Blended Learning Made Easy

Curationist: Miguel Guhlin (@mglearn)

Session Description

Blended learning is the reality in schools today given the ubiquity of technology; come share and learn what works well. Discuss how to plan, design, and implement the creation of a blended or online course that assists educators as they seek to convert traditional course content to a blended learning format.

Research on Blended Learning

Web-Based Learning

With the proliferation of sophisticated online tools for teaching, web-based learning today refers to many different types of online activities.

Students might: visit websites to acquire key information; write on a blogging platform in connection with an in-person or online course; communicate with classmates through internet platforms, such as Slack or GoogleDocs; develop born-digital projects with groups of fellow students; or interact with each other and their instructor through an online learning management system, such as BlackBoard.

Effect size: 0.33 via Visible Learning Meta X

Higher Education?

“Greater than 95 percent of students enrolled in the blended course section earned course grades [of] C- or higher, compared with 82 percent in the large lecture sections and 81 percent in the online sections,” Rogers told Science Daily. In addition, fewer students who took the blended version withdrew from the class and fewer reported end-of-semester anxiety (Source: eLearning Inside).

"The blended course structure we utilized facilitated bidirectional information flow, fostering conversations not only between the instructor and students but among the students themselves (peer learning)," said Jennifer Rogers, PhD, first author of the study. (Source: Science Daily)

Roadblock #1 - Dis-engaged Learning

“We need an educational system,” shares Ken Kay, CEO of EdLeader21, “that encourages self-direction.” How do we accomplish this given all of the new tools we have available?

You can facilitate deep learning about a topic with a whole host of strategies (check the chart). You want to use PBL when appropriate, that is, after students have a thorough background knowledge.

An effect size of 0.40 is what Hattie refers to as a hinge-point regarding what is significantly effective or at “a level where the effects of innovation enhance achievement in such a way that we can notice real-world differences” (Hattie, 2009).

What high-effect size instructional strategies could we use to build students background knowledge before jumping into a PBL unit?

Here are a few:

    • Jigsaw Approach (d=1.20)
    • Summarization (d=.74)
    • Direct Instruction (d=.59)
    • Practice Testing (d=.46)

Detour #1 - Project Creation Stations

The purpose of the stations is to introduce learners to content creation and curation tools via a variety of mini-lessons. These mini-lessons follow a formula:

  • Present a problem
  • From the problem, a task appears
  • Background knowledge or information is shared along with tools that can be used to create and/or aggregate data or information
  • A product of some kind is required that synthesizes information and/or create new stuff

These stations are self-directed and can be employed by groups of learners working in collaboration.

Examples

Explore more PBL and 5E Model Enhanced Lessons

Roadblock #2 - Old Content Formats

"The average attention span of a Generation Z individual is about 8 seconds. Massive amounts of information expressed in long texts is outdated. "

Detour #2 - Create Snackable Content

Create bite-sized that includes images, infographics, short videos, memes and quotes. Assign activities that facilitate choice and that are device neutral.

Consider the Seven Keys to Blended Learning.

Examples & Suggestions

Roadblock #3 - Silo'd Learning via Journals, Conferences

“Breaking your own mold can only make you stronger and more confident to reach higher levels in your professional and personal life,” says Dr. Elizabeth Lombardo, psychologist and author of “Better Than Perfect” as cited by Thomas Oppong.

Thomas suggests that the only time you are actually growing is when you are uncomfortable. “Seek out discomfort. Be deliberate about doing things that push your limits magnificently. Difficulty helps you to grow,” advises Thomas.

(Source: Teaching Digital Media)

Detour #3 - Build your Professional Learning Network (PLN) and a Community of Co-Learners

Community Spaces and Tools

On Your Own

  • Microsoft’s Educator Community: This online community provides access to free, online professional learning courses. You can get started using your free Microsoft account (go to login.live.com if you don't have one yet)
  • G Suites Learning Center: This website provides access to various facets of Google Suites for Education. Definitely explore it to develop your learning.
  • YouTube: Many millennials and Gen Z’ers are growing up learning how to do something on their own. They accomplish this by watching videos on YouTube. You can search online to find a wide variety of topics and learn, then apply what you watch.

Seven Keys to Blended Learning

Key #1 - Make Expectations Clear

Encouraging students to be self-directed can be a shift for many who have grown up with different expectations. For example, consider this list of roadblocks and detours for students.

key #2 – Create a digital textbook for student reference

“It’s not the reader of a text who learns the most,” says Stephen Knudsen, as cited in this TCEA TechNotes blog entry, “but rather the author.” While you may soon have students creating a digital textbook, encapsulating their learning, as the teacher, you can begin to organize yourself online. Using tools like Google Classroom, MS Teams with OneNote Class Notebook can make this organization painless.

Not sure about the benefits? Read this blog entry by Matt “Ditch That Textbook” Miller. He shares Garth Holman’s and Mike Pennington’s (two teachers) journey toward getting rid of textbooks. He also highlights some key ways that they worked together. Students were able to:

  • Write, collaborate and publish online. In today’s classrooms, you can easily use online word processing tools to facilitate collaborative writing. And students can publish their documents directly to their class learning management system, blog, or other virtual space. This facilitates tracking of multiple editors, and reviewers.
  • Develop interactive content. With tools like Google Sites, Wakelet, OneNote, students are able to embed a wide variety of content anywhere. The list is ever-growing. Using both built-in drawing tools and audio/video recording, as well as ad-hoc web-based tools, students can annotate text and images easily.
  • Take ownership of assessing their own work. Students can co-develop rubrics for creation of content or rely on a pre-created rubric available online. Students can copy these rubrics to their individual folders, then fill them in for their own project or another student’s creation.
  • Create cartoons. Students can create cartoons using a variety of sources online (e.g. Book Creator Online), Google Slides, or Powerpoint. Free cartoon tools abound, allowing for combination of avatar creations (e.g. Bitmoji) to tell a story.
  • Create videos and enhanced podcasts. Students can also rely on Powerpoint+Office Mix or Sway to create screencasts, narrated slideshows, enhanced podcasts (images+audio), documentaries, and more. Storyboarding can be easy using Powerpoint’s slide organizer or Sway’s card shuffling tools. Adding audio narration and embedding video is also a cinch.

Key #3 - Clarify Grading Overview

While grading policies for every learning situation may differ, consider taking advantage of video annotation and quizzing tools that enable students to interact and reflect on video. While assessing learning resulting from pre- or post-video watching activities, remember that you need not rely on traditional paper-and-pencil approaches.

In addition, students can also rely on video reflection tools that work similar to discussion boards, but use video instead of text. Flipgrid.com (available at no cost) makes this easy. Finally, also take a moment to explore video annotation tools that your students can use to take notes about YOUR videos. Vialogues, not unlike Flipgrid, allows you to create conversations that revolve around a video.

One more note about assessment in a blended learning classroom. While you can create and grade assignments and quizzes students complete, alternative assessment may play a role. “Flipped learning” often permits alternative assessment, as indicated by flipped learning creators:

In our Flipped-Mastery Model, we required every student to pass each summative assessment with a 75 percent. I was very rigid on this. A 74 percent was not good enough. But as I embraced alternative assessments, I was pleasantly surprised at how students were able to show me what they had learned without having to prove it on traditional tests. I had students designing video games, making videos, and doing art projects (Source: Jon Bergmann, Edutopia).

Key #4 - Set up a virtual class space

Using many, free available tools, you can easily create an online presence that is available to students, regardless of what mobile device they happen to use. This can become a digital repository for class resources, audio/video presentations, linked content, and assignments. More importantly, it becomes a digital space you and each student can use to exchange information and discuss growth around learning objectives.

Key #5 - Select a screencasting tool to record instructional videos.

A host of screencasting tools are available, including browser-based recorders like Screencast-o-Matic, Screencastify, and Nimbus Screencapture/Screenrecording add-ons for Chrome browser. Have access to Zoom.us for meetings (it's free for individual use), then use Zoom to create video screencasts of your teaching.

For example, a framework you could model for students:

  1. Pick out five photos that are about a particular event, a situation, or topic.
  2. Write three to four sentences about each of those photos. (Sample storyboard | ACMI Generator)
  3. Combine sentences and photos into a digital story.

Key #6 - Create class videos online for easy access across devices.

Whether you’ve created an instructional video, video of your slideshow, and/or screencast, you may want to find an easy way to host it online.

Few options work as well as YouTube.com. Don't have access to YouTube for easy video sharing? Both G Suite EDU and OneDrive for Schools offer unlimited storage options (or same as).

Did you know you can insert a video into Google Slides or Powerpoint Online? This makes it easy to share video-rich slides.

Consider using HyperDrawings with Google Drawings. This approach was pioneered by Joli Boucher.

Key #7 - Implement engaging classroom activities.

The Power of Classroom Discussions

Classroom discussions are an instructional strategy where students are invited to speak about the topic at hand. But it involves much more than just a teacher asking a class a question and then another, etc., It involves all students having robust discussion with each other in order to think more critically about a topic.

Using Classroom Discussions to Adapt Instruction

Classroom discussions allow students to improve communication skills by voicing their opinions and thoughts. Teachers also benefit from classroom discussion as it allows them to see if students have learned the concepts that are being taught. Moreover, a classroom discussion creates an environment where everyone learns from each other, which is the best kind of learning.

The key to successful classroom discussions is the feedback given by and the instructional adjustments made by the teacher. According to Hattie, “when implemented correctly, classroom discussions can be a source of rich, qualitative data – data that allows teachers to understand the thinking of their students more closely and determine if there are information processing errors that need instructional intervention immediately.”

There are many more strategies that can accelerate student learning in one school year. Find out what those are via the TCEA TechNotes blog.

The use of technology to accelerate learning is definitely something that TCEA supports. But we are also big believers in the use of the best instructional strategy for student learning. That’s why we’ve offered this five-part blog series on research-proven ways to help students learn more, learn faster, and retain a greater depth of knowledge. So far, we’ve discussed: