The ultimate guide to implementing digital learning

Change is happening rapidly. Young people are growing up in a world filled with revolutionary technological advances. More than ever, the ways we communicate, work, and access information have transformed. 

However, one sector is trailing far behind—education. Here, technology has only just trickled down into the classroom.

Educators and researchers alike have shared many thoughts about just why digital tools have had a different impact on education, ranging from a lack of professional learning and funding to the need for radical new pedagogies. 

Despite this uncertainty, Ontario’s Ministry of Education requires schools to adapt to online learning, and few know where to start. Time drains, delays, and anxieties creep in as schools wrestle with taking advantage of what tech can offer. 

In this guide, we unpack our top 4 strategies for optimizing learning through digital technologies. You will find practical tips and tricks for bringing your classroom into the 21st century. 

Maximize impact and minimize time

There is a global engagement crisis, with statistics showing that around 40% of high school students are disengaged. To meet the challenge of engaging a new generation of learners, some schools are pursuing novel teaching practices, such as New Pedagogies for Deep Learning.

Naturally, completely changing how we teach and learn sounds daunting and unrealistic. However, educators can create profound and engaging learning tasks online when they have the right flexible tools to support them. These tasks can motivate students and provide sufficient depth and rigour for content mastery and developing much-needed 21st-century skills.

For example, edtech platforms allow educators to assign learning tasks to students, helping teachers be more efficient by saving time on content creation and curation.

Teachers can use content from teaching and learning platforms like Atomi as the basis for a task, or use Atomi's rigorously designed resources on their own to drive engagement and buy-in from their students. The right resources go to the heart of the issue and can re-engage learners.

Atomi tip:
Select one or two 21st-century skills to focus on each topic. Focusing on specific skills helps students hone them more carefully and intentionally, allowing them to reflect and grow from week to week. It also helps reduce the cognitive and administrative load on teachers. 

Foster student autonomy 

Learners need to develop specific character skills to succeed in their post-school lives. Educators are central in encouraging students to take responsibility for their learning journey and fostering those skills. However, when juggling competing priorities, it can seem impossible to embed yet another learning focus into lessons. 

Atomi tip:
Encourage students to help themselves first. When students inevitably approach with questions like, “I don’t know where to start studying,” encourage them to reflect on their learning before giving them advice and guidance. Questions that ask them to articulate where they are stuck are particularly helpful.

‍But aside from tweaking pedagogy, using digital platforms that seamlessly integrate student autonomy into the experience will reduce stress, save time, and ensure the development of those character skills. For example, Atomi encourages students to take ownership of their learning through:

• Personalized revision reminders: As students complete quizzes on Atomi, their marks, effort, and engagement are used to calculate a personalized strength score. Specifically, how students have done and how long it has been since they visited the content determines how strong or weak the score is. Since this score is dynamic and decreases over time, Atomi offers personalized revision reminders at the top of their course and via email, focused on the topics of greatest weakness for each student. Focusing on weaknesses and not strengths builds resilience and a growth mindset in students and maximizes the impact of the study on their outcomes.‍
• Revision sessions: Students can take this further and create custom revision sessions by selecting what they want to revise, how long they want to study, and what question types they want to face. Atomi then automatically generates a session with questions that match their requirements. ‍
• Course access: Students can see the entire course on the platform. Full access allows students to move at a pace that suits their learning needs, providing opportunities to practice spaced revision and giving them the relevant context of course progression. 
  

Together, these features help build students’ capacity for motivation and perseverance, which will serve them well beyond the classroom. 

Start small 

The inclusion of digital technologies can feel like a big mountain to climb. It may be cliche, but reminding yourself to start small can help create consistent and sustainable digital classroom habits.

Look for areas in your classroom that already need improving and start there. By picking something already causing concern, you are more likely to feel motivated and see positive, impactful change more quickly.  Concerns vary from teacher to teacher, but we have unpacked some common issues for teachers to get you thinking. 

Digitize homework

Teachers spend hours finding meaningful work for students to complete outside of the classroom. The time it takes to find, assign, and mark student work is immense. Atomi makes searching, assigning, and marking homework much more efficient. Moreover, through features like the Strength Score, differentiation is far quicker since the platform analyzes student results and recommends appropriate next steps to educators and students, leading to higher engagement and lower learning gaps. Taking advantage of these efficiencies allows more time for 1-on-1 teaching in the classroom and for exploring topics in-depth through classroom discussions.

Differentiate with ease

Meeting student needs is becoming increasingly challenging. Teachers often find their classrooms split into two or three levels, all of which can change at a moment's notice. This split makes it difficult for educators to plan and deliver content pitched to the appropriate depth. Implementing tech can help educators differentiate lessons to ensure each student is challenged and engaged at the appropriate level. Atomi allows educators to create different work paths for individual students in a few clicks of a button. These personalized learning pathways are seamless and discrete and can be leveraged to track progress and celebrate student wins on an individual basis.

Arm yourself with data

Traditional classroom settings, where students sit in lecture-style lessons engaging in passive learning, are becoming extinct. Not only is this learning unmotivating and disengaging, but it does not equip students with the appropriate skills to be successful in post-school life. However, students working on different topics and tasks at various levels of depth and at different times is an unsustainable practice for teachers using traditional tools. Teachers need to know who needs help or extension and where. Traditional classroom methods make this process difficult and tedious, often leaving a student (or more) falling through the cracks. 

Technological advances have allowed educators to revolutionize their teaching without adding to the workload. Many of these tools save teachers time and effort while significantly impacting student achievement. One of the most significant improvements has been how educators collect feedback on student learning, particularly as learning tasks diversify.

At Atomi, we provide educators with various tools to track student progress and easily implement support.

Progress reports 

Progress reports provide information on how students have performed in a lesson and allow teachers to implement meaningful differentiation in only a few clicks. The report provides essential information, including completion rate and average mark, that allows for quick feedback. Progress reports also draw out misconceptions at the class level by highlighting challenging questions, which is essential for addressing those misconceptions early. 

Markbook

Markbook is a continuous reporting tool that makes it easy to understand students' performance. Teachers can see:

• How each student is progressing through the content
• Student's mark by topic
• And, who has been completing their assigned tasks.

Teachers can also sort, export, and assign tasks based on these results, which is useful when discussing student performance with parents. By arming yourself with data, you can give specific feedback and guidance to parents on student strengths and weaknesses. 

Class insights

Atomi insights allow teachers to view how students use Atomi. Educators can filter to see historical usage over time and break usage down by classes or individual students. These insights will help schools identify the power students, how usage changes over the year, and where there may be areas for improvement. 

Atomi tip:
Many schools use the insights tool to gamify their classrooms, creating healthy competition based on excellent study habits rather than academic performance. It is surprising to see how a little competition ignites student engagement. 

Final thoughts 

A utopian classroom environment is only achievable with the right tools. Educators cannot improve student learning without breaking from traditional habits, which often seem too daunting. 

But Rome was not built in a day. While this guide outlines four ways digital tools can quickly alleviate common classroom issues, we don't need to adopt them all in one hit. By selecting one or two tips initially and building them into daily classroom practices, educators will develop consistent digital habits and soon wonder how they did without them in the first place. 

Download the full PDF guide to implementing digital learning in the classroom.