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Ever dread teaching a big concept in your classroom? You know your students will acquire the skill at different rates, and you must keep them together to keep your sanity. You have to give space for struggling students to practice a new concept, but you also have to provide advanced students the ability to explore deeper. The answer is online self-paced learning tools. TeacherMade can help.
With self-paced learning, you choose the time, speed, and place of learning. If you need extra practice, self-paced learning is perfect. But it also works for students that need to move faster to stay engaged.
One of the biggest hurdles of the traditional classroom is balancing different learning styles and abilities. With self-paced learning, your students can choose how and when they learn. This gives them the space to succeed.
There are a lot of reasons to bring more flexibility to your classroom. Self-paced learning is inherently flexible, and it is even more so when you make the switch to online self-paced learning. Consider self-paced learning if you’re dealing with chronic absenteeism, school shutdowns, or teacher shortages.
Online self-paced learning tools, like TeacherMade, have built-in accessibility features. With TeacherMade, students can use features like:
TeacherMade makes it simple to convert your existing assignments to self-paced learning modules. Create an assignment in a few simple steps:
The best part of self-paced learning is that students get more flexibility and ownership over their learning. TeacherMade makes it possible to create pure practice assignments, and students can do the assignment as much as they want.
It would be impossible to make the switch to self-paced learning without the right tools. Online tools help you manage self-paced learning so that you can focus on your students. With TeacherMade, you can monitor student progress. See which students attempted and completed an assignment. With auto-grading, you can also measure success.
My number one goal for student engagement is the students’ desire to complete an assignment. I want them to be motivated and excited about their work. Typically your most challenging students have one of two problems. They are either very bright, understand the lesson, and become bored, or they are the opposite. This student may not fully grasp the material or lack the confidence to try. Either way, TeacherMade does the trick to keep these students engaged. My not-so-purposeful mistakes come in handy for students that are above the rest. These students rush to finish the lesson to ensure they got their 100%, and when they don’t, they are on the hunt for my mistakes. For the students that perform at a lower level, I do my best to create the assignment to look identical to their paper one so they do not get overwhelmed or confused.
With TeacherMade, I can easily change the parameters of the assignment to keep my students engaged. I assign a few lessons daily in math class, including practice and an exit ticket. The practice lesson consists of 8 to 10 questions from the lesson we learned that day. I do my best to make the practice page resemble what the work would look like if students completed it on paper. This way, students can work the problems out on paper and copy their answers. I assign practice to show the score when students submit it, as well as which answers were incorrect and the correct answers. This is what helps those higher-leveled thinkers to find and understand their mistakes. As far as the students who aren’t quite understanding, I monitor those who are not making it far in their progress, as well as scores that have been submitted. With that data, I can target the issues and help keep students engaged and focused. After students submit their practice, they complete an exit ticket. The exit tickets have between 2 and 4 questions that resemble the practice. This time students cannot use their notes or get help from teachers or friends. Students are motivated to get a good score on the exit ticket to prove their understanding and not have to do homework. The feedback from TeacherMade is instant and allows me to “read the room,” which ultimately helps keep students engaged.
Like many schools, our school has ACT practice resources that teachers can use in the classroom. Before TeacherMade, I would make copies of ACT practice passages for my students. The students would complete the assignment in class, we would correct it, and then discuss the answers together. It was not bad, but not all students were engaged. Some students tried their best and paid attention when the answers were discussed. They were genuinely curious to see how they did. Other students didn’t care much and bubbled in any random answers. When the answers were discussed, they didn’t care to see what they got wrong and why.
With TeacherMade, I was able to digitalize the practice exercises. After uploading the passages into TeacherMade, I used the Multiple Choice tool to create answer boxes for each question. When I assigned the practice, I chose the option that allows students to see their score — not the answer, just the score — on individual items when they submit the work.
In class, we typically do two rounds per practice passage. In the first round, I time the students to have a better sense of pacing. When time is up, the students submit their work. The students can see which ones they got wrong but aren’t given the correct answers. Then as a class, we discuss the items that most students got wrong. If it’s a silly mistake, we talk about it and try to be more aware of that test pattern on a future test.
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