Liberty LEADS

Educause defines the backchannel as a secondary electronic conversation that takes place at the same time as a conference session, lecture, or instructor-led learning activity.

teachers seem to be happy when students publish their work for purposes of grading, but don’t do anything with it afterwards. I think we’re seeing symptoms of what I call “The Keillor Effect” coined by Garrison Keillor in this quote:  “I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers…. The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175.”

As a warm up in the beginning of class, I took standards and turned them into the following questions: Could you use the work that this group to solve a similar problem? Give an example. What problem strategies did this group use when solving this problem. Can you suggest another? Did the makers of this video “leave out a step” or go into “too much” detail? Explain. Can you suggest a different approach to solving this problem? Did this help you learn? Why or why not was this effective or ineffective?

So challenge them to communicate back to you.

The integration of face to face and online components in a blended course is essential for student satisfaction with a course.

A blended learning approach combines face to face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities to form an integrated instructional approach.

The goal of a blended approach is to join the best aspects of both face to face and online instruction.

students rotate on a fixed schedule or at the teacher’s discretion between learning modalities, at least one of which is online learning.

Lab Rotation – a Rotation-model implementation in which within a given course or subject (e.g., math), students rotate on a fixed schedule or at the teacher’s discretion among locations on the brick-and-mortar campus.

Individual Rotation – a Rotation-model implementation in which within a given course or subject (e.g., math), students rotate on an individually customized

He uses the flexibility to manage time, place and pace, accommodating his learning needs and preferences.

students have the option to combine online and traditional courses as part of their academic schedules.

What are the top three reasons you like your blended classes?” They rattled off several reasons. These included liking how the course sites hosted their work and progress, allowing them to use fun technology tools, and giving them access to their courses anytime that worked for them.

The Scribe

except for test days, a different student is responsible for the daily scribe post.

Over the length of the course these scribe posts grow into the textbook for the course, collectively authored by the students; one student at a time, one day at a time.

This is the last generation of students who will carry backpacks to school.

Never in the history of education has the delivery of instruction been so drastically altered so incredibly quickly

Traditional professional development, however—the kind in which teachers attend a one-time workshop or conference to learn a new teaching method, for example—hasn't provided much help in bringing her classroom into the 21st century.

That reality needs to change,

focus, with razor-sharp attention, on what students need to learn, rather than on how to use a specific device.