Designing Successful Lessons for a Blended Class

This article is cross-posted on the VHS (Virtual High School) Global Consortium Blog.

My adventure with blended learning began with my online teaching through VHS. I can honestly say that the preparation for and teaching of my online course have been the best professional development of my 32 year career. As I learned so much and saw my students gaining so many new skills in this cosynchronous learning environment, I wanted my face to face students to have those same opportunities. My blended class came of that wish.

Of course, my next challenge was how to design lessons that took advantage of the blended learning model. Through research, a lot of reflection and a lot of trial and error, I have come up with what I think are the most important aspects of a successful blended learning lesson plan:

1. There should be "flow" between your online lessons and your face to face ones.

Learning should be as seamless as possible as students move between formats. Keep your learning goals in mind as you develop the lessons. What do you want students to take from this lesson? How can you take advantage of the online environment in developing the lesson? Which parts of the lesson will work better when you are face to face? Which will work better online? I often have class discussions that start in one format and continue in the other. This is one way to make the lesson flow.


2. The lessons should be engaging and interactive.  

French students tweet as "Le Petit Prince"

Don't fall into the mistaken thinking that just because it involves the computer, kids will love it. Not true. Computer work can quickly become a drudge as all adults know. Kids love lessons that engage them, whether they involve technology or not. What's not fun about real discovery and learning?

3. The lessons should take advantage of both the asynchronous nature of the blended class and the lowered affective filter that is provided by it.

What types of lessons work well asynchronously? Discussions for one, because students have time to think and consider their answers before responding. Similarly, some students will thrive in the online environment because the affective filter is lowered. The physical presence of the teacher and their peers, which may intimidate them in the face to face class, is no longer a hindrance to their expression. But discussions don't have to be text based. Many LMSs (Learning Management Systems) provide both audio and video tools. In the image below, my French students are holding an audio/video discussion. Interestingly, I find that the students' pronunciation of French is better when they post online as opposed to speaking in class. Again, I think it's the lowered affect.

4. The lessons should promote independent learning as well as collaboration, critical thinking and communication.

Hopefully we are planning all of our lessons to include collaboration, critical thinking and communication. Those are such essential 21st century skills that we would be remiss in planning any assignment without those three C's in mind. Independent learning is unfortunately not as ubiquitously addressed in our classes, however it is still critical to our students' future successes.

Oral discussion via videoIn college and beyond, our students will often be required to take responsibility for their own learning. Fortunately, this skill fits beautifully into online and blended lessons. To promote independent learning, your lesson can be discovery-based, or it can be as simple as allowing the students to choose which path they will take through the lesson. Your role is to guide them toward a meaningful path. Remember, it isn't about content. Content can always be Googled. It's about acquiring and honing skills.

5. Assessment should match the format of the lesson.

Seems simple enough, and yet for many teachers - and students - it is hard to give up that written test mindset. We think if there hasn't been a written test there hasn't been an assessment. But if the learning objective of your blended lesson was to be able to perform a virtual knee replacement surgery, a written test will not accurately measure the skills involved. It takes some creativity to develop these assessments, but once you get started, the juices will start flowing and the ideas will come more easily. For reference, see my post about Teaching in a BYOD .

There are plenty of resources available online to help you develop your first blended lessons. Here are a few to get you started:

VHS Blended Teacher Support
University of Central Florida's Blended Learning Toolkit
Colleen Worrell's Blended Learning Diigo List
Jim Askew's Designing the Perfect Web-Based Instruction Lesson Plan (includes a wealth of other resources)

Teachers Love to Share. So Start Blogging!

Recently I had the privilege of hearing Dean Shareski in person give his celebrated "Sharing: the Moral Imperative" presentation. If you haven't seen it, at least watch the first few minutes of his video in which he states "I am a Giant Derivative." You'll get the message quickly.



Dean's point is that we are all the sum of all the information we have read and consumed. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Aren't we impelled therefore to share our own knowledge and experience with others? Surely so. So why don't we? Teachers love to share. I think it's in our DNA. And yet many teachers are reluctant to share their ideas online.

Well, I get why many teachers are gun shy about tweeting, blogging and otherwise sharing information online.

1. You're exhausted. You're already giving everything you have. How can you do one more thing?
2. Alternative version of #1, you don't have time.
3. You feel that what you have to say isn't of value to others.

I've been there. I was fortunate enough to have a year long professional development experience through PLP (Powerful Learning Practice.) which helped me to develop a professional learning network and to understand the importance of sharing. Yet even after that transformative year in which I started blogging and tweeting, I soon went back to my old insular habits and fears. It took me a couple more years to get past them and really start sharing my ideas and resources online on a regular basis.

So how do you get past your reservations? Here are some things to consider:

1. Think you don't have time for blogging? Tweeting is microblogging. It's putting your ideas or links to your resources out there to share in 140 characters or less. Surely you have time for that once in a while.
2. Once you get validation from other people who retweet or favorite your tweets, or seeing that people from other continents have visited your blog, suddenly it becomes enjoyable. It's much easier to make time for what we enjoy.
3. One of the points Dean makes in his presentation is that while your ideas may seem ordinary to you, they are revelations to other people. You do have something to share, believe me.
4. If you do decide to blog, one thing that helps me is the Blogger app on my phone. If I get an idea, I can jot it into Blogger quickly and easily from anywhere. Then I can flesh out the post later on my computer. I did that with this article.

Where will the sharing lead you? That's actually the fun part - you don't know. But at a minimum it's sure to lead you to meeting other educators who share your ideals. And since we reap what we sow, the more you share, the more you will receive.

Still unconvinced? Leave a comment and tell me why you're not sharing online. Maybe we can learn from one another.

Online Teaching and Fairness

I teach one fully online class through VHS and one blended class. It was through my online class that I realized something about fairness that I had not noticed until now - that the concerns I often have with fairness with a f2f or blended class disappear in the online class.

I teach high school students, and it's well-known that adolescents have a keenly defined sense of justice. So I always strive to be fair in my dealings with them. But there are challenges especially with regard to missed work. There's always the athlete who didn't get home from the away game until 10 pm and didn't get to study for the quiz. Do I allow her to take the make-up quiz, when in the same room is the drama student who didn't get home from rehearsal till 10 pm but DID manage to study? What is fair?

I've only just realized that there are few fairness issues in the online class because all those encounters take place in the LMS in private between the student and teacher. So if I have an online student who started off on the wrong foot, but is now working hard to catch up, I have no problem excusing a few assignments to help him get out of the hole faster. Only he and I know.

What this means, then, is that the online teacher can truly individualize the learning experience for students. Not just through interaction with the content, but through interpersonal experiences.

It's not earth-shattering, but it's another advantage to online teaching and learning that I had not realized previously.

Now I'm excited, not only to better personlize the experience for my online students, but to carry this concept over to my blended class as well. These are the same students with whom I have struggled to provide a fair learning environment. Perhaps the answer is within the online portion of that class.

Stay tuned for the results.

Teaching in a BYOD. What? Like it's hard?

I love movie quotes, so the "Legally Blonde" quote came to mind. I wanted to write this post for those teachers out there who are afraid of a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program. The first thing many teachers say is "But how can I assign something if I don't know if they all have Word or iMovie or (fill in the blank here with the app du jour)?" My answer is simple. To paraphrase another famous quote, "There's a site for that!"

Your job as the teacher is to help your students gain the skills and master the content in your subject area, right? Now, take a look at the top of the Bloom's Taxonomy pyramid.

Create. That's where we're aiming. The recognized best use of technology in your classes is to have your students develop and demonstrate mastery by creating a product. So set the parameters of the assignment - what you want them to demonstrate - but let them get there in different ways. And no matter what wireless device they are using if they have Internet access, they can get there.There's a site for it.

For a recent summative assignment in my blended French class I wanted my students to show mastery of several structures such as comparisons, advanced negations and interrogatives and demonstratives. To tie it all together, I set the theme for the assignment as 'cars', ensuring the use of that vocabulary. I gave them some ideas for showcasing their knowledge such as an Xtranormal video, a comic strip, an animation, a Voice Thread and others. I pointed them to some iPad apps they could use if they chose, but everything they needed to do could be done with a web site. The students love having the autonomy of being able to choose the type of product they create. And studies show that that positive affect positively impacts the learning process.

That is not to say that you need to limit yourself to web sites. You don't. If there's a specific iPad app that you really want your students to use, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. Check out your school's iPad cart if you have one for that lesson. Or put the students in groups for that particular activity and group them by device so that they all have exposure to the app.

For the rest of the work, Google Drive or Open Office will handle the heavy lifting. And don't forget the power of creating a new audience for your students' work by having them blog.

Once you start thinking of ideas you can use in your BYOD classroom, the creative juices will start to flow and you'll have more than you can assign. Your students will have good ideas too, and they'll appreciate it when you validate those ideas by making a lesson which incorporates them.

For more ideas about teaching in a BYOD, checkout this article from Edutopia.

Online and Blended Learning at ISAST 2013

Here's a link to my Prezi on Online and Blended Learning from ISAST 2013

What Should I Be Doing with Technology?

So you're a teacher who wants to do integrate technology in your teaching. But every time you learn something new or develop a new lesson, the technology changes and your new lesson is out of date. What's a teacher to do?

I don't have all the answers, but I think I can help with with this. It's not about software any more. It's about connections. The more you can connect with your students and allow them to connect with one another and with others outside the classroom, the better their learning experience will be. That's my humble opinion.

All you have to do to get your head around this is to observe your students. How do they spend their time outside of class? Connected. They spend countless hours texting, facebooking, tweeting and otherwise communicating with others. They are constantly connected. Now what happens when they walk into the typical classroom? They sit down in rows facing the board and the source of all knowledge, the teacher, for, usually, a one-way flow of information that lasts 50 minutes. Talk about a disconnect!

I'm not saying that we should facebook with our students or tweet to them or anything of the sort. What I am saying is that we can learn from that model to make learning meaningful for our students. We need to start creating lessons that encourage collaboration and independent learning.

Some Examples:

• Video yourself explaining a concept with your phone, tablet or webcam. Post to your class blog. This is a very simplistic version of flipping your class. It's a way to connect with your students outside of class. Sounds simple and it is, but you'll start to see the power of it once you've done it.
• Make a screencast explaining a concept. Post this to your class blog. A screencast is a video recording of your clicks and drawings on the computer or tablet screen. You can do this with a number of apps, listed below.
• Have your students create screencasts explaining a concept to their classmates. Everyone knows that the best way to master a concept is to teach it to someone else. Screencasts give the students an excellent tool for doing this.
• Use collaborative software to create assignments. Give your students the tools they need to collaborate outside the classroom. These assignments encourage not only collaboration, but problem-solving and other critical thinking skills. Ask students to create an outline, mindmap or collaborative document or presentation using one of the collaborative apps listed below.
• When possible, allow students to choose what they learn. This could be a broad topic in which they choose which subtopic to explore further. Or it might be as simple as a supplementary vocabulary list of which they choose which 40% they want to show mastery. The ideas is to give them more control over their learning, which leads to ownership.

This is just a brief sampling, of course, but it's meant to spark ideas you can use in your content area. I'd love to hear from you what collaborative and independent learning lessons you are creating.

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Some Screencasting Apps for the iPad:

• ShowMe - Free. Very easy to use. Write with pen tool and add images. Onlien repository of screencasts that you can access. Creates a link to your screencast that you share with students.
• ScreenChomp - Free. Very easy to use. Write with pen tool and add background images. Creates a link to your screencast that you share with students.
• Explain Everything - $2.99. Many more features; steeper learning curve. Can import PowerPoint, pdfs, Word Docs. Includes text tools. Ability too add and sort slides. Syncs with Evernote and Dropbox. Upload directly to YouTube.

Some Screencasting Apps for Desktop Computer:

• Jing - http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html - Free. Very easy to use. Requires a download. Record your voice and all clicks on the screen. Creates a link to the video on screencast.com. Limit 5 minutes.
• ScreenR - www.screenr.com - Free. Very easy to use. Now download required but must create screenr account. Record your voice and all clicks on the screen. Creates a link to the video on screenr.com. Limit 5 minutes.
• SmartRecorder - Record your lessons on your SmartBoard. Creates video files you can post on YouTube or Vimeo.

Some Collaborative Apps:

• GoogleDrive - Use online or download software for computer or tablet. Includes word processor, presentations and spreaksheet. Share with students and they can work collaboratively in or out of class. http://drive.google.com
• MindMeister - www.mindmeister.com - Collaborative graphic organizer tool. Share with students. Assign tasks to students. They create collaborative concept map which can be exported to Word as an outline.
• Diigo - www.diigo.com - Share bookmarks with your students or have them create a collection of bookmarks. You and students can annotate web sites with highlights and sticky notes.

Blended Learning in the World Languages Classroom - The Nuts and Bolts

As a follow-up to my previous post, I thought it might be helpful to give some specifics and logistics for those who are thinking of converting their class to a blended one.

First you need to understand what it means to teach online. I went through an intensive training program through Virtual High School to become an online teacher. But there are many other workshops and conferences you can attend. Another excellent resource is the Blended Learning Toolkit which is made available for free through the University of Central Florida. Take some time to really understand what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Next you need an online environment for students to work in - a LMS (Learning Management System.) I chose Schoology, but there are others out there, such as Edmodo, Haiku and Moodle, all of which are free. I chose Schoology based on this excellent blog post by Jennie Magiera which points out its well thought-out integration with iPads. Your school's web site might also have enough features in Class Pages to manage a blended class. You want it to have the following:

• a document dropbox for student to submit assignments
• a threaded discussion feature
• a place to post links and documents for students

Also helpful would be a calendar, a blog feature, and an online quiz feature.

My class, as I mentioned in my previous post is not technically a blended course. Blended courses are those in which 30% to 70% (these percentages vary depending on the source) of the instruction is delivered online. I decided to meet face to face 4 days a week and online 1 day a week, so it's only 20% online. But it's a good start.

The next thing I did was think of the types of activities that best lend themselves to online learning and work them into my lesson plans each week. I want to have at least one group/collaborative assignment each week.

When all that was ready, I composed a letter to the parents explaining what blended learning is and what it would mean for their children. I was pleasantly surprised that none of the parents had questions or concerns. This week we had our first online session and it went well. The next day in class, we debriefed about ways we could do better, and so it goes.

One more thing you should know - expect to spend about twice as much time on your online classes as you do for your face to face ones. That has been true for my fully online class and I am finding it to be true as well for the blended one. But it is time well spent and you will be amazed at how much you learn. I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.

I hope you try it.