Knowledge
Innovative Solutions: Using Ed-Tech to Enhance SEL Skills and Promote Student Success
With SEL practices come opportunities for students to learn some of the most important social-emotional skills, like self-awareness, goal setting, social awareness, and more
As many teachers know, there’s always some new form of pedagogy to implement in teaching to improve learning outcomes for students. As an educator in Sunbeam Ballia, our faculty learned a whole lot about social-emotional learning, which many in the education world now refer to simply as SEL. I discovered this pedagogy to be extremely important for me while educating diverse sets of students. While students learn many intellectual skills in the classroom, that impact can plateau without a strong social-emotional core.
Technology can help students be more comfortable sharing their experiences. For example, our students can create a video diary to document their daily activities and reflect on their emotions and reactions to different situations. Using tools such as Flip to record a reflection, or capturing ideas using Canva or Adobe Creative, or Cloud Express to create visual representations of their emotions or design a timeline of their progress and set goals, can help. Digital tools such as Kahoot, Quizizz, and Google Forms help create self-assessment quizzes for students. With these tools, students can self-assess their knowledge, skills, and attitudes and receive authentic, meaningful, and timely feedback on their performance.
Creating digital portfolios with tools like Spaces EDU, Book Creator, and other similar tools allows students to explore the evidence of the work they have done. This shifts their focus to the process of learning itself. Finally, personalized learning plans through choice boards, class playlists, or HyperDocs lead to increased student engagement, improved self-awareness, and greater metacognition, and give students more control over their learning.
There are many benefits of social-emotional learning, including helping students learn to work as part of a team, helping them manage their own emotions in the classroom, and helping them build stronger connections to their school work among others.
With SEL practices come opportunities for students to learn some of the most important social-emotional skills, like self-awareness, goal setting, social awareness, and more. And, when adding educational technologies in the school, they can unlock new sets of benefits and expand the power of SEL.
Expressing emotions in a social setting – The connection between SEL and technology, when you think about it, is a fairly logical one. This is because students can create more authentic learning when they use tech tools in a real way. Linking instructional content to both their emotions and using technology helps make the content much more real. It also generally results in students showing greater amounts of interest and passion.
Tech Enhances Social-Emotional Learning – Though not commonly associated with social-emotional learning and social and emotional skills, students can certainly learn other relevant skills through SEL experiences. These include skills like persistence, practicing empathy, problem-solving, and redesigning experiments to overcome previous failed attempts. Particularly when educational technology comes into play, the ability to persist through failures can take a lot of different routes. Besides this, technology can align with SEL in a few different ways. Students may start to connect more deeply with academic content and develop more meaningful intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. Not only is there potential for EdTech incorporation to make SEL more meaningful, but there’s also potential for it to help students learn key 21st-century skills in the process.
Teachers can use various tools to better understand how students are doing with SEL skill development and their overall mindsets. They can try formative assessments or capture other forms of data to show students how they can improve. This is especially useful if they exhibit negative behavior at any point ( but, educators can also track positive behavior).
Surprising SEL tools for the classroom
Other forms of technology can also help students manage their emotions throughout the day. Devices like smartwatches, for example, can track stress by measuring key physiological indicators and relay that feedback to teachers. They can then use that information to offer an alternative option for those students. Technologies like virtual and augmented reality are also viable in situations like this. If teachers sense a student is frustrated, stressed out, or anxious, specialized VR content can help them return to their comfort zone. AR or VR can immerse students in deep breathing exercises, for example, redirecting their entire focus until they’re okay. Essentially, it all comes back to making sure students are functioning at a high level socially and emotionally. Then, they can get the most out of learning with help from technology.
Students can use digital platforms, like Flipgrid or Wakelet, to share their thoughts or new things they’ve learned on important topics. By voicing real emotions, they can better connect with the content, their peers, and themselves—the main goals of SEL.
The Social-Emotional Learning Foundation in Different Subjects
One way to bring technology into social-emotional learning is when teaching public speaking. Many children (and adults) get nervous about public speaking, so educators can use this as an opportunity to help students manage those emotions. One example is teachers using a microphone in class and handing it to students when they have a question. This helps them feel more comfortable in class discussions or when answering questions. And, this added real-world relevance can help them overcome fears of speaking in front of an audience. Another way to help is by making time for students to self-reflect. Many social-emotional skills have to do with self-improvement and things students can do on their own. Reflecting on, recognizing, and recording examples of positive behavior can help them build on what they did right.
Using Robotics for Education and SEL
Finally, educational robotics has shown promising results as a technology that helps with social-emotional development in kids. Particularly when students have social or language disorders, they can use various educational robotics tools to communicate by programming the robot to say certain messages or execute certain actions that indicate how they’re feeling.
Author – Arpita Singh, Principal, Sunbeam School, Ballia, UP
