Blended Bulletin, Issue 22

Blended Brags

Last Tuesday, Kevin Killeen, Christy Berry, and Diana Ayrula visited classrooms at Lincoln Middle School in Meriden in the morning and collaborated on classroom design in the afternoon. These math teachers were happy to see blended methods in action and utilized the planning time to revisit their first draft designs. Diana was nice enough to open up her classroom for this work, which was helpful in seeing a station rotation set up in a relatively small space. I'm looking forward to our science visit tomorrow!

Cool Tools

If you like using interact quiz tools (i.e. Kahoot, Socrative) in class, you should check out Quizalize. One feature of this tool that I particularly like is asynchronous quizzing. You can assign quizzes in class all at the same time, or assign quizzes for students to use as practice at home.

Newsela has teamed up with Rock the Vote to create Students Vote 2016. This tool provides a wealth of resources for teaching election-themed text sets at differentiated reading levels, as well as interactive and real-time voting on primary and election days.

Expii Solve is a weekly set of 5 challenge math problems ranging from middle school math, to AP-level. These problems require math skills, but also a healthy dose of logic and creativity. The founder, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, explains his philosophy behind the site here.

Open eBooks is a brand new initiative launched by the White House to increase student access to high quality books. Teachers and students at Title I schools and on military bases, as well as any special education teachers can register to provide access to the free library to their students. 10 major publishers have contributed content, and I'm sure that list will grow. Read more about Open eBooks here and watch Michelle Obama's introduction to the app here. #GoOpen

Professional Learning

My favorite article from this past week is Why Your Tech-Obsessed Conference Presentation Stinks—and How to Make It Better. As many of you know, I've had the opportunity to travel to quite a few of the biggest edtech conferences in the past year-- ISTE, iNACOL, FETC, and METC. One of my worries is just what this article highlights-- tech decisions are being made for show, not for actual impact on teaching and learning. Justin Taylor and I presented about just this issue at METC, and it is a relief to see that others are fighting the good fight!

Another article that spoke to me for various reasons was What WALL-E Teaches Us About Adaptive and Personalized Learning. My Disney fanaticism aside, the article's point about how adaptive technologies may make students and teachers cognitively "lazy" is an important warning about integrating digital content. It is often easy for students and teachers to sit back and let the software decide what should be learned when. However, this can "deskill" both students and teachers from making important decisions about their own learning or teaching.

Reflection is one of the Core Four Elements of blended learning, but can easily be overlooked. In How One Teacher Champions Student Reflection with Technology and Public Speaking, a teacher talks about how she uses Zaption (you might also consider Vialogues) to have her students reflect and guide the feedback on their presentations