’s learning, incorporating early and frequent reflections can make a big difference. According to Peter Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel’s book Make it Stick, “reflection can involve several activities…that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visually and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time).” In addition, frequent reflection brings greater awareness of the skills learned and helps solidify learning experiences.

Setting time for students to reflect and analyze their new knowledge frequently allows them to digest the learning objectives and activities and make it their own, whether through processes and experiences associated with retrieval, elaboration, or generation.

This is also an excellent time for teachers to identify areas where students need more support. Try the following tools and suggestions to help students document, verbalize and share their reflection responsibly:

They can then customize it as their learning blog. By keeping a reflective journal in this way, students can actively consider the real-world implications of their learning. Scaffold their reflection by using the following guiding questions:

What are the most interesting discoveries I made today? (It can be about global issues, applicable skills, themselves, new ideas, the community or others)
What were some of the most challenging moments today? How did I overcome them? What did I learn from this?
What useful advice did I receive from my peers?

Introduce a learning tool that is familiar to your students.

For example, Flipgrid (https://flipgrid.com/) is like Instagram Stories or Snapchat. Students can create short video blogs (vlogs) and post them into a group they make through your teacher account. Please encourage them to verbalize their new knowledge and align it with what they already know.

Start a forum by posting a statement of inquiry related to the topic/unit on Google Classroom.

This creates a focused and live discussion in and out of class and provides a platform for students who may be less vocal in class to participate.

Give these activities a try, and let us know how you get on. We’d also love to hear any exciting tools and techniques you have used to incorporate reflection into your lessons. Let us know here.

Setting Up Your Own Makerspace

Posted on August 10, 2018October 20, 2022 by user

Whether your school has already set up its Makerspace and wants to develop it further or is considering setting one up, this article in EdSurge by Parker Thomas a school consultant is a helpful guide.

Three points stand out to us:

Start with the learning outcomes: “Define the skills, knowledge and habits that kids will learn or develop in your space.”
Develop a community: “Define the culture for the space.”
Make it cross-curricular: “Based on the culture and the desired skills, knowledge and abilities, determine appropriate integration points in the rest of your curriculum and the life of the school.”

While you are setting up your Makerspace, start engaging your students with a free Makerspace Empowerment Program Kit from Particle!

Teacher Interview: Shasta Quilala from The Philippines

Posted on August 10, 2018September 21, 2022 by user

“Our partnership with BSD has, in two years time, provided us with threefold gain in the areas of:

Student Engagement – Their easy to use and navigate platform as well as the unique and unusual projects have seen us gain an increase of at least 50% overall across those subjects using their material as compared to those without. This engagement has also led to better performance in terms of scoring in tests and activities on the part of the student, and much lesser preparation and checking time on the part of the teacher, which in turn allows us to focus on the learning experience itself.

Professional Development – The computational and design thinking principles embedded into the curriculum drive our teachers towards a more learner centric approach in practice, not just in principle. They have also been able to provide us with real time, personalized support that have enabled even our new faculty to maximize the use of the program within their classrooms.

Organizational Growth – Our partnership with BSD has given us a competitive edge over other schools in the market and a unique value proposition that has increased our enrollment. It has also been an integral part of our developing a future ready, future smart curriculum and learning approach that we have used in order to gain accreditation for our programs at GSC.”

– Alessandra Valino, Vice President of Good Samaritan Colleges, The Philippines

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Since the Summer 2017 started, we have been working with an amazing school that decided to fully integrate technology education into their subjects and classrooms. We spoke to Shasta Quilala, a teacher from Good Samaritan Colleges who felt empowered learning technology education with BSD.

1. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what subject you teach?

My name is Shasta, I am from Dagupan City, Pangasinan. I am a teacher at Good Samaritan Colleges, located at Cabanatuan City and I teach Technology and Livelihood Education (T.L.E.) for Grades 9 and 10. I also teach Computing for Grade 10 with cores Database and Visual Basic Programming.

2. What has kept you busy over the last few months?

The past few months have been very busy because our school decided to run our first ever Summer Camp (Back in March)! With the help of our teachers and the BSD Education team, our students had an in-depth, hands on experience with technology. We received a lot of positive feedback and reaction from the students, even how they felt they were famous techies. They even surpassed our levels of achievement, learning technology education through BSD Online!

When the school year started, we also ran a pre-learning session for technology teachers of Grades 7-10 to introduce HTML and CSS and get students started to help prepare them in using code across different subject areas, like English and Social Studies. It was a bit challenging at first because for some students, it had been the first time they ever used a computer. It was very satisfying and gratifying for us to see our students interests in coding, they could even code better than us!

3. What cool things are coming up in the next few months?

Technology education is being fully integrated into our curriculums this year. I am one of many excited teachers! Some of my colleagues have already started creating their lesson plans with BSD’s integration.

It is wonderful to see that teachers are starting to be more fond of technology and adopting it into their classrooms. They are starting to see code as their partner and tool for teaching, it makes learning more conducive and interesting. We hope it will be as successful as the recent Summer Camp held.

4. What do you want to do next in bringing tech into your classroom for your students?

As a technology teacher, I want to engage students in coding and robotics more, they are very powerful tools for everyone. BSD is a stepping stone for all Filipino students to come out of their shells and develop their tech journeys, we know and can see that there is a lot of potential. As their teacher, I am ready to mold and guide them towards the competitive world outside the four corners of our classrooms.

Students can learn how to build and share their website using My First Website on BSD Online.

Introduce a learning tool that is familiar to your students.

Start a forum by posting a statement of inquiry related to the topic/unit on Google Classroom.