3 Interactive Courseware Activities to Keep Students Engaged in Learning
3 Interactive Courseware Activities to Keep Students Engaged in Learning
Making learning fun and hands-on is a great way to engage students, help them retain more information, and encourage them to connect prior knowledge to new knowledge and experiences. That’s why Edmentum strives to design interactive content and activities for Courseware, Edmentum’s standards-aligned 6–12 digital curricula, that we know students will find helpful and engaging. In this post, we’ll spotlight four of those interactive activities and show how each of them can help engage learners.
When learning new material, it’s helpful to have a study guide handy to help you analyze and retain information. That’s why Courseware’s guided notes have quickly become a fan favorite among educators and students alike. Guided notes are interactive PDFs available in essential Courseware courses that students can complete to actively engage with their tutorial. The notes are designed to serve as instructional scaffolding and help students slow down, meaningfully interact with the material they’re learning, and break down information into consumable pieces to improve retention and reduce cognitive load.
Students typically work on their notes by having their tutorial opened in one window and their guided notes open in another to answer the fill-in-the-blank fields. Once completed, students can save their notes to their device so that they can refer to them later when studying for their mastery tests. For students who prefer writing their notes on paper, the option to print guided notes is also available.
Clarifying Big Ideas Tutorials
Students who struggle in math and English often do so because they’re basing their thinking on misunderstandings. To help address those common misunderstandings in core content curriculum, we’ve designed Clarifying Big Ideas (CBI) tutorials. The research-based CBI tutorials are standalone tutorials that are shorter than a regular Courseware tutorial, and they focus on addressing big ideas without being too difficult for learners. There are designed to be highly engaging to keep students moving through them quickly.
Our English 10 and Algebra 2 courses offer a total of eight CBI tutorials—four per subject, per semester—that encourage students to engage in their learning through check-for-understanding items and click-to-see “think-alouds.”
Project-Based Learning Activities
Activities that incorporate real-world problems help students connect what they’re learning in school to practical applications beyond the classroom. We’ve designed 14 STEM project-based learning (PBL) activities to help students develop higher-order thinking (get students creating!), increase student agency, and provide opportunities for sustained inquiry. The activities are meant to be extended projects to be completed over several weeks and are available in biology, physics, algebra, and high school earth and space science.
Students begin the PBL activities by being shown an essential question. Then, they’re guided along the research and analysis process while they receive regular feedback via knowledge checks, videos/simulations, and graded activities for instructor feedback. Lastly, they get to their final projects where they are expected to synthesize all that they’ve learned and successfully present it to an audience.
Visit our course catalog to view the broad range of course subjects we offer including core, CTE, electives, world languages, and advanced courses.
Want to learn about how to keep students engaged in learning when they’re moving in and out of quarantine? Check out Learning in Quarantine: 4 Ways to Use Courseware to Keep Instruction On Track.
