Empowering Students With Tech – 4 Step Guide

With so many new technologies claiming to revolutionise learning – AI, machine learning, VR, AR, apps for everything – it can be a struggle to know what to focus on. For me, the focus has got to be on empowering students.

If we could find sustainable ways of empowering students to take more interest, more control and more responsibility for their own learning, we could (in theory) be more effective in use of time and resources.

We could be more effective in meeting each student where they are. We could be more effective in identifying their development needs. We could optimise the time we have together. Here are a few ideas to do just that.

Here are 4 steps to Empowering Students With Tech

1. Self-testing

Students test themselves and let teachers know when they are ready to be assessed.

There are many self-grading quiz apps out there. Quizlet and Google Forms all offer easy, adaptable options for any teacher to create a quiz that aids students in checking their understanding of basic knowledge.

Or, why not let students create their own quizzes for each other?

2. Self-editing

Self-editing and thorough reflection can be excellent learning tasks, but often need the support of a teacher. Using apps like Grammarly to help students find their grammar errors before turning in an essay can build self-confidence and self-awareness.

3. Self-reflection

Continual and active reflection of one’s own development can also be a powerful tool. And it does not have to be difficult.

Why not just have each student open a Google doc and share it with their teacher at the start of each course?

At the end of each week, the student could write 10 minutes to reflect on: Where am I now? Where am I going? What’s the next step to get there? Check out this example from Jen Roberts.

Or, have students write a tweet to sum up their understanding of today’s lesson. This applet lets you save those tweets to a spreadsheet, which makes it easy for the teacher to review.

4. Peer-review

Sharing docs and organising peer-review is a great way of empowering students to help each other and help themselves.

By seeing good examples and even not so good examples, students can become more critical and more constructive.

Using a tool like Peergrade makes assigning random or decided peer groups easy, plus it captures the feedback in a understandable and digestible way.

Have a look at this example to see how one teacher used it as a way of empowering students to improve their essays before turning it in for their first “teacher” feedback.

Using many different tools can be confusing and provide lots of unrelated data. Therefore, we must pick and choose which tools work for the needs of our students.

If you use an LMS, most of these tools are integrated, and the learning data collected is tagged so that it can be easily sorted.

Empowering Students Means Encouraging Ownership

Either way, the more we help our students take ownership of their own learning process, the closer we will be to understanding their needs.

These are four ways we could take advantage of technology to further empower our students to self-regulate, self-motivate and self-evaluate.

Kristy Lundström
Starting out as a Mathematics and Computer science teacher, Kristy Lundström understands the impact effective technology and systematic thinking can have on learning. She has worked as a Head of School for more than 10 years in Sweden, Belgium and the US. In every school, she seeks to empower teachers, support students and build communities. Her philosophy can be summed up by her favourite hashtag: #unleashpotential
@klundstromatmcd