Best ways to use Learning Tablets to Engage students at home: A teacher’s perspective
This global pandemic continues to affect each and every aspect of our lives. The education ecosystem too came to a standstill making teachers and parents worried about their students’ academic progression.
Students too seem to be in a state of anxiety and distraction regarding their academic years ahead.
Having recovered from the early shock, schools and NGOs are slowly trying their bit to get back to active teaching and learning. Needless to say, there is now a strong need to supplement live online classes. Students need an efficient digital learning tool at home. Teachers are looking for a set-up that can enable classroom teaching. It should create a safe, non-judgmental, and enjoyable learning environment for the child at home.
That’s where educational tablets like the iPrep Tablets can serve the purpose really well. In times to come, as trends suggest, a number of schools, NGOs, and even state governments will purchase tablets preloaded with digital content for their students just like the iPrep tablets.
However, merely distributing tablets to students isn’t enough. What will be even more important is how would our teachers and educators use these tablets? How will their students for proactive learning?
For over 5 years, at iDream Education, we have been researching how a technology solution should be designed. It should act as an enabler for the teachers to support them in their teaching journey. While at the same time, it builds excitement in the students to learn by connecting learning with their life growth.
We draw experience of having implemented our solution with 1.5 Lakh+ students in 15 states across India. We have come up with some very simple ways in which you can adopt the iPrep learning tablets. This way will ensure the best utilization and impact of using the tablets with your students:
Reinforcement of teachings with curriculum aligned Animated videos:
What we eventually want is for our students to understand all concepts well. They should be able to apply them in the real world. We strongly believe that connecting learning with the real world is an important skill that must be developed in students.
To facilitate that, we have put together, an enjoyable and story-like animated video lesson. Here each topic starts with a real-life connection that students can relate to. And all these video lessons are aligned with the curriculum of your school.
Therefore you can supplement your teaching by guiding students to watch animated videos that are related to the same topic. This way students will be able to connect with what you are teaching. They will also retain it for a much longer time.
Fun at home:
The key is to keep students inquisitive and curious about upcoming classes. So, you can instruct students to watch some practical project-making videos. You can then ask them to follow those to make their own project models that need to be shown in the next classes.
By doing this, students will remain excited on a continual basis and will eagerly look forward to each and every consecutive learning session.
Read books:
What fun it used to be to hear stories from our grandparents. While those are still moments to cherish, we can try to recreate the same environment for our students by encouraging them to read books on their iPrep tablets.
The iPrep Learning Tablets are also preloaded with a huge collection of digital books including stories, poems, comics, biographies and much more, you can also refer your students to other reading apps and online sources of books. You can also record a story and send it to your students. How amazing it would be for your students to listen to you telling them a bedtime story.
Moreover, you can also consider scheduling a book reading session once a week. You can ask students to each read a paragraph from a book OR even record their own videos sharing what they learned from a particular book.
100% mastery over topics:
Coming back to some serious academic goals. Both you and us will agree on the fact that every child is unique and may take different amounts of time to build mastery over a concept. But till now, there wasn’t any tool available to you which could assist you to understand each student better and then guide them with personalised feedback. Well, now you can.
Most tablet-based solutions including our iPrep Tablets come with assessments on each and every topic which can be taken up again and again till the time a student masters it. We are therefore taking away time and marks as a factor from the learning.
You can always guide students and make them understand that failing or passing a test should not be the ultimate result. Mastering or becoming perfect at a topic is of the highest significance. This will not only help students to learn with zero gaps but also help them attain a positive attitude towards learning making them believe nothing is impossible.
Also read: Can Educational Tablets help in covering historical Learning gaps
Get students familiar with the real world:
If there is a chance that students can get connected to the internet, the teachers can assign them some real-world problems while asking them to find the best possible solutions to share during the next online class. This helps students to get acquainted with real-life problems, builds an attitude to face them whatsoever, and even develops their research skills.
Learn with games:
All work and no play make jack a dull boy. The good news is that this proverb does not really stand true with iPrep tablets as these devices already make learning so much fun for students! Having said so, you will find a number of simulation games with educational value online and you can guide your students to play such games.
Centralized Reports:
If you can take out some time from your schedule, you must refer to the reports section. In iPrep Learning Tablets, for example, we capture student-wise usage and learning data. These are available for you to see on your teacher’s app or on an online reporting dashboard.
You can access these reports very easily, keep track and provide personalized guidance to each and every student.
If a student is scoring low consistently, the teacher can effortlessly analyze the difficulty being faced by the student. He/She can then allot specialized lessons or assignments to improve his performance and better outcome.
Some international research studies on tablet-based learning show that due to speedy advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), educational tablets too seem to have the potential to work interactively with other computers, interactive boards, and many such electronic devices. This has resulted in them being perceived as a major educational tool. It has been found that efficient usage of such technologies and the internet in education is sure to enable learners to keep pace with the latest changes and developments in the world. (Uzunboylu & Ozdamli, 2011)
This gives another good reason why teachers can consider learning tablets as the next big thing in terms of education. It will cover home learning as well as connecting teachers and students at a whole new level.
These are just some of the ways we have seen being adopted by thousands of teachers in our network who have also seen consistent improvement in their students.
The story of Sonia Ma’am
Before we end, we would love to share with you an inspiring story of Sonia Mam. She is a Science teacher in a government school in Rohtak, Haryana, and is using personalized iPrep tablets with her students. The transformation she has observed in her students is nothing short of remarkable.
We hope her journey, her story will inspire you.
With iPrep tablets, there are infinite possibilities you can explore. While we have mentioned some above, we would love to know from you how you are using technology to connect and engage with your students at home.
Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below. Or you can write to us at [email protected] and we would love to feature your efforts on our platform.
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