#AppleEDULeaderChat 10/27: What are your expert tricks and rewarding treats to fostering student engagement?

Can't wait to connect with the #AppleEDULeaderChat crew!

One of my favorite ways to foster student engagement is to run play workshops with creative platforms such as Keynote, iMovie, or ARMakr. Maybe an animation workshop or an AR workshop introducing how to and then letting students discover and explore. Or for high school, have a GarageBand workshop for exploration before creating music. Then maybe that particular play is woven into soft starts or tinker time for elementary or extra workshop time for older students.

Here are a few play resources created for photo and animation: https://bit.ly/YearofPurposefulPlay

One of my favorite teacher moves when using iPad in the classroom is to let the student lead by AirPlay. Students are immediately glued to the lesson because they see one of their peers leading rather than myself.

A trick for fostering student engagement is to get involved! Student engagement increases when teacher engagement increases. I think the more excited and involved teachers are in the process, the more engaged students are. Students seem most engaged when the teacher is in the middle of the learning with them.

Engagement with technology happens when the tool is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with creativity. Student thinking has no limit as they make original works of art to represent ideas they’re learning in class.

When it comes to fostering student engagement, Keynote is a favorite tool of mine.

Keynote Kaleidoscopes

This coding challenge is all about using a repeated pattern of Keynote shapes as a For Loop to create a kaleidoscope. Look for inspiration around you. Consider what you're learning about or what's interesting. The Keynote shape library has hundreds of images to choose from. Or, you can create your own!

Create your design, use a For Loop to repeat the pattern around a circle, and add animation to turn it into a kaleidoscope.

Thanks Mary & Mike for providing a space in the Community to chat about how engagement interfaces with student learning.

Our high schools participate in the ChallengeSuccess program out of Stanford University that conducts and aggregates a yearly school wide student survey comparing results across participating schools. Student engagement is one focus of the survey. Over several years students have indicated the following on the topic of academic engagement. According to the survey, students feel engaged when:

• they have friends in class
• there are interesting topics
• there are enthusiastic teachers
• there are discussions, debates, experiments, projects, games
• there is new and challenging material
• learning is relevant and authentic to their life 

I’m in the process of interviewing our teachers about what activities, lessons or projects that they implement to foster engagement in their classes. It is helpful for me to gather ideas to share with them from this post.