Does your school have a policy to turn off all electronics when entering the classroom? Great idea to decrease on distractions, right? Or is it?
Students today are technology savvy and use it often to gather information. Knowing how students learn today, there is opportunity use technology in the classroom.
Here are some ideas:
- Encourage your students to use an app such as Evernote [not a free app] to take notes during class. They can share with peers.
- Instead of lecturing about medications, have the students use their own electronic device and obtain the content on their own. They can fill out a medication card to either turn in for grading or for future clinical or simulation experiences.
- Instead of telling students treatments of a disease process, have the students work in pairs to obtain the information themselves. Allow them to share what they learned. Make sure they tell you “why” the nurse should take specific actions. Rationale is so important for deeper understanding.
- Give them a case study with the following questions for them to explore either on their own or in groups using the internet.
- What are the important patient findings?
- What do the findings mean?
- What is the patient’s priority? Why?
- What are expected patient outcomes?
- What actions should you [the nurse] take?
- How will you know the actions taken are effective?
- Have the students develop a patient teaching flyer about an assigned disease process. (assign a unique disease to each student if possible) print and share with entire class or have students report out to the class.
- When a student asks a question of you during lecture, have the class look up the answer and discuss as a class.
- Incorporate NCLEX style questions in your lecture for the students to answer on an app such as Kahoot, Google Classroom, Teams meet.
If students are busy on their electronic devices doing something that you are asking them to do in the classroom, there will be little time for them to be doing something else. Gen Z students are amazing at multitasking, which is a great ability. Let them thrive in their own environment!