At its best, teaching is about making connections. Through a shared joke in class or a quick conversation about a concert t-shirt before class, we connect with our students. We also connect with other teachers, at first out of desperate necessity to stay afloat, but eventually – hopefully – as united families do. By taking them on a journey where their efforts are rewarded with mastery, we try our best to connect our students to the curriculum.
It’s overwhelming to think that, at any hour of my school day, there are thousands of other adolescents seated in their own Psychology classroom. Their experiences run parallel to my students’, yet so much could be gained by having them intersect, if only briefly. There is boundless potential in connecting students from different schools, states, or even countries, either as audience members, collaborators, or competitors. There are many creation tools available to realize these possibilities.
I urge my students to create presentations for a larger audience than just their classmates. The biggest stage is YouTube; however, its faceless commenters can be merciless. Voicethread is a cloud-based product that allows for more meaningful conversations. Rather than uploading a video presentation to YouTube, have students put in on Voicethread instead. Viewers can comment on them via phone, keyboard, or camera. Plus, it’s asynchronous, meaning that everyone can view and comment at their own pace. Thinglink has evolved into a hub for digital storytelling as educators transition to teaching using virtual spaces. For engaging (yet occasionally vertigo-inducing) slideshows, Prezi has been a popular PowerPoint alternative for a number of years.
Collaboration between classrooms is a worthwhile ideal, and Soundtrap might be a tool to make it happen. Though marketed as a music-making platform, it gives users a shared space to communicate and create audio files. Imagine a collaborative podcast or audio lesson made by students from different schools — exciting stuff!
A few years ago, many of my students were obsessively playing a particular trivia game on their smartphones: QuizUp. It is an app that matches players head-to-head in a battle of accuracy and speed. Once it became possible to upload original content, first I had my students create multiple-choice questions in . Then I vetted their questions and uploaded them to our Psychology QuizUp game. Within the app, there are the things you’d expect like leaderboards, icons, and challenges. However, my favorite part is the chat area where players can ask questions or offer encouragement. QuizUp has proven to be an excellent tool for getting my students to engage with the curriculum by competing with players from around the world.
Playing trivia against more than one other person is fun, too. For the past four years, during the last school day before the AP Psychology exam, I have organized and hosted the Kahoot Smackdown. Kahoot is a game platform in which competitors answer multiple-choice questions projected from their teacher’s computer. The Smackdown is a live-streamed event from my computer to classrooms all over the country in real time. Students respond on their web-enabled devices and earn points based on speed and accuracy. Kahoot is normally limited to a single classroom at a time; most students know which of their classmates is going to win before the game even starts. By opening up the competition to hundreds of students, that certainty is gone. It’s a yearly highlight to have my students competing against students from every corner of the country. I am only able to organize and promote the Kahoot Smackdown thanks to the AP Psychology Teachers’ Facebook page, a valuable resource for any secondary-level psych teacher. We teachers benefit from connecting, too.
One valuable byproduct of teaching high school Psychology is that students have opportunities to recognize they are a part of something bigger. Using technology that promotes sharing students’ experiences encourages them to connect in new and unexpected ways.
