As expected, texting was the top activity of cell phone using teens with taking and sharing pictures, playing music, and recording and exchanging videos also being popular uses.
How can we leverage the use of texting in our classrooms to maximize student engagement and learning?
When educators leverage these types of informal learning by giving agency to the students to use their mobile technologies and by providing the structure and skills for their use within more formal educational settings, motivation and learning are increased.
Yet so many teachers prohibit and collect phones when you come into class. This is something administrators can encourage a shift in.
fl ow activities have an optimal level of challenge— goals are neither too easy to attain, nor too diffi cult, for that indi-vidual participant. Optimizing challenge means that the participant has to stay fully engaged (not too easy), yet keep attaining enough small successes along the way to feel a sense of mastery (not too hard). Second, fl ow activities provide abundant, rapid feedback, so that it’s immediately clear whether one’s actions are having the de-sired effect. Abundant feedback encourages continued engagement as the participant quickly learns how to adjust his or her responses for better results
To got "flow" in an online course, we need to model gaming with hard, but not too hard work with lots of positive feedback.
there is overlap between game play and engaged learning, with both being characterized by multiple attempts, the ability to overcome early failure, intrinsic interest in the “story” (be that course material or game narrative), and pursuit of a clear set of attainable objectives.
Clearly stated - if learning becomes more similar to gaming, there will be deeper learning.
Similarly, when we praise and encourage students— which we should be doing frequently— we must watch our language, being sure to cite specifi c things we liked about their work and/or the effort put forth, rather than making global statements about how good they are at the subject or skill.
This is such a true mind shift for most teachers and parents. It requires rephrasing to discuss effort rather than the product itself.
For one, students are less in-clined to work themselves into a frenzy of anxiety and avoidance when they are working with smaller, more manageable tasks. They also get more opportunities for feedback, which helps refocus them if they’re off track, and, if they are on the right track, gives doses of effi cacy- boosting encouragement.
This is key. In our "gaming" class, we were given a range of points that would earn us a specific grade. We knew clearly what was expected and there is a window of time to complete it in which helps build positive feelings about the class.
Setting up lots of briefer conversations as well (e.g., weekly topic discussions) that open and close on specifi c dates is another anti- procrastination strategy.
The key here is brief. In our busy work worlds, it takes hours to read, synthesize, and restate on a forum. If posts were limited to three -five sentences or an opinion on something, then that would be one way to keep students engaged.
but it’s possible to create an atmosphere of autonomy by giving students some choices and using wording that frames them as free agents.
Student voice and choice are mandatory for a successful course!
Teachers and parents foster mindset simply by how they talk to students about their per for mance. Insidiously, positive comments can be the worst offenders for pushing students into a fi xed mind-set.
Teachers and parents have so much power to grow or stunt the growth of a child's mindset.
In the growth mindset, it’s effort, not inherent abil-ity, that is the main explanation for why some people succeed and some don’t.
There's so much new information about growth mindset and hot you have to "grow it." It's not something one has or doesn't have.
One strategy is presenting grades in a way that is “informational” rather than “controlling”— advice that makes sense in light of the motivational power of autonomy and perceived choice.1
This is where profiency-based learning comes into the picture.
Positive habits, then, are a kind of behavioral “safety net” that can keep us from falling too far when we’re depleted.
So very true but those habits have to be taught and reinforced to be effective!
Self- control is a limited resource— we can keep it up for only so much time before it fails, a psychological pro cess known as ego depletion.
This is so opposite what we've been taught growing up! No wonder it's hard at the end of the day to "go back to schoolwork" when you're exhausted after a long day!
If one thing emerges from de cades of psychology research on moti-vation, it’s that there is no single, universal motivating force. Rather, theorists concur that any given behavior on any given occasion re-fl ects a combination of multiple contributing factors.
This is inspiring and freeing, there is no "magic bullet" for motivation, it's a combination of actions.
And how are we supposed to translate that inspiration factor into a virtual environment— where we can’t rely on all the normal social signals to convey enthusiasm, approval, and encouragement?
A simple e-mail does that. In other classes I've taken we'd receive e-mails from the instructor if they noticed an assignment wasn't in. It was always a caring, thoughtful e-mail which spurred me on to submit them earlier than normal because it felt like the instructor cared.
what we are motivated to do, or not do— stem from a complex interplay between what we feel and what we believe. In par tic u lar, we’re motivated by what we believe about our own capabilities, how those capabilities compare to other people’s capa-bilities, and how our capabilities allow us to exert infl uence over the environment.
This is so important in order to instill the drive for students to achieve even when they believe they can't. In my experiences in poor schools, the students can't believe they CAN do it. When we show them that others like them have, they begin to believe maybe then can.
This tongue- in- cheek characterization shows how having a central mission powerfully motivates game players. Once they buy into the mission, the sky is the limit, moti-vationally speaking.
The biggest motivator is true purpose. If we could engage students in learning in school this way, we'd have real growth in our schools and in their future.
Online educators who use discussion boards successfully estimate that their interaction with students can be as much as three times the interaction with face-to-face students, and that peer-to-peer interaction is even many times more than that.
This wasn't surprising! It does seem like I spend much more time interacting online than I ever did in F2F classes. I always learn so much from my colleagues in class.
Allow for some flexibility in student-generated topics.You’ll find that it often makes good sense to set all major discussion topic areas in advance; however, you may also want to leave room (on the board and in your class schedule) for student-generated topics, which will increase motivation and support a learner-centered climate.
This really helps engage the students which automatically increases their learning!