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TEACHING TODAY

How Edtech Tools Can Humanize Learning – and Help All Learners Thrive

How does using edtech in the classroom create a more meaningful and personal learning journey for your students? Find out in our #EdpuzzleReads Twitter chat with author Stacey Roshan!

Roshan Blog Post Illustration

Illustration by Edpuzzle Staff

Being an introvert and a perfectionist as a student informed Stacey Roshan’s commitment to make a change in her own classroom. In her book Tech With Heart: Leveraging Technology to Empower Student Voice, Ease Anxiety, & Create Compassionate Classrooms, Roshan shares how she successfully infused empathy & compassion by intentionally integrating educational technology into her lesson design. She and her ideas were the recent subject of our #EdpuzzleReads Twitter chat.

Connecting and building up students has been Stacey Roshan’s mission. Sure, she’s a dedicated math teacher invested in student academic success; her flipped classroom and online teaching models attest to that.

Over the years, however, Roshan recognized that teaching students and reaching students are two entirely different things.

As she notes, “Imagine a classroom where we could empower every voice in that room — where we celebrated the ideas of not only the students who raised their hands but where every individual had a platform to make their thoughts seen.”

Roshan’s firm belief in the power of technology to help students find their voice, build their confidence, and take ownership of their learning creates, she affirms, compassionate classrooms where both teachers and students feel empowered.

How can we help our quietest students make their ideas heard in the classroom?

The start of the school year is, admittedly, hectic. And amid the chaos of expectation, explanation, and exploration, it’s not uncommon for our more reticent students to hide in plain sight.

Technology, however, provides opportunities to hear from them. Daily check-in surveys, interactive lesson platforms, sticky notes, and peer-to-peer learning are all excellent ways to integrate technology to ensure you hear from every one of your students.

How can technology help us connect with students on a deeper or more personal level?

While there are those who would argue that technology tends to make us less connected, Roshan asserts that the variety of educational platforms instead offers students a myriad of opportunities to communicate their individual needs.

For example, Roshan endorses Edpuzzle as a convenient platform to create a comprehensive lesson that includes (1) a voice note introduction, (2) a check-in, (3) video-specific questions, and (4) a space for students to ask questions, reflect, and explore:

How do you ensure strong communication with parents so that they can become part of your trusted team from early in the year?

Imagine a three-legged stool with a broken leg: Is it balanced? Is it stable? Does it fulfill its purpose? Not so much.

And that’s why Roshan whole-heartedly advocates building a durable relationship among parents, students, and teachers; each leg of that stool reinforces the overall objective of establishing trust and guaranteeing success.

Getting parents onboard, Roshan contends, is the first step in establishing trust and encouragement. As such, she recorded a parent video to explain her flipped model, the expectations of it, and most refreshingly, the why behind it.

Roshan encourages teachers to be transparent with parents and to keep them updated with an accessible resource hub, digital newsletters, weekly emails, or other available tech tools.

How might you reimagine your lesson design or classroom environment to better encourage all students to participate?

Compassion goes a long way in helping to generate confident students. By creating safe learning environments for all students to find their voice, we can assist in building their confidence; and again, it’s technology that facilitates that goal.

“A tool,” Roshan maintains, “is only a tool until it is part of a solution.”

In other words, a willing acceptance to re-envision a new way of doing things to create a beneficial learning environment is powerful and transformative.

Whether it’s implementing choice boards, flipping, asking students for feedback, executing a badge system to gamify learning, or simply offering introverted students the opportunity to respond in a digital format creates trust, builds courage, and sets the stage for self-determination.

Empathy. Compassion. Reflection.

Technology used with these intentions in mind metamorphoses a classroom into a community.

To learn more about the role technology plays in supporting classroom equity, check out the hashtag #EdpuzzleReads on Twitter, watch Roshan’s TedED talk, visit her website, or purchase her book.