Resources to help provide multiple means of engagement:
Whole Class, top-level engagement:
One of the best ways to motivate and engage students is make them feel empowered. A good learning management system can help with that. Sometimes the district will pay for a system, but it may not work for your or your students, or they don't pay for the level of integration that would best work for you. A good, teacher-level, free, alternative is Schoology. There are paid versions, but the classroom-level options are available for free. I am still exploring this site, but it's exciting for me.
Using a class website and making it a living part of the classroom is great for student engagement and, in my experience, it's also a great way to make missing assignments and/or make-up available to students regardless of whether or not they are in class. I have triedGoogle sites which was much too time-intensive and finicky for me at the time; however, they do have a new interface which seems much more user-friendly and intuitive. I have also used weebly and wix to try and make a class website. By far I have liked and used my weebly account the most, though I would say that you need to make sure to use a education account, it has special perks and advantages for teachers, including the ability to create student logins and student-created webpages.
Another way to engage students in different ways is through the use of technology which pushes infrmation to the students as they are navigating through the lesson. There are several different sites and ways to do this, but I wanted to highlight a couple which were new to me and which I started using.
Nearpod is a great technology which pushes content to students, but it is paced by the instructor and must happen in real time. This can be great for making sure that all students are on task or forcing quick responses from students, but it does mean that students cannot self-pace. Another drawback to nearpod is that free accounts are capped at total users. If you are going to use this resource, be sure to duplicate your nearpod for each individual class period so you don't inadvertently exceed the cap of 40 per session and lock students out.
Classkick is very similar to nearpod, although I think it has some key improvements. Nearpod will allow you make quizzes and true or false questions, which classkick does not do, but if you're wanting to use open-ended questions, I like this format better. The platform seems intuitive to students and they are able to move through it quickly. You can create an assignment and assign multiple class periods or rosters to that assignment. Then you just give each class the proper code and they sign in to the program. As long as they enter their name the same way it each time, the program remembers them and their work (if they misspell their name, it enters them as a new student, but it's easy to delete these mistakes). As the instructor you type, draw, or speak the question, you can embed a file, picture or video and you can upload a powerpoint and have it translate it to the class kick. Students can also respond to the question by recording audio, uploading images or files, typing or drawing. And, a key factor for me, students are self-paced through the assignment. You can view their responses in real-time, and they can virtually raise their hands (and you can virtually answer their questions), but they don't have to wait on other students to move on if they are ready.
Small Group or Individual Level Engagement:
One way for students to contribute to a community and collaborate together is to use classroom blogs. You can use any blogging software for a classroom blog, but it's better to use one of the following because they tend to be approved by school district blocking software. Blogger (which is now owned by google), edublogs (which is an extension of wordpress) and if you do a classroom website, most sites allow for a built-in blog that you can create student logins for.
One way I've seen which is very effective students to take turns posting to the class blog outlining the key events, topics, etc. of the day for those students who are absent.
Students can keep reflective blogs that document their learning throughout a learning or project or address the roadblocks they faced and how they overcame them.
Students can keep blogs where they set and track their goals or how they connect their learning to their own experiences and/or lives.
Another key way to increase student engagement is through student choice. There are lots of different ways to incorporate student choice:
Seesaw allows students to caputre and/or create products which demonstrate their learning and uplaod them to the site to create a portfolio of projects. You could easily have students capture a set number of projects/assignments per term and then grade the final portfolio.
Articles and blogs about increasing engagement:
This is a great article from edutopia about ways to increase student engagement. One of the key takeaways from this article is the difference in method and motivation between technologies which are used as tools and those which are used as tutors.
This is another article from edutopia about student engagement, from the perspective of the student.
This article about the key principles of engagment (although it does not follow the CAST model), also notes the difference between performance orientations and mastery orientations and makes the claim that students are more engaged when they approach tasks from a mastery orientation.
One of the risks of working with technology is that it changes rapidly and sometimes without warning. I have made every effort to ensure that the resources linked here are accurate. I intend for this to be a living and evolving resource and hope that I will continue to use and check these links; however, please contact me if you find that the links are broken or the resources are no longer available.