Blended Learning

Blended learning has been a buzzword in education for a while, but what is it? Blended learning combines the best-of digital learning and face-to-face teaching practices for the purposes of enhancing the teaching and learning process and increasing student engagement. Blended learning approaches can also allow you to personalize learning for students, moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach of the industrial model of education.

As this image shows in relation to the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, blended learning can help you focus more on the higher order thinking skills rather than the lower order thinking skills in class. Instead of chalk-and-talking low order content information (i.e. lecture), this process could be flipped to be presented in a video (teacher-created or other videos from YouTube, TED, Khan Academy, etc.). Other activities can be created, also, that can check student understanding of this content in the process of consuming content. These situations are when technology comes into play.

A variety of digital technologies can be used to create and distribute activities that allow students to get that pre-classroom content.

What tools do we immediately have available to promote blended learning?

PowerSchool Learning has some built-in features.

• Discussion forums
• eAssessment
• WikiProjects

Other easy-to-use tools that are free to use:

• EdPuzzle (check student understanding of video-based content)
• GoFormative (allows teachers to give live assignments to students through a variety of quizzing, drawing, and video-referenced possibilities)
• Explain Everything (iPad app on our iPads) (teachers and students can create video tutorials about any course-related content)
• Google Forms

If you have a smartphone and/or tablet device, those can help you capture video and/or images that you can use in different blended learning approaches.

Most of us want more time during our class periods for deeper discussions, Socratic seminars, inquiry, project-based learning, and giving more opportunities for students to create rather than consume content. Blended learning can help greatly to free up the class time to pursue those deeper learning and more engaging activities. If you would like to look into some blended learning approaches, don’t hesitate to contact me.