Applications for Learning Engagement
- Charles Shewell
- Jul 18, 2022
- 2 min read
3 Mobile Apps to Use in the Classroom
No matter how many students you have in your classroom, each student learns differently. Educators can sometimes struggle with how they design their teaching due to the differences each learner has in obtaining the necessary information being taught. The best way to improve learning is to find a universal design of learning as it helps with student, representation, action, and engagement. Image provided below:
I have researched a variety of educational applications that I believe could help provide a more universal learning and found three that I would like to discuss. These apps all provide capabilities for adding classroom engagement and individual student expression as they help to individualize learning for the students, while making it easier for the instructor by making instruction interactive and providing access to a variety of material, as well as offering collaboration for relationship building.
NEARPOD
This application allows teachers to find pre-build lessons or create digital lessons consisting of a multitude of information that can be shared and personalized with students as they navigate through provided images, videos, websites, quizzes, polls, and assignments at their own pace, allowing individual tracking. Educators can control the delivery of lessons and have a formative component where teachers can embed quizzes, questions, or open-ended responses. This app can make any lesson interactive, allowing for real-time assessment. Nearpod even has the capability to interact with Google Classroom, Slides, and Drive. Through offering collaboration and gamification, students are able to build positive social connections as well. I find that the overall objective for this application is to better engage students and allow immediate feedback for the instructor.
BRAINPOP UK
The BrainPOP application is an easy to use and fun resource for educator support, to use in your classroom as it is a library of animated educational content that adds interaction and gamification to your lessons. The library covers a range of topics stemming from core subjects to humanities and arts, and even technology and citizenship. The age range recommended for this application is between 7 and 14, however some ratings have mentioned that it could be raised as some of the topics provided such as war are for older kids. Educators can use this app to provide visual aids through animations that can cut down on preparation time, as well as supplementing interactive activities to help monitor student understanding, allowing teachers to provide feedback. The animations and visual aspects of this application provide help for additional language learners, and helps all students that are visual learners to recall information easier. This application provides subtitles as well.
SHOWME
Teachers and students can create interactive presentations called “ShowMe’s” when using this application. This app is a content creator that allows the creation of presentations where a user can record or create voice overs, include images or videos, and has tools for drawing and adding text. This application has the potential to help teachers use a flipped classroom method, as well as allowing teachers and students to create interactive engaging presentations. Presentations can also be shared and used for collaboration in group assignments, effectively allowing learners to build communication skills and relationship building through teamwork.
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