MVU-MyBlend Social Media

I am not yet sure who this instructor is who is presenting, but they seemed to have had some good pedagogy behind what they were doing in building their blended environment with ID in mind.

I also like the emphasis on continual improvement, the honesty about the time it takes to plan really well, and her key insights for other instructors who are just beginning to think about venturing into a blended learning environment development.

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?

Peter J ArashiroMODERATOR MyBlend - Yesterday 7:09 PM Ok, just one more Grant Wiggins blog post to share (likely not the last!). In this post, he talks about the mindless practice of posting objectives or Essential Questions in classrooms so that students and teachers will know what they're working towards every day. Seems like a pretty good idea in theory, but in practice, the focus tends to be on the POSTING (so that teachers don't get written up for not doing this) instead of it helping guide teaching and learning. The big thing that came to my mind was how BH uses objectives to guide the design of instruction. I think we all agree that this is a good thing. However, these same objectives are also presented to students when they see how they're doing (assessment-wise) in class. When students read these objectives, do they make sense or are they more inclined to just look to see if they met the objective or not (by looking at the percentage). I think the strategy to use objectives to inform instruction is sound and we'll need to find ways to make it useful for both teachers and students.

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:

Roman Stotland10:16 AM+1 2 1 1 Reply I think this is great that schools have the option to do this, and thinking about it, we do the same when we (MVU) have a "snow day". It is definitely beneficial for the 12th graders in the article that all have district assigned laptops, the only things that might hold something like this back is students with households that might not have the latest technology or internet, which does still exist. What would be the solution for them?

Midori Grahl ID and Learning - 9:09 AM #Education My professor has published a paper on VoiceThread. He is the one who taught me about this tool.

Peter J ArashiroMODERATOR MyBlend - 5:42 AM #Socrates Are these questions we should be prepared to answer about MyBlend? I think so :-)

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.