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This is a video shared in the BLiC course as an example of a summarizing project at the end of the course. Instructors who go through this course give some advice to others who are just beginning to look into blended learning. This is a short video with music and text of Liz Peter's final project. Liz teaches 5th grade.

Peter: This blog post by Grant Wiggins (Understanding by Design) is pretty lengthy, but he does a nice job of talking about the pros and cons of "the lecture." While it's simple to say lectures are bad or ineffective because (insert your list here), he traces the instructional strategy of the lecture back to its roots and describes how it came to be such a controversial strategy for teaching. What I like about his post is that he presents both the effective parts about lectures (e.g., sharing thought processes, modeling and sharing cognitive structures) and the ineffective parts (e.g., most undifferentiated approach to teaching) so that we are not just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Instead, we are continuing to ask the question what is the most effective strategy for the instructional situation?

"Aaron Sams and Jon Bergman from Woodland Park, CO have flipped their classrooms on their head. Now, kids watch lectures at home and come to class to do more experiments and interact with the teachers. They've also implemented a Moodle testing solution to verify that the kids have mastered each topic before they can move onto the next. " This is a nice highlight of Jonathan Bergman by our friends over at TechSmith. Here, Mr. Bergman shares a bit of his rationale for moving toward a mastery model in his Chemistry course and how it has allowed for differentiation which is a topic of importance with MyBlend partners.

I have been planning to do an #EdTech review on Socrative and Infuse Learning as they are fantastic tools for getting a healthy pulse of a blended classroom, a checking on prior knowledge, an exit slip, a checking for understanding or even for creating a formative and collaborative quizzing environment for learning. Think clickers on steroids really, but without having to purchase and distribute a uni-function device. The interfaces will allow any web connected device for more in depth responses from the learner that goes beyond multiple choice functionality. In fact, Infuse Learning even goes as far as allowing students to respond to a prompt in real time by drawing a picture and the submissions all get aggregated on the teacher screen so that the class can see everyone's drawings in one main view. Brilliant. I see that @JohnHardison1 beat me to the punch not long ago in promoting the use of these tools. In fact, he even has included chunked video screencast tutorials from his YouTube account embedded right in the post so that you can experience a demonstration about Infuse Learning options from the teacher and student perspective. Nicely done John! I hope our MyBlend community can check this out and benefit from learning about the power of these tools.

Per conversation with Peter & Brandon, I wanted to share an example of Zappos style review. The thought is that we could repurpose this review style for us to review tools that could promote differentiated, customized and/or personalized learning. Here is my interpretation of the "zappos" video review structure: 1) Host/Reviewer Intro 2) Presentation of the product (both visual and name) 3) Quick visual "show off" of the product's attributes 4) Briefly go into detail on essential core features 5) Briefly mention envisioned/practiced uses & users 6) End with re-stating the name of the product These should be brief, quickly digestible, and instantly applicable to classroom practice. Comments welcome for agreement, disagreement, and additions.

Nicey nice. Love this. I think this style would also be snappy and applicable to a focus on a given pedagogical practice that is product/tool agnostic.

"There has been a lot of interest in the flipped classroom."

"A look at the use of AWE's Student Learning Center computers in an elementary school classroom at Miami Elementary, part of Chippewa Valley Schools in Michigan, that is for students with cognitive disabilities. The video shows how AWE's products provide an ideal blended learning solution in classrooms. "

Peter J ArashiroMODERATOR MyBlend - Yesterday 4:35 PM #Learning A nice, concise, blog post about personalized learning in the classroom. This site (kinda reminds me of what we're trying to do with MyBlend site) is worth keeping on the list of sites to monitor for content:

In this video, Dr. Curt Bonk from the School of Education at Indiana University brings up ideas and things to consider for those who are looking to implement blended learning. Dr. Bonk is a very engaging educator who shares his findings and teachings with the world to help educators connect on the topics of online and blended learning strategies.

This is a video talking about a history teacher's attempt to tackle differentiation through his work now at Knewton. It reminded me so much of our recent Willingham talks Peter started with us about kids who gravitate toward either experience (like Logan) and those who gravitate to content knowledge. It also reminded me of what we are doing with MyBlend except from a content creation focus.

This site is an example of the value of being a social aggregation space for the topic. I can see how MyBlend would bring the added value of being Michigan centric.

via Pocket http://ifttt.com/images/no_image_card.png December 17, 2013 at 06:31PM