According to the Ministry of Education, Blended Learning is
Blended learning uses the tools of a learning management system (LMS) to teach and support learning in a face-to-face class. Through blended learning, K-12 students can access high-quality course materials, course calendars, and assignments during and outside school hours.
Students can also take part in face-to-face lessons and communicate with their teacher and classmates using a suite of secure online tools […] These tools help students learn or review key concepts, stay organized, show what they have learned, submit assignments, track their achievement, and communicate with others.Having taught in all three divisions, I have been "lucky" to have experienced the various challenges each division presents. Below is a look at how I have explored using Blended Learning in Primary, Junior and Intermediate classrooms.
Primary Division: In primary, which is my current division, I have been looking a lot at using the flipped classroom aspect of Blended Learning to support my students. Using our LMS (D2L) and the Showme app for ipad, I create mini-lessons that introduce or pre-teach the concept I am covering in class the next day. When the students enter the classroom, they are already coming equipped with a general idea of what we are covering, an understanding of the big idea and a confidence through familiarity with the material.
The benefits of this have been significant to both my practice and my students success. Students special needs are able to access the material easier because they are coming to class with their "minds on" to the concept. This familiarity has also reduced the anxiety a number of my students faced to new concepts and thus enabled them to engage in the class. As a French Immersion teacher, this addressed an FSL concern for reinforcing the vocabulary of study as well as supported listening for understanding. The students in my math and literacy support groups are then instructed to use these videos to discuss with their parents. Teaching their parents builds self-efficacy and is a powerful way to learn.
Junior Division: While working in the Junior division, D2L was still in its infancy with our board and so I decided to continue using Edmodo. I really like the "Facebook" look of Edmodo and it is extremely ease to use for both teachers and students. I liked that it functioned like a shared blog and the students could share their work and it was immediately presented in the feed. It was really easy for the students to embed their work from Storybird, Popplet and Voki. The ease of ability for students to upload audio and visual pieces, provided students with special needs an access to sharing we had not before experienced.
However, the real learning came from the students ability to provide feedback both at the carpet and online. We began by creating success criteria for an assignment in class, collaborated in their Tribes to develop a plan and then applied the criteria to the work online. Our in class discussions, made for powerful online feedback...powerful and timely. The students were not only helping others, but they were learning from them and in turn bettering their work, their French language skills in oral, listening, reading and writing and creating a Blended Learning community.
Intermediate Division: The thing I miss the most about teaching Intermediate is all of the awesome things you can do with these kids. They are able to work independently and their ability to use feedback is significantly more advanced. Using D2L as my LMS, I was most pleased with using Grader app for supporting my students success in a Blended Learning scenario.
In the classroom we worked collaboratively to unpack the learning goals and develop the success criteria. I would then set them loose to begin their work. Throughout the process, students would submit sections for feedback through the dropbox option. I would then use the Grader app to draw, markup, highlight, underline, and add inline audio comments anywhere in the assignment. I was able to offer specific, timely and personalized feedback to support them in their final product. Students with special needs were able to improve their work through the clarity of the feedback structure and my time spent correcting French written grammar eventually decreased as a result as well. I will be looking to draw this tool into Primary this year as we explore the use of ePortfolio in D2L.
CLICK HERE FOR THE D2L GRADER APP
As the stigma around technology in the classroom becomes decreases along with the price, Blended Learning is becoming a much more popular approach to student success. I am excited about the possibilities this will bring to my students and my personal growth as an educator.
There is still some skepticism (or maybe just confusion) about using Blended learning at the younger ages. I teach a Junior ABQ couse and I often get questions about what or how to "teach" with Blended Learning at the Junior level. What I notice is that people sometimes confuse Blended learning with having students use Web 2.0 Tools or other online tools. It is not the same thing. Blended learning is actually supporting your curriculum or topic in explicit ways and allow students to use online collaborative tools to reach specific goals. As you have noted and clarified in your blog, blended learning is when the teacher combines face-to-face teaching methods with online teaching methods. Your examples of submitting assignments and getting feedback online demonstrates this well. I have not tried Grader App but plan to investigate it further. Thanks for sharing the link Lee and for sharing/showing others why this is so important .
ReplyDeleteWell one thing is sure – Blended Learning is definitely beneficial for many reasons, e.g. learner’s engagement increases when dealing with various types of content or the feedback is improved. What I think is the most important thing for students is that it might turn learning into fun – don’t you think?
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