With the winter break and holiday season quickly approaching, how can you keep students engaged? To make sure students are focused and excited about their learning during this busy season, I have four tips to share with you. In today’s blog post, we’ll look at four ways to keep students engaged with ways you can use Hāpara to make it happen.
If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you know I’m a big fan of Hāpara. You might remember these two recent blog posts.. This includes, “5 Ways To Create a Positive Classroom Culture With Hāpara” and “Flipped Professional Development for Educators from Hāpara.” Hāpara is a digital teaching and learning platform for education. It provides a streamlined experience for teachers and students using Google Classroom. So as you work to keep students engaged – during a time of the year that is full of distractions – Hāpara can help!
4 Ways to Keep Students Engaged
This list of four ways to keep students engaged is great for any time of year. But as you wind down the calendar year and approach the halfway point of the school year, it’s a great time to try something new. You might decide to try out one of these each week. Or you could choose just one on the list to get started. Let’s take a look at these four ways to boost engagement and keep students interested and excited!
Take a spin on the traditional
To make your lessons more creative and engaging, take a spin on the traditional activities in your routine. I love maintaining a structured schedule, templates, and a set routine. But if your students become increasingly distracted as they approach a winter break, it’s a great time to change things up.
I love this example of an if/then adventure story that can help make your lessons more creative and engaging. This example features a Workspace in Hāpara. It has a clear purpose, interactive resources, and small groups for students to work in.
Provide choices to students
A great way to give students more ownership of their learning is to offer choices. Within Hāpara, you can provide students with choices based on how they like to learn. And choices on how they want to show what they know. The flexible grouping feature in Hāpara can help make this happen. As you can see in this example (pictured below and linked here), you can set up different activities for students to choose from all from within a single Workspace.
Surprise celebration of students
This time of year is perfect for celebrating students in an informal way. To recognize excellent behavior in your classroom, you can use Hāpara Highlights to send positive messages when a student is doing something you’d like to celebrate. In Highlights, teachers can also use the Snaps feature to take a quick screenshot and “catch a student doing something well.” In addition to sending this Snap to students, you might also share it with their family or a school administrator to extend the celebration.
Introduce a new game
Games are lots of fun and can serve an educational purpose, too. To help keep students engaged as you approach the holiday season, you might introduce a new game. Of course, you could revisit a favorite game from earlier in the year, but a new game might be the perfect option for grabbing students’ attention and keeping them interested and engaged in course content. In Hāpara, try game Workspaces, like an escape room Workspace!
Finish the Year with Hāpara
As you approach the halfway point of the academic year and the final days of the calendar year, it’s the perfect time to explore Hāpara. If you use Hāpara already, these ideas are ready for you to put into action. And if you’ve thought about trying it out, one or all of these four tips can help you keep the momentum going as you finish up the final days of 2022.
Ready to get started with Hāpara? If you’re a Google Classroom user, you’ll certainly want to check out Hāpara. Use this link to learn more about how Hāpara can help you create engaging digital learning experiences, and schedule your demo today!
