Equip yourself to close the attainment gap
Thomas Courtley
Education Specialist
In many countries a wide number of students are paying the consequences of remote learning during the pandemic, struggling to catch up on a social and academic level. What can you do about it?
Attainment gap widened due to the effects of the pandemic
The impact of the pandemic on education is a widespread global problem. It is difficult to pinpoint its numerous causes. Also young people from relatively affluent families have been affected by social isolation. Yet on average students from disadvantaged backgrounds have been hit the hardest. In general, it has been proven that more is needed from schools and teachers to offer their students the most effective and engaging education technology experience.
What can you do about it with the help of LessonUp?
If wisely used, a digital teaching and learning platform can support you during all phases of your lessons, to stimulate student engagement, and give you a complete overview on how each student is doing. Hereunder we list 5 ways in which LessonUp can help you address this challenge by engaging and monitoring all your students, with all their different personalities & backgrounds.
1. Engage students with interactive features
Research suggests that students relate very well to interactive lessons and exercises, and also enjoy doing so with the help of devices such as laptops, tablets, or their mobile phones. The challenge is to find the ideal combination of in-person and digital interaction, where the two realities support each other.
Engage your students with one or more of the interactive elements offered by LessonUp. They are very easy to implement and use in the classroom. Activate prior knowledge with a mind map, or simply spin our digital spinner to help them introduce themselves. Check out our interactive elements.
2. Provide real-time feedback to students
Almost all students enjoy working in an interactive way, by answering digital quizzes or open questions, looking at a video, or uploading a photo. In LessonUp, their feedback is saved in automatically generated student reports, which are safe and always consultable. In the reports you can write a message to your students related to their answer/s, providing them with feedback, tips, and comments.
For more information, check out this blog article on giving students real-time feedback.
3. Adapt your learning material
With LessonUp, you can easily create several versions of a lesson to share with your students. You can adapt the pace, instructions, and objectives of a lesson. The lesson reports that you receive in LessonUp give you a clear idea on students’ responses to specific lessons. Based on this information, you can customise them with targeted content.
Students have different learning paces. Some are really quick in scanning a lesson and answering questions, while others need more time. When you are introducing a new lesson, you might want to adapt your explanation, the lesson's length, or the way you word learning objectives, making it relevant for all students.
4. Almost all students have a smartphone or a tablet
Even if your school doesn’t provide them with other digital learning devices, almost all young people have a smartphone.
A LessonUp lesson looks great on smartphone. By clicking on a box (or not) you can allow your student to view an entire lesson real-time on their phones, tablets or computers. On the other hand, you can decide to have them participate with their mobiles only during the interactive parts of your lesson, or forward your students an interesting video to view at home. Additionally, you could ask them to upload a picture within a LessonUp slide, and feed it back to you in order to discuss it.
5. Bring actuality in the classroom
If possible, create a link between the topic/chapter you are discussing and actuality. News items, human behaviour, architecture, discussions on forums or social media, well-known films or music are all topics that could interest your students, and promote interesting classroom discussions. Try to create links between what you teach and your students’ worlds.
Actuality needs to find its place also in an educational context, no matter what subject you are teaching. With LessonUp you can easily create lessons that are not based on the syllabus, but on actual events. 👉 What’s going on in this picture?
