Mobile Learning and Digital Games in School

Heterogeneous Classes

One of the problems we seem to encounter these days is having large multi-level classes as a standard; suddenly there are many pupils or students of different ages, coming from different schools, or repeating the year. Even those pupils who for different reasons almost never attended your subject in former schools are there making integration in the class even more difficult.

One nice solution can be flipping your classroom. Another problem is making your lessons interesting for boys as well as for girls, sometimes they are interested in different things, look at the masses of existing games separated by gender.  Are gender games a solution? We can certainly use games to teach, it is only a matter of searching the right game and incorporating it in our syllabus. After all, gender games keep children interested, but even if we don’t use games, we could learn from them and also differentiate giving pupils the chance to choose tasks especially when it comes to teaching things that one gender does not particularly like. Furthermore, we should not forget a problem we always encounter: Teaching children or grownups with different learning preferences or styles VAK (visual, auditive, kinesthetic) together. Many students have a dominant visual learning preference; they are fine the way our educational system works, but it is hard work to cope with dominant kinesthetic pupils because they can’t sit quietly for long, and if you have a loud class, dominant auditive students could be in disadvantage. Luckily technology is there to help once more: Thanks to mobile devices we can have videos, podcasts, simulations and interactive exercises to cover the needs of all pupils and students at the same time. Using technology in the classroom helps students and pupils learn each at their own pace, work in a team and develop their individual skills.