If you’ve been teaching for the last 3 years, you know that the nature of the game has changed. Technology is becoming more and more apparent in our students’ lives and since being forced to teach remotely for some time. Everyone has become more aware of all the things technology can do since we started teaching with tech.
Unfortunately, there has been a lot of talk among teachers who want to go back to the way things were and teach mostly with paper and pencil. I am here to tell you that you shouldn’t put your laptops and tablets away just yet!
Here are 5 reasons you should continue teaching with tech, despite remote learning coming to an end, so stay with me. You’ll also find strategies to help you with integrating technology better than ever!
Why Teaching with Tech Should Continue
1: Students Know the Basics of Technology
Teachers and students alike have spent the last several months learning and using new technology and websites more so than ever before! Make your life easier in the classroom and harness the new tools that you and your students learned!
Keep that Google Classroom going so you don’t have to have an “absent student” bin. Keep using Nearpod to engage your students in the classroom. Quickly take a pulse of your students’ confidence level with Mentimeter. Why stop using the tools that will make your life easier in the long run?
2: Keep Your Student Engaged
Technology shouldn’t be a reward. It should be something that is used to help keep students engaged in learning. Teaching isn’t lecturing anymore and students learn by doing. Giving them digital devices to help them complete their own research will keep students engaged longer.
Another way you can keep your students engaged is by assigning these Google Sheet Pixel Art activities to them on Google Classroom. Students will love seeing the pictures come to life and still be practicing their math skills.
3: The Future is Technology
I read an interesting statistic from The Donut the other day. The top 10 majors in the US for college were all STEM majors, and the starting salaries for those majors looked pretty competitive. This is where the future is going, so we should be using technology with our students to prepare them for it.
Wondering what The Donut is? It’s an email subscription of news that I get. If you want to check it out here’s my referral link: https://vrlps.co/E4O5D1R/cp
4: Teaches Digital Citizenship and Responsibility
By using and modeling how technology should be used, students learn to be good digital citizens. We know they are using technology for personal purposes, we should also show them that technology is useful for learning purposes too.
Teaching with tech in school teaches them responsibility. They learn to look for appropriate sources, communicate effectively, and even problem-solve when they can’t find what they’re looking for right away!
5: Easily Differentiate Learning
Remember when differentiation was the buzzword of education? That was before “new normal” and “unprecedented times” became the words we hear most often.
Just because the buzzwords are changing, doesn’t mean we should forget the old ones. Differentiation is key now more than ever when teaching our current students. Everyone is on a different level and with programs like IXL, Nearpod, and Prodigy Game, differentiation is so much easier! The websites basically do the differentiating for you.
Have a learner struggling to multiply mixed numbers? Throw up a LearnZillion video with 2 practice problems on Google Classroom. Done.
Want to enrich your higher learners? Let them create a GIF with Google Slides to explain how to multiply mixed numbers. Your students will love using technology for new things!
I hope that after reading this you are more inclined to use technology this year, despite going back to face-to-face instruction. Let’s harness the power of the tech tools you and your students learned!
TLDR? Here is a list of technology-enhanced strategies that you can use in your classroom when you go back to face-to-face instruction:
- Continue to use Google Classroom for absent student work
- Use Nearpod in the Teacher-Paced mode
- Use Mentimeter to gauge for students’ confidence level
- Let students do their own research
- Use LearnZillion, Khan Academy, and IXL to help differentiate
- Enrich students by having them create a GIF of math skills you want them to teach
Thanks for stopping by!
alexandra
