Blended Learning

Experimenting and Innovating: How to Find the Best Tools and Tactics

January 23, 2013 | 11:45 AM | By Katrina Schwartz

iZone

New York City is experimenting with new tools and tactics with its Innovation Zone, a devoted unit for trying out new approaches to learning and sharing best practices with like-minded educators. The iZone, as it’s commonly called, started in the 2010-11 school year with 81 schools, and since then, they’ve more than doubled that number and hope to reach 400 participating schools by 2014.

Schools across the system are trying out different learning approaches, including blended learning, online courses and project-based teaching. As with the most lofty aspirations of educators, the iZone’s goals are to personalize learning, provide real-world experience, change the ways staff and students view their roles and take advantage of the vast number of tools available to students and teachers.

The iZone serves as a hub for innovation taking place at school sites. Staff support schools with funding for equipment, connecting teachers to resources and one another, as well as serving as the repository for the growing body of knowledge about progressive approaches. Though the project is still young, this program has made a dent in differentiating learning, according to Deputy Chancellor for Talent, Labor and Innovation, David Weiner.

“It can be really hard for the leader to shield teachers from traditional measures so that they can feel free to innovate.”

For example, in participating high schools, the 35-40 percent of students who are taking an online English Language Arts class are passing the state’s Regents test at the same rate as students in traditional classrooms. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, blended learning, Citizen Schools, iZone, online learning

Shifting Tactics: Rocketship Will Change its Computer Lab Model

January 22, 2013 | 10:58 AM | By Katrina Schwartz

Rocketship's Learning Lab.

Rocketship Education, a network of charter schools based in California, is changing the way students will use computers in its Learning Labs. Rather than spending chunks of time in computer labs with divided computer stations, students will be using computers in their classrooms, with the help of teachers and aids.

“The integration between the classroom and the Learning Lab was an area that could improve. That’s part of the reason that we made this shift,” said Charlie Bufalino, National Development Associate and former Online Learning Specialist at Rocketship. By moving computers back into the classroom, Rocketship is hoping to form a better connection to what students are doing on computers to what they’re learning in class.

In a PBS Newshour special last month, several teachers said that Learning Lab practice isn’t linked closely enough to what happens in class. Bufalino says that teachers have always been encouraged to use data from online learning to inform their teaching; that said, at its most basic level, the function of the Learning Lab was for skills practice, while teachers focused teaching on what they call higher order thinking skills in class. Now, Rocketship is hoping teachers will have more control over both.

“The integration between the classroom and the Learning Lab needed improvement.”

“The idea is that in this more flexible model, there will be more time for teachers to diagnose and look at the data,” Bufalino said.

The data, however, can be overwhelming for teachers to analyze. Rocketship uses six different online programs, all with separate mechanisms and criteria for feedback. Rocketship’s national office has been working on building proprietary systems that unify all the data, so teachers look at one screen that compares apples to apples at a glance. Their integration system is aligned to the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, blended learning, individualized learning, Rocketship

Case Studies: How Teachers Use Tech to Support Learning

January 7, 2013 | 11:58 AM | By Tina Barseghian

Erin Scott

Starting the year off with ideas on the best ways to use technology to support learning, Larry Ferlazzo collected an invaluable list of criteria last year from educators, to which he added more resources in his recent blog post for EdWeek.Other posts in the series include Using Ed Tech to Create Deep and Meaningful Experiences and Effective Ways of Using Tech in the Classroom. Here is MindShift’s contribution to the collection of ideas.

1. GAMES AND GROUP WORK.

For those wondering what a game-based classroom looks like in a traditional school, take a peek into Ananth Pai’s third-grade class in Parkview/Center Point Elementary school in Maplewood, Minnesota. Using his own money and grants that he applied for, Pai has managed to round up seven laptops, two desktops 11 Nintendo DS’s, 18 games for math, reading, vocabulary, geography, and 21 digital voice recorders. Students’ reading and math scores went from below average for third grade to mid-fourth-grade level. Students compete in games with other kids across the world, learn about fractions and decimals by riding a virtual ghost train, for instance, work on their reading skills on sites like Razkids, figure out whether they can make a living by growing flowers, learn about their constitutional rights with the Go to Court Game, and so on.

2. LEARNING LATIN.

Teacher Kevin Ballestrini turned his introductory Latin class at Connecticut’s Norwich Free Academy into an alternate reality with an online video game. The students’ job: to save the world by joining a shadowy organization on a quest to find the Lapis Saeculōrum that was part of an Ancient Roman society. “It’s a mix of a role-playing game and an alternate reality game,” Ballestrini says. Students play the role of Romans in a reconstruction of ancient Pompeii (or ancient Rome) and have to learn to think, act, create and write like a Roman in order to win the game. And those are the same goals of any introductory Latin course.

3. REACHING STUDENTS.

In Ramsey Musallam’s A.P. Chemistry class at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory in San Francisco, cell phones are a natural extension of the way he communicates with his students. As soon as kids walk in, Musallam sends out a text blast through Remind101, asking them a challenge question that’s related to the day’s lesson. “First person to tell me the units on K for a second order reaction gets chocolate,” he types and sends off. His students know he does this regularly, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, blended learning, Minecraft, Mobile Learning

What Online Tools Work for Teaching Language Arts?

January 3, 2013 | 12:16 PM | By Katrina Schwartz

Erin Scott

When it comes to language arts, the jury’s still out on the quality and effectiveness of the available software. Some schools are investing and experimenting with different products, with mixed results, while others are working with free available web 2.0 tools. Here are two case studies examining each approach.

THE SOFTWARE APPROACH

Firstline Schools, a public charter school company in New Orleans operating five schools, has aggressively pursued blended learning with hopes to help students who have fallen behind — especially after the devastating effects on schooling after Hurricane Katrina.

“We can’t imagine going back to a traditional model,” said Chris Liang-Vergara, director of instructional technology for personalized learning at Firstline. “It seems crazy with the amount of differentiation we need.”

Firstline uses Achieve3000 in some schools, a program that allows students to read a nonfiction

“The biggest issue I still see is that people are still trying to break it down when
it needs to be combined.”

article everyday and answer questions related to it. But the program is dry, according to Liang-Vergara, and it can seem random and disconnected to the rest of what students are doing in class. He says he’s seen it used well, but usually by experienced teachers who are empowered to use it for the best kind of differentiation. If the teacher takes the time to search the Achieve300 database for nonfiction articles that are relevant to other class work, discusses them, and wraps them into the curriculum that works best. And the software does provide differentiation, increasing the difficulty of vocabulary and sentence structure as a reader progresses.

“When you show it to any experienced teacher, they get very excited because they think about how much time they’ll save and how much information can be at their fingertips,” said Liang- Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, blended learning, digital citizenship, language arts, literacy, teaching with tech

Will Rocketship Change Its Learning Labs?

January 2, 2013 | 3:00 PM | By Tina Barseghian

Rocketship Schools in the Bay Area have been one of the trailblazers in the ever-changing landscape of blended learning. Located in low-income neighborhoods, the schools’ Learning Labs — where students spend up to 90 minutes a day on computers working on math and literacy software — has been one of its defining characteristics.

But this model isn’t working, some Rocketship teachers say, and because it’s a charter school network with evolving systems, it may soon be changing, according to this PBS Newshour story.

“There’s definitely an aspect of us kind of not knowing enough about what’s going on in learning lab to be able to use that in our classrooms,” said teacher Judy Lavi.

“We don’t yet get data that says, OK, teach this differently tomorrow because of what happened here. And that is — that is a frustration point,” said teacher Andrew Elliott-Chandler.

Adam Nadeau, principal of Rocketship Mosaic Elementary, says he doesn’t think the Learning Lab model will continue next year. And Elliott-Chandler sees a different function for the computers.

“Next year, we’re thinking of bringing the computers back to the classrooms and the kids back to Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, blended learning, Rocketship

2012 Ed Tech Trends: Insights From Insiders

December 19, 2012 | 12:12 PM | By Frank Catalano

At the end of the year, pundits love to share their versions of summarized lists of what was hot in ed tech in 2012. In addition to the obvious — Common Core curriculum and assessments, games in learning, consumer tech in education — there are others that may be more subtle or even counter-intuitive.

Here are five, drawn from first-hand observation at major 2012 industry conferences ranging from the more traditional Association of Educational Publishers’ and Association of American Publishers’ Content in Context to the edgy SXSWedu event in Austin. These represent one perspective of what the education industry itself is seeing, cutting across individual conferences and events.

Flickr:remiforall

1. PAPER IS NOT DEAD

While digital is firing up imaginations and well-equipped classrooms, paper is still the pervasive medium of choice. Digital instruction is simply finally achieving equal billing for serious consideration and state and federal funding. Despite this year’s declaration from the FCC and U.S. Department of Education that the industry should replace paper with digital textbooks by 2017, financial and technical hurdles remain.

For example, one high-profile Open Educational Resources pilot in Utah uses digital resources to create paper high school science textbooks — at an attractive per-copy price of about five dollars, versus $80 for commercial texts. Why paper? David Wiley of Brigham Young University explained at SXSWedu that the digital device cost per student was high and much of the benefit could be derived in how the material was customized, taking advantage of paper’s “unlimited battery life.”

Technical concerns were front-and-center at a Consortium for School Networking/SIIA Feedback Forum held with district and state officials during the ISTE 2012 conference. While WiFi and devices may exist in a school district, distribution can be lumpy, creating hurdles to smooth implementation. “We have schools that are one hundred percent textbook, and schools that are fully digital — a broad spectrum,” said a Louisiana-based tech coordinator.

It is, one administrator from a California district noted, the last mile Internet connection into schools and even individual classrooms “where things get interesting.” Which renders paper Continue reading →