“Digital innovation” is more than just a term in today’s fast-paced world of education. This is a significant element of getting kids enthused about school, helping them do well, and making sure they keep learning for the rest of their life. Schools throughout the world are changing how they educate and build their buildings so that every student can study in a way that works for them. This is because more and more individuals are using new technologies like AI, VR, and data analysis. To help kids accomplish better, school administrators, teachers, and politicians need to employ more digital tools and procedures.
Teachers can use digital technologies to make sure that each student’s learning style is fulfilled, to keep track of their progress in real time, and to get students to work together outside of class. These improvements also help people be more creative, use technology better, and think more critically. In the 21st century economy, these are all vital talents to have. If you want to utilize technology the proper way, you need to plan ahead, keep learning, and be really dedicated to making things fair and easy to use.
This article speaks about eight new ways that schools are using technology to help kids achieve better in school. To be sure that this resource is complete and correct, we have carefully chosen credible research, case studies, and expert comments. This guide will help you deal with the digital revolution in education with confidence and a clear vision, whether you are the IT director for your district, a school administrator, or a teacher in the classroom.
1. The Best Learning Platforms for You
A quick peek at
Adaptive algorithms are used by personalized learning systems to create courses that are specific to each student’s strengths, weaknesses, and needs. These systems always know how well students are doing, and they change the level of difficulty, the pace, and the types of tasks to make sure that students are always challenged but not too hard.
The good stuff
Adaptive Pathways: Websites like DreamBox Learning and Khan Academy change the math and science lessons based on how well each student understands the material. This helps individuals do better on tests that everyone has to take.
Student Engagement: Interactive dashboards and game-like features enable students set and reach their own goals. This provides them greater motivation and keeps more kids in school.
Teacher Efficiency: Automated grading and progress reports can help teachers get more done in less time. They can then use this time for group activities and personalized help.
A Look at Summit Public Schools
The Summit Learning Platform helps Summit Public Schools build a paradigm for individualized learning. Schools who took part experienced a 15% rise in reading skills and a 10% rise in math skills over three school years compared to schools that didn’t.
How to Make It Happen
Data Privacy: When you collect and store student data, you must follow FERPA and local laws governing student privacy.
Professional Development: Show teachers how to read analytics and apply what they learn to plan classes for the next week.
Equal Access: Give every child a device and a good Internet connection to help close the “digital divide.”
2. Putting games into the teachings
A quick look
Adding things like points, leaderboards, medals, and goals to learning makes it more fun and helps people learn. It turns boring tasks into entertaining quests by using youngsters’ natural desire to achieve well and be tested.
Pros
People are 30% more inclined to keep learning when they get badges for finishing courses and other tasks like that.
Students can see their scores and how they’re doing right quickly, which helps them find and fix mistakes right away.
Kids learn how to talk to each other, work together, and solve problems when they play multiplayer educational games.
Things to Use
Classcraft is a role-playing game that turns the classroom into an enjoyable environment for students to learn and act properly.
Quizizz lets you take live quizzes with memes and scoreboards. This makes you want to see how you stack up against other people.
Answers and Questions
Too much attention on rewards: Make sure that the game’s goals are similar to those in real life to balance outward rewards with inside motivation.
When you make gaming interfaces, incorporate universal design ideas like text-to-speech and adjustable font sizes so that all kinds of learners may use them.
3. VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality)
A Quick Look
Students can learn by doing in three-dimensional, interactive worlds with VR and AR. They can learn more from these books than from regular books. You can use these tools to look at old civilizations and cut up virtual frogs. This makes it easier for you to understand ideas.
Things that are good
Improved Memory: Studies indicate that students utilizing VR recall as much as 75% of the material after one week. On the other hand, students who just go to regular lectures remember only 20% of what they learn.
Safe Simulation: VR can safely recreate hazardous or complex scenarios, such as chemical reactions or aerospace engineering.
Emotional engagement: People feel empathy and curiosity when they read or watch immersive stories, especially if they are about history, literature, or social studies.
Using Google Expeditions in the classroom
Google Expeditions has more than 900 AR and VR excursions, such as the Louvre Museum and the surface of Mars. You can get to them with cheap phones and cardboard headsets.
The best techniques to get things done
Aligning the curriculum: Don’t just use VR and AR for fun; make sure they help you teach what you want to teach.
Technical Support: Set up charging stations for devices, make sure there is enough Wi-Fi bandwidth, and develop rules for keeping things clean and in good shape.
Teacher Facilitation: Teach teachers how to lead discussions before and after classes so that students learn by thinking about what they see instead of just watching.
4. Looking at data to get information
In short,
By gathering and analyzing several types of school data, such as attendance and behavior records, test scores, and engagement indicators, data analytics tools help teachers decide how to teach and what regulations to make.
Things that are good
Early Intervention: Predictive analytics can find kids who are expected to fail months before they do, so they can get the help and instruction they need.
Resource Allocation: District leaders can use information about needs and effects to decide how to invest money on technology and training for teachers.
Dashboards keep an eye on the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for schools, classrooms, and districts. This is helpful for the society because it allows people make decisions based on facts.
Check out PowerSchool Analytics.
PowerSchool Analytics lets you connect student information systems (SIS) with analytics modules so you can generate your own reports and set up alerts for attendance and performance issues.
Things to think about when you do it
Data Literacy: Offer workshops and give your employees the chance to get certified so they can learn how to read data.
To preserve everyone’s trust, make clear rules about who owns the data, how it may be used, and when it can be used.
Integration: Use open APIs to make sure that all of your digital systems, such your LMS, SIS, and others, can talk to each other.
5. Things that make it easier for individuals to work together in the cloud
To sum up
Google Workspace for Education and Microsoft 365 Education are two cloud-based collaboration suites that let teachers and students talk to each other, share data, and work together in real time, no matter where they are.
Things that are good
Students can access materials and turn in their work whenever and wherever they want. This makes it simple to use hybrid learning approaches and flipped classes.
Version Control: An automatic version history keeps your data safe and tells you who changed a file.
Scalability: The cloud infrastructure can easily handle times when there are more users, as when students switch to online learning or take tests.
One example is St. Mary’s High School.
After switching to Google Workspace, St. Mary’s witnessed a 40% drop in email attachments and a 25% rise in group project submissions. This made it easier for people to get things done at work and helped students work together better.
How to do well
User Training: Teach people with different degrees of digital skills, such as basic, intermediate, and advanced.
Use role-based permissions and single sign-on (SSO) to maintain the system safe and easy to use.
Backup Plans: Make sure you have copies of important paperwork and lesson plans on a computer that isn’t connected to the internet.
6. Using AI for teaching and testing
A Quick Look
Artificial intelligence is changing a lot about tutoring and testing. For example, it uses natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and autonomous grading. With these systems, you can obtain personalized feedback right away on articles, problem sets, and language practice.
Good things
AI tutors like Carnegie Learning can help you with your arithmetic homework any time of day or night. This helps teachers do their jobs better and gives students additional chances to learn.
Objective assessing: You can cut down on bias and make sure that the scores are always the same by automatically assessing multiple-choice, short-answer, and even essay answers.
Duolingo and other apps use AI to change vocabulary and pronunciation courses based on how well each student does.
Things that are not right
Make sure that AI models don’t have any biases based on gender, culture, or language. This is what we call bias reduction. Do this a lot and change the training data such that everyone gets the same treatment.
AI should help teachers make decisions, not take away their options. This is especially true when it comes to judging how creative someone is and how good they are at coming up with fresh ideas.
7. Guidelines for BYOD and mobile learning
To sum up
When you learn outside of class on your phone or tablet, that’s called mobile learning. If there are rules in place to keep them secure, students can bring their own devices to school and use them for schoolwork.
Pros
Seesaw and Remind are two mobile apps that make it easy for parents and teachers to talk to each other, share portfolios, and have meetings at different times.
Cost Savings: BYOD saves the district money on hardware and makes sure that all the pupils know how to use the devices.
Engagement: Flashcards and quizzes on mobile devices that turn into games make the time you spend on the bus or in other places more fun.
Ideas for Policy
Equity Measures: To keep digital equity, let students borrow devices if they don’t have their own or give them plans that cost less.
Acceptable utilize: The student handbooks should make it obvious how to filter content, utilize technology properly, and be responsible.
Network Management: Use mobile device management (MDM) technology to keep devices safe and stop apps that aren’t allowed.
8. How to Teach Cybersecurity and How to Be a Good Digital Citizen
In short
It’s really vital to teach kids how to use digital devices safely and keep their laptops safe. Students learn how to preserve their privacy, be safe online, and exchange information properly in lessons about digital citizenship.
Nice things
Less Risk: Students who know more are less likely to fall for internet scams like phishing and identity theft.
When kids learn about digital traces, plagiarism, and copyright, they learn to be honest and value the work of others.
Culture of the Community: When peers take the lead on proactive policies and programs, online spaces can be kind and welcoming.
A curriculum is similar to Common Sense Education in certain ways.
For grades K–12, Common Sense Education has a whole Digital Citizenship Curriculum. It include courses, movies, and ways for families to become engaged.
How to Stick to Your Plans
Cross-Curricular Integration: Teach digital citizenship in language arts, social studies, and science classes to help students remember what they learn.
Peer Mentoring: Teach student leaders how to run seminars and behave correctly online.
Ongoing Reinforcement: Add digital citizenship check-ins to the morning announcements or to advising sessions.
For example, the Hillcrest Unified School District
In 2022, Hillcrest USD started a digital shift across the whole district. After two years, here are some interesting results:
- Fifteen percent more students graduated from schools with personalized learning programs.
- Proactive digital citizenship programs have cut down on discipline problems by 30%.
- Because labs now feature VR and AI-powered tutoring, 50% more students are taking STEM optional classes.
These numbers show how well tech-based, all-around planning can work when everyone is on the same page and there is a clear goal.
The best ways to make sure that the installation goes well
Include instructors, students, parents, and other people in the planning process to make sure that everyone agrees and that it makes sense.
Pilot Programs: Before distributing a new piece of technology to all the schools in the district, let a few schools try it out first. Ask for feedback and come up with plans on how to use it better.
Think about grants, public-private collaborations, and renting technology to keep your budget flexible.
Make clear KPIs, like how often people use technology, how well they do on tests, and how often they engage with your content. Check on them every three months.
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs): Teachers should meet in PLCs on a regular basis to talk about their plans, resources, and experiences.
To put it plainly
Digital innovation is changing how schools work, which gives kids more opportunity than ever to do well. Schools may make learning environments that are fun, fair, and ready for the future by carefully putting together personalized learning platforms, gamification, VR/AR, data analytics, collaborative tools, AI tutoring, mobile learning, and digital citizenship education. To accomplish successfully, you need to plan ahead, get appropriate training, and always think about what’s best for your students. School leaders should be willing to try new things, make decisions based on data, and assist kids learn the digital skills they will need to achieve well in the future.
Things That People Ask a Lot
1. What is personalized learning, and how does it help kids learn?
Adaptive software makes sure that the material is suited for each person’s strengths and weaknesses in individualized learning. It makes students more interested in school, helps them do better in school, and helps teachers use their time better.
2. How can schools close the digital divide when they create rules around BYOD?
Schools may make sure all of their kids have the technology they need by giving them devices, paying for their data connections, and working with community groups.
3. Should schools use VR for lessons?
Even though high-end VR technology can be very expensive, many districts start with simple things like headsets that work with iPhones. You might also be able to get help with the costs of starting up through grants and partnerships.
4. What should schools think about when it comes to keeping students’ private information safe?
Schools have to obey standards like FERPA and COPPA, keep data safe, acquire permission from parents before collecting data, and make sure that only certain people may see the data.
5. Can AI help students learn instead of teachers?
No. AI tutoring is a terrific tool for teachers since it lets students practice on their own and get feedback right away. This helps a lot of students at once. But students still need teachers to help them learn how to think critically, deal with their feelings, and make more complicated choices.
6. What effect do gamification approaches have on students’ motivation?
Points, badges, and leaderboards are all parts of gamification that make users feel like they’ve done something and encourage them to compete with each other in a nice way. Research indicates that this can enhance persistence and increase the enjoyment of learning.
7. What is the best strategy to teach people how to be good digital citizens?
Teach your kids how to be good digital citizens in every lesson. Have activities that kids and their families can do together, and let older kids show them how to do it.
8. How can schools tell if their digital innovation programs are working?
Make sure you know what you want to happen with things like attendance, test scores, and how active students are. Look at them often, get feedback from people who care about the project, and change your plans based on what the data shows.
References
- Khan Academy. “About Khan Academy.” Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/about
- Classcraft. “Classcraft: Engaging Students Through Educational Role-Playing.” https://www.classcraft.com
- Google for Education. “Google Expeditions: VR and AR Learning.” https://edu.google.com/products/vr-ar/expeditions
- PowerSchool. “PowerSchool Analytics.” https://www.powerschool.com
- Duolingo. “The Science Behind Duolingo.” https://www.duolingo.com
- Common Sense Education. “Digital Citizenship Curriculum.” https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship
- DreamBox Learning. “Adaptive Math Learning Platform.” https://www.dreambox.com
- Summit Public Schools. “Summit Learning Platform Impact Report.” https://www.summitlearning.org/impact-report