Teachers are constantly looking for ways to reinvent lesson plans to make learning easier. At an institutional level, schools, universities, and educational bodies are looking for efficiencies to facilitate a seamless learning experience for students. It’s one thing for a teacher to stand at the front of the room and share knowledge, but it’s much more effective when teachers are able to create lesson plans using interactive platforms that are readily available and relatively easy to use.
The other thing to consider is how interactive platforms encourage invisible learning – ways to incorporate learning through experiences and through play rather than a more traditional approach. Students between Kindergarten and 12th grade spend 12,000 hours playing video games on average, about the same time they spend in the classroom! This creates a huge opportunity out of developing games and interactive content that students want to play while learning key materials via invisible learning.
So how can you use interactive platforms to make your life easier as a teacher? Here are 4 ways interactive platforms can enhance your lesson plans and increase student learning.
Seamless Integration of Multi-Media Learning into the Classroom
Interactive lesson plans integrate technology into everyday learning. Rather than focusing on a teacher lecturing or a series of readings, key content is brought to life through multi-media delivery. Often, this involves getting outside and exploring the world around you while using technology. A great example of this is the BrisAsia Festival, which featured 8 different locations in Brisbane, Australia. This interactive experience featured street art and the stories of the artists behind each installation. Not only is it visually interesting, but the experience provided an in-depth understanding of Asian visual culture and multi-cultural issues in addition to learning about storytelling and how to create art.
More Engaging Language Learning Tools
Language is constantly changing, and it’s important for students to have a good foundation – whether learning a new language or perfecting their native language. Storytelling is a great way to learn a language to understand the cadences of sentence structure, cultural applications of certain words, and understand the different dialects that evolve over time. Interactive platforms provide the opportunity to use storytelling in a more engaging way because it pulls in the world around you rather than simply reading from a book.
For example, The Paramatta Poetry Trail allows people to discover the rich history of Paramatta through poetry written by both professional poets as well as local high school students. Not only is this a great learning experience for students that do the poetry trail (you can experience it remotely in the classroom as well!), but the program to put it together was also a rich learning experience for students if you are looking to build a major project.
Professional poets held a series of workshops for students to learn about writing poetry, the students learned about history through research and then wrote their own poems and collaborated with teachers and the professional poets to finish up each poem. This program will leave a positive mark on students for years to come.
Addition of More Tactile Experiences for Different Learners
Not every student learns the same. It’s always a struggle for teachers to incorporate a varied approach into lesson plans. Interactive platforms that unlock the next activity or challenge when you are in the right location create a more gamified learning experience that is extremely hands on. It combines education with entertainment and allows students to learn through play.
With screen fatigue setting in as a new reality after over a year of online learning for many, it’s time to activate many of the public spaces that are around us to give our eyes a rest. It could be an art walking tour, a puzzle trail with activities at several locations, a choose your adventure story, interactive theatre – the sky is the limit.
The Outdoor Reads: Activate Creeks & Waterways is a great example of exploring the flora & fauna in the world around us through puzzle trails, historical adventures, and flora & fauna trails at city parks. Brisbane City Council activated 55 separate locations into 8 linear adventures as part of this interactive learning experience. The goal was to educate families about the flora, fauna, and history of each park. It was a highly engaging activity for all ages.
The educational themes covered were indigenous and WWI history and, of course, nature. This larger activation allowed for multiple visits and multiple learning experiences.
Another great example of a gamified interactive experience is the Brisbane Street Reads project where 45 locations were turned into 3 fictional Choose Your Adventure stories. The experience was so successful that it has since expanded.
Encourage Community Exploration and Critical Thinking
Critical thinking and the ability to form opinions and act appropriately on those opinions is one of the soft skills students need to learn – but an extremely important one. It usually starts within the communities and social issues that directly surround students because they are social issues they see everyday. Interactive experiences that combine both community exploration with hyper local storytelling are highly effective.
The Mustard Seed: Coldest Night of the Year is a social issues walk in Edmonton that uses personal storytelling, multi-media content, and physical location to educate people on homelessness, poverty, and other social issues that are important within the community. Each story is unlocked when you reach the next location. This kind of immersive storytelling experience allows students to both educate themselves and decide what actions to take once they have gathered all information.
How can Story City Help?
Story City is an international leader in locative and interactive storytelling. The GPS app is the only one of its kind that runs this type of interactive digital/real world experience, and it can be used as such an effective asset for educators and educational institutions.
We have created a no code platform that is easy to use for content creators and educators with high impact results. Contact Story City to see how we can help you elevate your students’ learning experience through a seamless integration of technology into the classroom. Just email: ecraven (at) storycity (dot) com (dot) au
