Research into traditional teaching methods has revealed that interactive teaching is extremely useful for engaging pupils. Modern teaching methods rely on using interactive teaching methods to bring out the best in students and ensure they are learning their lessons effectively.
Today, we are going to check out how coin flips and wheel spinners are useful for interactive teaching. We will check out five different ways in which they can be used to engage students in the classroom.
How Wheel Spinners and Coins Flips Can Be Used for Interactive Teaching
Given below are five general ways in which teachers and educators can engage their students using coin flips and wheel spinners.
1. Teaching Math Lessons
Some specific math lessons can be taught easily with the help of a digital coin or wheel spinner. Concepts of probability and statistics can be easily taught with the help of these technologies.
Probabilities are hard to understand for younger students. After all, they don’t know how they can be defined using mathematics. Teachers can get them started with a coin to showcase simple probabilities.
For example, the probability of a coin landing on heads is ½ (0.5). By using ten coin flips, you can show that indeed five times out of ten, the coin lands on heads.
A wheel spinner can be used to showcase more complex probabilities. A digital wheel spinner can be edited to add as many slices as you like. So, you can show more complex probabilities like, what is the chance of a particular slice getting selected out of ten.
2. Decision-Making Exercises
Teaching students how to make decisions for themselves is an important part of education. After all, the whole point of education is to equip the children with enough knowledge so that they can become independent and functional adults.
During classroom activities, make the students use coin flips or wheels to decide on tasks, duties, and even which topics or chapters to cover next. The inclusion of coins and wheels provides several advantages.
For example:
- Students become more used to making decisions.
- The decisions are impartial so they know there is no favoritism going on.
- Since the decisions are vested in random occurrences, there is no blame assignment either.
So, decision-making exercises become better as students learn to deal with the consequences of their decisions in an emotionally safe way.
3. Interactive Quizzes
Normally, most students dread quizzes and tests. That’s because they are afraid to fail, and quizzes are something that they can fail at. Some students become tardy and avoidant because of this fear. This results in a lack of preparation which obviously results in low scores.
By making quizzes interactive and making their teachers can introduce an element of fun. Here’s a simple idea of how that can work.
The questions of a quiz are all listed on a wheel. Add more questions than need to be answered. For example, if the quiz is for ten questions, then have at least fifteen.
The questions the students have to answer are chosen by a wheel spin. This adds some anticipation to the test because some questions might be easier than others. If the wheel chooses such questions, the students will feel elated.
This chance of getting an easier quiz can motivate some students to prepare better and therefore be more engaged in the activity.
Another example is using a coin flip to decide on answers. The way this works is that you prepare a quiz where each question only has two options for answers.
Students fill in the ones they know and the ones they don’t know are decided by a coin flip. This way there is a chance that they can score higher than they initially could. It also makes the quiz feel like a game.
Those are some ways in which quizzes and tests can be made interactive and interesting.
4. Assigning Roles in the Classroom
In most schools, students are assigned some classroom roles that are not related to studying. For example, a student may be tasked with cleaning the white/blackboard before every class starts. Another set of students may be assigned cleaning duty after school ends i.e., they clean their class before leaving for home.
The idea is that the classroom as a place of learning must be treated with respect. By making students clean it, educators instill a sense of responsibility in the students to maintain their classroom.
Understandably, such activities may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If you force students to arbitrarily do these tasks, it may breed resentment.
To avoid this, educators can use randomization tools like coins and wheel spinners. The idea is that by randomly assigning these roles to students, and rotating on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, the students can feel somewhat better about their situation.
This can curb the breeding of resentment to a certain degree and ensure that students do not get tired of their duties.
5. Randomized Grouping for Class Activities
Classroom activities like debating, brainstorming ideas for essays, and self-assessment require grouping of students. Normally, students simply gravitate to their friends and sit with them.
However, this is not conducive to promoting a social learning environment. After all, this results in students simply staying closed off within their cliques.
To rectify this in a fair and unbiased manner, teachers can use a wheel spinner to divide groupings of children. They can put the names of all students on a few different wheels and spin them together. The names that the wheels stop on become one group.
Or you can just spin one wheel multiple times and each name that gets chosen gets hidden. You can make groupings with the three consecutive spin results (or however many you need).
This way, the students know that this was random and they get to expand their social circle.
Conclusion
Interactive teaching is great and you now know how coin flips and wheel spins can help spice it up. So, good luck using these tools in your own classes.