Online learning has the stigma of being less effective than on-site teaching…
- Students are said to be less attentive during class
- Classmates might have less interaction and cohesion with each other
- Teachers might not be able to reach students in a way they could in on-site classrooms
At UNBRICKED we’ve mastered the art of making online learning easy and fun for your children. Here are five ways we’re revolutionizing the online learning experience.
In this article we show you how we not only solve those problems but make learning an even better experience.
We achieve this by leveraging online tools and using proven teaching methods making online learning more enjoyable and accessible. We enable students to learn at their own pace and follow their individual interests and strengths.
Way 1: Interactive Virtual Classrooms (Zoom)
Our virtual classrooms take place via the online video communication and collaboration platform Zoom.us. They’re designed to engage and captivate students, fostering a sense of connection and collaboration with their peers and teachers.
Here’s a closer look at how Zoom.us features enhance the interactive learning experience:
- Breakout Sessions: Breakout sessions allow the virtual classroom to be divided into smaller groups, simulating the collaborative environment of traditional classrooms. Teachers can assign students to breakout rooms to work on group projects, discussions, or problem-solving activities. This fosters active participation, engagement, and peer-to-peer interaction.
- Reactions: Zoom offers a range of interactive reactions, such as “hand raising” and “applause,” that allow students to express themselves non-verbally during a live session. Students can raise their virtual hand to ask a question or provide feedback, while the applause reaction can be used to acknowledge achievements or show appreciation. These features promote student engagement, participation, and classroom dynamics.
- Screensharing: Screensharing is a valuable feature that allows teachers to share their screens with students. This enables seamless presentations, demonstrations, and sharing of educational resources, such as slideshows, documents, videos, and interactive websites. Screensharing enhances visual learning and facilitates real-time collaboration, ensuring that students have a clear understanding of the material being presented.
- Presentation Tools: Zoom offers various presentation tools to enhance the virtual classroom experience. Teachers can use features like annotation, highlighting, and spotlighting to draw attention to specific content on their shared screens. These tools help focus students’ attention, facilitate discussion, and emphasize key points during lessons or presentations.
- Chat and Q&A: Zoom’s chat feature enables real-time written communication within the virtual classroom. Students can ask questions, share insights, or engage in discussions, promoting active participation even in larger class settings. Additionally, the Q&A feature allows students to submit questions that can be addressed by the teacher at appropriate times, ensuring a structured and organized learning environment.
By utilizing the interactive features provided by Zoom.us, teachers can create engaging and collaborative virtual classrooms, improve learner satisfaction, host virtual events (e.g. inviting experts from all over the world) and collaborate globally.
These features facilitate communication, active participation, and the sharing of resources, making online learning a dynamic and interactive experience for both students and teachers/experts.
Way 2: Gamification of Learning
Gamification in Education means that we apply game design elements in our educational setting to turn boring lessons into a fun and engaging experience.
For us the most important gamification fundamentals are:
- Engagement
- Fun
- Fairness
- Benefits
First and foremost, a game should be engaging and fun to the attendees so that they want to play it.
In order for the students to stay motivated, the game should be fair. Everyone should have the same chances for rewards and beneficial outcomes regardless of their current knowledge and skills. This includes feedback from the teachers and other students as well as challenging quizzes (that are neither too easy nor too hard).
Top Gamification Elements We’re Using
These are the gamification elements that we use in our lessons and teaching material such as online courses:
- Quizzes
- Quiz Duels
- Quiz Scores/Points
- Online Courses with Progress Bars
- Timers ( such as pomodoro timer https://pomofocus.io/ )
- Badges for achieving specific results
- Leaderboards/Ranking
GoBrunch.com – virtual rooms that look real
Apart from Zoom – we’re also experimenting with complementing online collaboration tools that have more focus on interaction and gamification: These are GoBrunch and Gather.Town (Hint: We don’t use those additional tools yet)
GoBrunch allows the creation of virtual rooms that mimic real environments. This is ideal to drive more engagement to the live classroom or online course by providing thematic meeting rooms.
Interactive Tools such as quizzes and polls, whiteboards and breakout rooms help to achieve learning objectives.
Students love this tool as they get the feeling of “hanging out” with their friends. Teachers love the small details of ist and that it’s fun to use.
See real use cases of GoBrunch:
https://usecases.gobrunch.com/
Watch it live in action:
Mit dem Laden des Videos akzeptieren Sie die Datenschutzerklärung von YouTube.
Mehr erfahren
Gather.town – virtual learning experience with the quality of in-person meetups
Gather Town enables circulating through a space like in an 90’s computer game. When walking close to one another a private video conversation starts. The conversation ends automatically when you search for a quiet space in the map.
See what Gather.Town looks like:
https://www.gather.town/use-cases/education
Way 3: Personalized Learning Paths (Mentimeter & Co)
Small classes of max. 8 students and online tools allow us to create personalized learning paths for each student based on their interests, strengths and current knowledge.
Mentimeter.com is an online tool that gives valuable insights from students (and teachers) with word clouds, polls and quizzes.
Teachers get feedback on what is most interesting for students and are able tailor the lessons to those interests and knowledge gaps as well as create assignments that fit each student’s learning path.
- Word clouds: The ideal brainstorming tool for every topic you can think of. Students get a link and can type in all words and questions they have in mind.
- Quizzes: Quizzes can be used for assessments and measuring learning progress. Mentimeter’s online quizzes allow teachers to create individual assignments that fit the students current understanding and challenge them in a way that is fun.
- Polls: Similar to word clouds, polls allow to get general feedback from students for e.g. plan events and seminars.
See what Mentimeter looks like for Education:
https://www.mentimeter.com/education
On top of that we offer additional go-to ressources for each subject. If your child is super interested in a topic we encourage them to further explore it. We provide the most relevant websites, tools, (free) programs, latest projects and researches, institutions as well as experts in the respective field.
Way 4: Interactive and Engaging Course Materials (Moodle & Co)
As a central learning and communication platform we use Moodle.org. This is always the first place for students and teachers to go to see what’s going on at UNBRICKED. 🙂
It allows our teachers and students to find it all in one place: Learning materials and resources, events, chat communication etc. Moodle is available in your browser and as an app. You can take your school with you wherever you go!
Moodle allows…
- teachers
- to share all learning materials including text files, images, quizzes, videos and online courses
- create assignments (not homework!) and assign them to their students
- teachers and students to create an unlimited number of spaces for their subject/project
- an overview of all your classes and events in a calendar view
- to communicate and chat with teachers, students and classmates
“Examples of Devices for E-Learning” by sandraschoen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
See Moodle in action (Moodle demo for schools):
https://school.moodledemo.net/
Way 5: Incorporating Real-world Projects (“Open Studies”)
Every Thursday our “Open Studies” take place. For one whole day per week we explore a topic beyond the school curriculum.
All students (regardless of their age or class) can choose from a variety of topics and projects. These are projects that our teachers or students come up with and take responsibility for. From time to time, we also invite experts from universities, industry, politics etc. to share insights from their latest researches and projects.
This teaches your child networked thinking, skill development and management of real-world projects in an ever-changing world.
Conclusion
These five ways show that online learning is in no way inferior to traditional schooling.
Instead UNBRICKED offers everything it really needs for a fulfilling (school) life:
- A great bond between classmates and teachers – communication via Zoom, Moodle (or even GoBrunch and Gather.Town)
- exciting topics and learning material – excellent teachers and experts from the field, interactive learning material on our Moodle platform
- plus interactive online tools that make learning fun – Moodle, Zoom, Mentimeter etc.
Want to have a compact overview of our pedagogical concept?
Here you go: https://unbricked-online-school.com/secondary-school/
You know more great communication, collaboration and teaching platforms that we should try out? Let us know in the comments below!
Stay Tuned!
