Blended learning can allow for students to become more 'self-regulating' in their learning. In 2019, I attempt to create an online website where 'food tech' students Year 7-8 can follow a pick-a-path scenario that is available 24/7. The idea was to allow for students to choose what they wanted to learn and decide for themselves how they were going to evidence this. This page attempts to capture that journey and the experiences that followed.

Food Technology is a practical area and students had become heavily reliant on the teacher in order to learn practical skills. This is a difficult task when there is only one leader in a group of 15-20. The question becomes how can we get everyone to be leaders in their own learning and do it collaboratively.

In my scanning, it would have been wise to select one class to focus on. However, I blindly rolled out the new program to all my classes. This took a mammoth amount of energy and rapid change. What did happen was a very quick transformation of the program took place within a short-time frame.

Helping others to become leaders in their own learning meant creating and designing a framework where learners had choice and made their own decisions. Blended learning programs can allow students to learn when they want and flipping the classroom can allow the student to learn what they want. In 2018, I did a literature review on the pros and cons of blended learning which included flipped learning. This is what lead me to give creating and designing a flipped blended learning program a go.

Again, the focus of this program was rolled out across 13 of my 15 classes, 8 of which were client schools and the remaining 5 from PI.

I considered using pre-determined online platforms such as, Google Classrooms, Hapara etc. However, I required a platform that would allow students from multiple schools who may or may not have access to Google or Hapara to access the website. So, I looked at creating my own website. Looked at Simple sites and Google sites. Decided Google sites looked easier to use and was already pre-used in our school environment.

Below is a outline of the actions to be taken:

1. Getting started - looking at what I needed before I even roll the program out (see next text box below)

2. Design considerations - easy layout, easy to follow

3. Going Live with the Initial Design - Phase 1

4. Taking Feedback - Teething Stage

5. Making the first changes - Phase 2

6. Taking Feedback - Refining/Ironing Out Stage

It was important before starting to ensure a few things:

• access to devices
• number of devices required (so number of students)
• (plan b if not enough devices)
• students have access - device logins, account logins etc
• (plan b if no access)
• choose a web platform
• students can access the web platform - permissions, literacy or ...
• any other access requirements eg youtube
• choose the class you are going to target

The first version that was created was too open. It was more a pick a path that allowed students to choose and go as they pleased. Very few students could navigate through the self-planning. More scaffolding and support needed to be put in place. For some classes the jump to self-determined learning was too far and the support needed to be very explicit eg literally layout what to do. Therefore, it was necessary to provide a more structured framework that could support more students. This does take away more of the freedoms.

So, could I provide a more structured framework but still allow for those few who were self-managing, self-determining.

An interesting note - who I thought would do well with the freedom did not. I had made a hypothesis that a previous class who done well in the traditional food tech classes I provided would also do well in the blended learning program. What was discovered is that the students who did do well tended to have access to internet and a device. They also did NOT have too many after school activities and therefore had time to complete work outside of school hours. Students who did not do well had no access to internet and/or devices. There was also a group of students who had access to internet and devices but were extremely busy after school every day and pretty much did not get home till late. They expressed they had no time to complete work so relied on class room time to complete work.

This meant the workload needed to be targeted for what could be attained by a student in 1.5hours. The struggle was working out what was achievable for one student was very different for another.

Mrs Petersen -

• Choose only one group of students to work with
• Heutogogy - further research

Discovered TKI website as some great info for designing e-learning programs, including a great tip of inserting a google calendar that links the LI's - see flipped learning and e-planning.