Week 6: Techniques to engage students

Tell me and I will forget. Teach me, I will understand. Involve me, I will remember.” This proverb has been my motto, especially while I am teaching. I think this is the rationale why an interactive classroom which engages students in the learning is more effective than a one-way classroom. Nevertheless, engaging and motivating students can be challenging, particularly in a class of 30 students with different levels of English.

This week’s articles focus on how to enhance learning by engaging students. Frankly, it is not a brand new thing for me. I always involve my students with activities, role plays, discussions, presentation. However, I do acquire some precious techniques to blend in. I like the interactive lecture techniques about “Think-Pair-Share” for students to share their response to the teacher question, “Concept Test” to show student conceptual understanding, and “One Minute Write” for students to state the most difficult part of the lesson. I also love the method of disseminating the lesson content before the class in the form of PowerPoint documents via email or through Dropbox. Recently there is a trend of “Flipping your class”, a new method of teaching in which students watch the lessons at home, communicating with peers and teachers via online discussion while concept engagement takes place in the classroom with the help of teachers (video clip:  http://vimeo.com/70893101;  http://youtu.be/iQWvc6qhTds )                  Moreover, I learn how to unleash the advance power of PowerPoint, utilize Concept Test, Blank Slide and Hyperlinks to actively engage students during the slide show.

Regarding the Project Step, we are asked to implement the technology tools to solve the problem in our class. As a matter of fact, I have done it weeks before. At first, when I introduced the tech-tools to them, I could see some doubt on most of the students, due to the workload of their core subjects or difficulties to stay connected to internet. But, I told them my school-time experience about practicing speaking in front of the mirror, which would be much more unfavorable than what they need to do with the aid of technology today then I asked them to visit my blog as well as my audio podcast in Video Boom. I managed to talk them into it. They were enthusiastic and excited. Now they have their own blogs and start to write their reflections about the class. They also have their accounts with Audio Boom and began to record their voice regarding the reflection written in blog. Some of them have tried to link their audio podcasts to their blogs. They are quite happy to be able to use the tools to express themselves in English and I observe some of the shy students start to speak English. In the event, I tell myself that I have to bring this to the next level by setting a virtual classroom for my students to stay connected with peers and teacher outside the class. The website that can help is Nicenet which is free and easy to access.