Lumio Buzz: Take student engagement to the next level

Student engagement is on every educator's mind!

Our Ambassadors, Erin Glover and Brenna McPherren, are not just committed educators, they're also Technology Integration Facilitators (TIFs) at Lake Washington School District in Washington state, U.S. In their roles as TIFs, they've worked to identify the most common challenges that educators face in their classrooms, especially in the light of the pandemic. They discovered that "increasing student engagement" was a recurring theme with educators.

In this post, Erin and Brenna dive into three easy-to-use Lumio features that can save teachers time and maximize student engagement in classrooms.

First let's meet our Ambassadors!

1. Power of graphic organizers

Lumio’s graphic organizers are an effective tool for helping students organize their thinking and communicate their learning effectively. As pointed out by Ambrose 2010, “how students organize their knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.” Lumio’s ready-made, customizable graphic organizers encourage students to demonstrate their understanding and allow educators to check for prior knowledge, scaffold learning, and gain insight into student progress.

Erin and Brenna have discovered that ready-made graphic organizers are a fun way to increase student engagement, requiring very little prep from the teachers.

2. Power of a blank page

Lumio's blank page feature is an empty canvas where teachers can guide and stimulate students’ creativity while engaging them in fun ways. Promoting creativity in the classroom has been shown to enhance student engagement. Moreover, it's easy to turn blank pages into collaborative workspaces that stimulate whole-class discussions, leading to increased participation, greater student choice, and opportunities for students to be creative in demonstrating their learning.

3. Power of student choice

Giving students choices in their learning has a number of benefits, ranging from increasing student engagement to allowing for differentiation by providing appropriate challenges (Toshalis & Nakkula, 2012). Erin and Brenna love using Lumio’s Shout It Out! feature followed by giving students scaffolded choices to demonstrate their learning.

Shout It Out! is a powerful tool that allows students to share ideas, prior knowledge, and opinions synchronously from their devices across all learning environments. When used to promote student choice in an activity, Shout It Out! can be very effective in increasing student engagement, as it makes the learning process more relevant.

Brenna recently used Shout It Out! as a brainstorming activity with her second graders to get them excited about a project about the solar system. She set up Shout It Out! to get students to reflect on “What do I already know about the solar system” and “What do I want to know about the solar system?” This generated genuine interest and motivated students to pursue their topics of interest for their research project. Students also got the opportunity to choose how to showcase their learning which ranged from Lumio blank pages to posters to fact sheets etc.

Brenna and Erin’s examples showcase how teachers can use these Lumio features in more than one way to foster an environment of active, collaborative, and engaged learners. Brenna and Erin noted that integrating technology to increase student engagement does not necessarily require extensive preparation from the educator.

To hear Erin and Brenna discuss the design and use of their classroom activities in detail, watch their webinar here. Want to integrate their engaging activities into your lessons? Find their Lumio lesson here and save it to your own Lumio library!