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.

Multiple-Modalities, student anxiety for learners not prepared to have choices, competency-based learning is unique for each institutions based on research, allows for more 1-1 teacher support for students, some faculty provide more of an adviser role while others thrive as SMEs on the screens, place & time, good & bad days, agility of personalized learning, expectations of students for prompt responses proves to be a continual problem, teachers/institutions don't know where to start in all cases - advice is for IT infrastructure to be carefully planned out to align with student services side of an institution... start with a course or a degree program that lends itself well to a competency-based approach, start small, work with a team of others from other departments,

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.

"Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, recently delivered the keynote address at the Hoover Institution's Symposium on Blended Learning in K-12 Education. In this keynote, he describes his vision for "education reimagined.""

Solid post. I Digg it. Would love to solicit guest posts very much like this with Michigan faculty. I think his words about giving "a) some examples of research that supports blended learning and b) have some concrete samples of the different types of work that students will produce and c) demonstrate what assessment will look like. If you cover these three components, then my experience is that parents are thrilled about the change." could also ring true for MyBlend PD.

"Instead of a course syllabus or description, I've found it more useful to give students a "roadmap for success".  Here is an example from my middle school Geography class.  The idea is that all learning options are clearly laid out and routes for success are made clear.  It is well worth spending a class or two clarifying what the journey will look like in a blended learning environment and I've found that this reframes the experience for students in a way that they understand.  It also lays the groundwork for the one-on-one conversations you will have with students moving forward.  You will want to delineate the different segments of the class, discuss possible timeframes for moving through the challenges and what the options are for demonstrating mastery at each stage.  In this particular roadmap, some items are bold because they will be done by all students.  Other components are framed by a dotted line meaning that only some students will be eligible for those challenges based on their progress at specific stages.  You will want to make the roadmap as clear as possible so students are able to understand the journey to the point where they develop a sense of agency around their work. "

In this short post, Jon ____ gives some good thoughts to consider for the elementary teacher regarding considering the value of creating a video for a lesson or not, and what things to keep in mind if such an intervention might be called for.

"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.

"Begin with the end in mind.  "

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

via PocketOffice of Instructional Consulting: IU School of Education April 28, 2012 at 03:41AM @jgh @brainysmurf FYI these Bonk 10-min videos run fine on iPad (site says Firefox, IE...yuck) http://t.co/SW5ViZnm #bonkopen #bonkland via PocketOffice of Instructional Consulting: IU School of Education May 16, 2012 at 05:47PM

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.

"Here are four crucial factors to keep in mind as schools plunge in."

"The third in an eight-part series highlighting the International Association for K-12 Online Learning's standards for quality courses and teaching as put into practice by educators in online and blended learning learning environments. The focus of this module is: Differentiation (Learn more at inacol.org.) "

"In this video, Molly, one of our amazing blended learning teachers, and I are co-teaching a class during which we use socrative to collect student feedback on the spot."

I appreciate how Missy McCarthy has gone through the process of flipping her Math classroom and reflecting on the things she has learned. Missy teaches math at Okemos High School in Okemos, Michigan. In this post, in particular, she recounts how she took one class period to observe her students while they watched her screencasted instructional video to learn about their viewing habits of the content she has been creating. Her findings were interesting as they relate to the common concern of the flipped classroom regarding if the students are actually watching the videos or not, their note taking habits, if they are doing the practice problems or diving right into the required homework, and the ability for students to transfer what they are learning in the videos to problems that were not in the exact form as the examples provided. This, in turn, is now guiding how Missy is structuring her content, providing required note taking guides to evaluate if conceptual understanding improves, and even guide some of the questions she poses and instruction she delivers in the classroom together so that she can help students through the process of transferring the knowledge to new contexts.