It can be tough for teachers to get pupils excited about learning in a face-to-face environment, let alone when everyone’s working separately. Teachers across the country have had to adapt and implement remote learning strategies to keep students on task. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to keep students engaged while they’re learning from home. For starters, treat parents as an ally - keep them in the loop wherever possible. And if you introduce a new approach, start small. If students are enthusiastic, grow it over time. Effective tech is also a good place to start.
Pandemic or no pandemic, it’s the question every teacher has pondered many, many times over:
‘Just how do I keep their attention?’
Educational continuity plays a significant role. Uncertain, stop-start learning can severely hinder academic performance. For teachers, it’s harder to create a sense of engagement, wondering how long it’ll be before the world gets put on pause again. And for students, disrupted lessons can cause them to lose track. That’s why keeping education going, no matter what’s going on in the wider world, is so critical.
A lot depends on the learning environment itself. Without a physical classroom, and the important non-verbal cues that meeting in-person can provide, managing students’ focus now requires a different set of solutions.
As you’re reading this, it’s entirely possible that pupils and teachers are working in traditional physical classrooms. But equally, they might be working in something closer to a hybrid model, with some pupils in the physical classroom but others at home. And then you’ve got the purely remote model, which sees students and teachers united only in digital space.
Taking into account this new, hybrid learning environment, teachers the world over have had to adapt and implement remote learning strategies to keep students on task. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to do it, and some useful rules of thumb for making learning as seamless as possible.
For starters, educators can make an effort to keep parents onside (for younger students, of course). Treat them as an ally. Tell them what’s happening, be transparent and approachable. Parents already worry enough about their children (even more so in the COVID-era), so teachers should reassure them that they don’t need to worry and help them to embrace these new ways of learning.
Because the fact is, school isn’t like it used to be. Remote learning has been gaining popularity for quite some time. It’s true that the transformation has happened more quickly than people expected, but modernizing education means trying to do things differently. Trying new approaches. Making things feel fresh.
Finding the right technology will make a huge difference for keeping students engaged. That’s why Lenovo Smart Classroom solutions have combined hardware, software and services to offer a comprehensive portfolio of educational tools. This smarter technology helps teachers to keep the whole class involved, whatever the learning environment.
For example, take Lenovo’s premium all-in-one meeting room system, the ThinkSmart Hub. Allowing students and teachers alike to join high quality video meetings and share content with a single touch, it’s an ideal collaboration device for every kind of learning space, whether a small classroom or a larger lecture hall.
And what about students connecting from home? Lenovo Winbooks and Chromebooks are affordable, secure, versatile, easy to manage and – most importantly of all – they’re fast, which means no student should be left behind as the lessons progress.
There’s also classroom management platforms, such as LANSchool, which helps teachers to monitor their students’ browsing activities, push content for lessons, and encourage active participation whether one-to-one or as part of a group discussion.
These Lenovo solutions, all of which are purpose-built for the education sector, really help teachers ‘come alive’ in the digital environment ― as they would in a real-world classroom ― giving them the ability to virtually recreate the classroom experience for remote students.
Now the role of teacher can evolve into something resembling an ‘animated storyteller’. This is the kind of dynamic learning environment that keeps students engaged and hungry to learn wherever they are, with exciting new methods and opportunities for solving that age-old problem: “how do I keep their attention?”
For more information about Lenovo’s Smart Classroom solutions, visit our Education homepage.
