Making Learning Visual: Helping Students Engage
Engage Students, Encourage Interaction
Learn Together
How a Vanier College Instructor Connects Real Life With Physics
Science and physics in particular, is traditionally presented as a subject of laws and formulas where there is no place for debate or dialogue. But discussions are an essential part of doing science. Students learn best when they share their observations, interpret evidence, and explain their findings to peers and teachers. Rhys Adams uses Visual Classrooms to get students working together to make meaningful connections between physics concepts and their own experiences.
Vanier College Is an English Speaking College Serving Over 6,000 Students in Montreal, Quebec
Testimony
When we use Visual Classrooms, all of my students are engaged in deeply meaningful discussions about applying the concepts I am teaching them. Students report that using Visual Classrooms makes them more likely to come to class and more likely to stick with the course. And students’ physics conceptual test scores are off the charts!
— Rhys Adams, Vanier College
Experiences
Rhys used Visual Classrooms to bring students' lives and voices into his physics classroom. He created a Visual Classrooms activity focused on Newton’s Third Law and the forces arising between pairs of interacting objects. As homework, Rhys asked students to take or find a sequence of photos of two interacting objects, before, during, and after the interaction and post it to Visual Classrooms. In class, students discussed their photos in groups and were asked to draw a pair of free-body diagrams for the objects in the photo and post them to Visual Classrooms.
Rhys asked his students to refine their diagrams and to describe the scenario and explanations with a new vocabulary; to provide feedback on teammates’ diagrams; to use their feedback to correct their own diagram; and to explain how and why their choice of system changed. This was easy for students since all of this information was available on Visual Classrooms' collaborative workspace. And Rhys was able to manage and facilitate students’ multiple, evolving conversations as they were happening in real time.