One of my favourite free tools I use with my students is Future Me.  Future Me is a simple online program that allows you to send yourself an email in future.  You simply type in your email and set the date and Future Me takes care of the rest for you.

Future Me is such an easy program to use!

My students use Future Me to:

• Set goals and send them to the future as a way of being reminded what their goals were.
• Make predictions about what they will learn
• Remind themselves of habits they want to change or new things they would like to learn

One of the reasons I like Future Me is because it activates one of the greatest factors of intrinsic motivation; that is goal setting. Future Me acts as a fun program that allows you to set goals and then check your progress after a defined amount of time.  Another reason that I like Future me is that it is not just an educational tool – you can use it to send yourself funny messages, reminders etc

How to use Future Me:

1. Go to futureme.org
2. Type in your email address, subject and email content
3. Select the date you want the email to be delivered on (must be at least one month in the future)
4. Click submit

A couple of points to consider:

• You should always make your emails private. If they don’t they will appear on the right hand side of the screen
• The emails on the right are occasionally inappropriate for students. I tend not to point out the fact that the emails are there and most students don’t bother to read them.

Let me know how you go with this great free tool

Activity: How smart is your Right foot?

Give your students these simple instructions – play it up to make it even more fun (I offer prizes etc)

1. While sitting down, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

2. Now, while doing this, draw the number ’6′ in the air with your right hand.

The students find that their foot will change direction.  No matter how hard they try they won’t be able to make it go the other way.

The reason for the change in direction is that the signal from the left brain and right brain get mixed up.  By getting your students to do this fun activity before they start a lesson engages the brain and gets them ready for learning.  I have found that I can do this over and over again and the students don’t tire of trying to outsmart their foot.

Enjoy!

In the last post we looked at how to engage the brain in learning.  We looked at how the Reticular Activating System (RAS) acts as a filter which gives priority to information that is new or alerts our curiosity.  The brain is hard wired to make predictions and then will give its attention to determining if that prediction will prove true.

After the information passes through the RAS it then passes to another part of the brain called the amygdala which acts like a switch.  The amygdala ‘decides’ whether the information will go to the reactive part of your brain (the part responsible for the fight or flight response) or the part of your brain that is involved in reflective thinking and conscious thought (the prefrontal cortex).

In the younger years the prefrontal cortex is not as well developed as the reactive parts of the brain, especially when exposed to situations involving:

• Stress
• Frustration
• Anxiety
• Boredom

So what does mean to us as teachers?

If we can reduce (note I didn’t say eliminate) the above causes from a student’s classroom experience we allow them to enter a more alert and relaxed state allowing information to flow more freely through the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex).  Now the reality is that we are not the saviours of the world! It is not realistic for teachers to take responsibility for the emotional state of each of our students.  We can however take steps to teach our students the necessary skills to deal with stress in a positive way.  This Post on Habits of the Mind deals with this.

Two strategies that I use in my class to teach students to be aware of their emotional state and to deal with their emotions in a positive way is:

1. By conducting a mask activity (see tomorrows post)
2. Allowing them to journal about the days activities.

So to recap…

As teachers it is best to engage your students in learning by arousing their curiosity allowing them to make predictions about what the lesson is about.  This causes the brain to pay attention to its prediction to see if it was correct.  The second key to engaging the brain in learning is to try and provide learning environments that are as free as possible from stress, boredom, anxiety and frustration.  This allows the information to travel to the thinking part of the brain and become part of our conscious thought.

What do you do with a student who is inattentive or consistently distracted in class?

Each one of us are constantly being bombarded with information via our five senses (taste, touch, smell, hearing, seeing), yet not all that information reaches our conscious awareness.  Each piece of information has to travel through a part of our brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS).  The RAS acts as a filter or a grid only allowing vital information through to our brain and therefore stopping our brain becoming overloaded with stimuli.  Sometimes a student can be inattentive or attentive to the wrong thing because their RAS is not allowing the correct information through.

The brain had been programmed to allow certain stimuli through.  The main type of information that will always get through the RAS to the ‘thinking brain’ is:

• Anything new or novel.  For example a change in environment, a different sound, smell, sight etc.
• Anything that could be perceived as a threat.

Anything else has the potential to be filtered out.

The following two step process will help you as a teacher to engage the brain in such a way that we promote learning and we increase our chances of our lesson content getting past the RAS to the thinking part of the brain?

Once the students have made a prediction the brain will give its whole attention to finding out whether it was correct or not.

Step 1: Remove any elements of what might be perceived by the student as a threat.

This includes all the obvious threats such as peer pressure and the fear of failure but also needs to include some of the less obvious threats such as what will the lesson be about? Will the lesson be too challenging?

Step 2: Engage the brain by providing novel stimuli.

The brain is hard wired to be curious towards anything new.  It loves to predict the future and will give full attention to anything that ‘catches its attention’.  Some of the strategies that will work are…

• Play some music as the students enter the room
• Wear something different.  this could be a hat, jewellery etc
• Change the set up of your room
• Speak with a different tone or pace
• Display a picture that is only loosely associated with the lesson content and have the students predict what the lesson will be about

The possibilities are endless the main thing is that you introduce something new and have the students try and make a prediction.  Once they have made a prediction the brain will give its whole attention to finding out whether it was correct or not.