Keeping students involved through whole-class interaction, hands-on activities, and purposeful technology use.
GUEST COLUMN | by Marcin Joka
Once students put their phones away, a teacher still has a room full of young people to engage. Some are eager to answer questions. Others are confused, distracted, or hoping nobody calls on them. The lesson must give them a reason to participate.
‘The lesson must give them a reason to participate.’
For U.S. schools and districts introducing phone restrictions, that is the next challenge: preserving interaction, timely feedback, and student participation without relying on personal devices. I believe this creates an opportunity to design lessons in which technology supports shared experiences and gives students more reasons to look up, talk, and explore.
Keep the Interaction
Smartphones offer a convenient way to run quizzes, collect answers, and check for understanding. Those functions remain valuable when personal phones are put away. Teachers still need to hear from the entire class and identify students who need to have the concept explained to them again.
Screenless student response devices offer one way to preserve that interaction. Students can answer questions, participate in team challenges, and receive immediate feedback while following an activity on a shared classroom display. The teacher can review responses and decide whether to move forward or revisit a concept.
Each student has a way to contribute without opening a personal device connected to messages, games, and social media. For students who hesitate to raise their hands, answering alongside everyone else using the student response device creates another route into participating in the lesson.
Student response devices are a useful starting point for a lesson, but their value goes beyond encouraging participation. Game elements such as points, timed challenges, and leaderboards can add energy, but a fast or correct response alone does not always show whether a student understands the concept.
By evaluating results across activities, teachers can compare performance, track progress, and identify which concepts students understood easily and which require further explanation. Looking at patterns across the entire class can also reveal whether the lesson and teaching approach were effective. This turns student responses into feedback on both the learning taking place and the teaching process, helping teachers decide what to reinforce, revisit, or approach differently in future lessons.
Bring Learning into the Physical World
Student response devices can show what students know at a particular moment. Hands-on activities that can be done without the use of personal devices offer an engaging way for students to take the next step by asking them to apply their knowledge, observe the result, and explain what happened.
Educational robots can be a good option to provide these types of hands-on activities. In a physics lesson on measurement and units, for example, students can estimate and then measure a robot’s height, width, wheel diameter, or weight. They select appropriate tools, record their results, convert them into different units, and compare their measurements with those of their classmates. When the results differ, they must consider whether they selected the right tool, measured accurately, or converted the units correctly.
A robot can also help students explore distance, speed, and time. A group might plan a route, estimate how far the robot needs to travel, and predict where it will stop. Students then program its movement, observe the result, and compare it with their calculations. If the robot turns too early or stops in the wrong place, they have a concrete problem to investigate and a reason to revise their approach.
A tablet may be used to create the program, but most of the learning happens beyond the screen. Students measure, calculate, test, discuss their observations, and explain the changes they make. These decisions give the teacher useful evidence of whether students can apply a concept, rather than simply recall the correct answer. Rotating responsibilities also helps ensure that everyone participates in the investigation.
Robotics can support learning beyond coding, math, and physics. Paired with structured teaching kits and lesson materials, a robot can become part of activities in science, storytelling, and social-emotional learning.
Students might program a journey through a story they have written or use a robot to act out a fictional classroom conflict. The shared scenario gives them something concrete to discuss: what happened, how the characters might feel, and what they could do differently.
Use Technology to Engage in, Not Distract from, Learning
Screen-free learning can describe a specific activity without requiring every minute of the school day to be screen-free. A shared display may guide a discussion, a tablet may support one stage of a robotics challenge, and assistive and communication technologies remain essential for some students. The aim is to make deliberate choices about where students’ attention goes and whether every child truly needs an individual screen for the task.
Start by choosing one device-dependent lesson and rethink it without student screens. Keep the learning goal intact while introducing hands-on activities or other technologies that don’t require all students to be at a screen. By balancing students’ use of devices with engaging, hands-on student activities, you support student learning while complying with screen time bans.
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Marcin Joka is co-founder and CEO of Photon Education, the company behind Photon Robot, educational teaching kits, and Classwise, a classroom engagement system with screenless student response devices. His work focuses on helping teachers combine hands-on learning, whole-class participation, and purposeful technology use. Connect with Marcin on LinkedIn.
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