What Is Active Learning?
Active learning is a teaching methodology that involves students’ full attention and participation when they learn. It’s the act of learning by “doing,” not through traditional lectures or slideshows. With active learning as a more involved and student-focused teaching strategy, students are able to think critically, engage creatively, and learn effectively.
Benefits of Active Learning
Active learning is changing the world of education, pushing toward a more inventive, technical future for the next generation of innovators, leaders, and developers.
- Keeps students engaged. By training teachers to use active learning strategies and identifying which activities can be used with technology, students become more involved in their learning experience. Teachers can achieve their curriculum goals while students fully comprehend daily lessons, becoming more collaborative, productive, and creative.
- Develop technological skills. By integrating technology-related activities and programs in teachers’ curriculum, students can develop skills in AI, machine learning, and simulation modeling during their daily lessons. For example, with an activity on classifying the diversity of plants with Python software, students can learn about data science while also developing a computational thinking mindset.
- Expand innovative skills through technology. By using technology in an academic environment, students can also develop specialized mindsets in design and computational thinking that will benefit them in the future. These lessons can help students inside and outside of the classroom, varying from teamwork, collaboration, and tolerance, to creativity, communication, and innovation.
- Build toward future careers. Preparing students for careers centered in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an investment that administrators and parents are encouraged to make. Employers are already adapting to industries for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, so preparing students during their education with active learning approaches is crucial for the evolution into a tech-centered future.
Planning for Active Learning
In order to prepare students for success, teachers and educators need training and lesson plans that are designed for active learning. Intel’s Skills for Innovation site has more information on all the skills, active learning lesson plans, and courses that are necessary for you to help set up students for success, no matter where they learn.
Skills for Innovation
Rethinking technology’s role is crucial for the generation that will drive the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Intel® Skills for Innovation Framework begins with planning for future mindsets, skill sets, and social-emotional skills. This approach to education not only fosters these skills and mindsets for a job-ready mentality, but it also allows students to develop more confidence in their tech abilities within a technologically advanced future.
Professional Development
Ongoing professional development is another critical factor in education transformation. Teachers need innovative, future-ready, and active learning strategies to make effective use of technology in the classroom, whether it be virtual or in person. Intel’s professional development courses help teachers move toward mastering those skills, improving their teaching strategies.
Active Learning Activities and Programs
Some examples of active learning in the classroom include youth curricula such as the Intel® AI for Youth program and Intel® Future Skills program, as well as competitive esports programs.
Intel® AI for Youth
Driven in partnership with governments in eight countries, Intel® AI for Youth is a program that teaches students about AI, data, natural language processing, and computer vision. Launched in 2019, the AI for Youth program aims to teach as many as 30 million current and future workers about AI by 2030. Examples of projects include an app that helps match tutors with students, a webcam with computer vision to identify occupancy, and an AI-based program to detect cyberbullying online.
Intel® Future Skills
Intel® Future Skills helps build confidence and skills for today’s students through technology and innovative experiences. Intel collaborates with partners to produce the right resources and technology to provide employability training and hands-on innovative experiences. By preparing students for future careers, expanded mindsets and new experiences become vital to learning skills in problem-solving, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
Competitive Esports in K–12 Education
Today, competitive esports have become an increasingly popular extracurricular activity. Esports, just one of many active learning games, can teach students social-emotional skills such as leadership, teamwork, strategic thinking, and resilience—all while they develop technical and computing skills. Teachers also usually see an improvement in students’ grades, self-esteem, and focus when they participate in any extracurricular. Esports has also been able to establish more equitable game play with its participants, allowing teams with students of different genders, ages, and able-bodiedness.
Technologies for Active Learning
At Intel, we believe that technology should be administered into active learning strategies in order for them to work efficiently; technology draws the line between active and passive learning. Teachers and educators should also have a detailed plan to implement active learning into the classroom. Then, students will be able to develop technological and critical-thinking skills that can help them flourish in higher education and future careers.
Active learning can be used at home or in the classroom and schools need to be ready to easily integrate to anywhere learning environments. Then, students can leverage their tech skills into blended learning environments, allowing them to further engage with their academics.
Size the Performance You Need
For students to receive the full benefits of active learning, they should have access to technology that is readily available via personal computer (PC). Selecting the right device is crucial for an active learning environment where educators use tech-related projects or programs in their lesson plans. Students will need the best fitting devices for their academic success, whether they receive their education online, at home, or both.
When looking for the right device for anywhere learning, there are many things to consider: learning environment, device functionality, manageability and deployment, and cost. Intel has a vast portfolio of processors that can run as many or as few applications as needed depending on the performance and apps necessary for class.
For an elementary school student, remote learning and digital content access could be all that’s needed in a PC. However, a middle school student would also need programming, digital content creation, and data science applications. Then, a high school student would also need AI/machine learning and simulation software on top of that. This graphic shows the range of educational activities and the Intel® processor performance each PC would require. The more applications that run at once, the more performance is needed.