Online Teaching and Blended Learning

Blended Learning	e-Learning
-Uses online e-learning platforms.	-Uses online e-learning platforms.
-Combines Face-to-Face Interaction with online learning.	-Can be strictly online.
-Requires students to be in a particular place (“brick and mortar”).	-Does not require students to be in any particular place.

Examples of Possible Blended and e-Learning platforms:

• Edmodo
• Ning
• Facebook
• Any Blog, such as Blogger
• D2L
• Today’s Meet

Ministry Directives and Initiative regarding e-Learning

Below you’ll find links and information about what the MOE has to say about e-Learning and Blended Learning:

Information about e-Learning

Brochure about e-Learning

Excerpts from the Brochure:

E-Learning Ontario allows teachers to better engage and support students learning and share their expertise with colleagues across Ontario through the provincial Learning Management System (LMS) and the Ontario Educational Resource Bank (OERB).

E-Learning Ontario gives learners the flexibility they need to succeed.  It gives secondary students more learning opportunities while they work towards graduation.  And it can help elementary students improve their oral, reading, writing and math skills.

Education and student success are top priorities for the Government of Ontario.  Access to high-quality digital support through e-Learning Ontario is key to ensuring that all students succeed, regardless of their location, abilities or circumstances.

Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board

Below you’ll find links and videos about how Blended Learning, e-Learning, and 21st-century Learning is being rolled out in the HWDSB.

The Hub (D2L)

e-Learning

An excellent video on how 21^st-century Learning is changing the face of our schools.  The positive influence of Technology, e-Learning, and Blended Learning platforms on students and teachers can be seen in this video:

What about the Juniors?

There is most assuredly a place for e-Learning and Blended Learning at the Junior level.  A frequent occurrence is illness or injury that requires the Junior student to be away from school for an extended period of time.  From broken limbs, to pneumonia, to a family vacation that was planned a year ago, many of the wrinkles in the Junior student’s education could be ironed out by an e-Learning platform.

While e-Learning does not replace face-to-face interaction within the classroom, being able to keep up with what the class is doing in their absence would cut down significantly on the amount of time it takes Junior students to get caught up after being away.

Further, having an e-Learning platform that students can access on evenings and weekends for resources and to hand in work is a convenience that it would be nice to have available for everyone.  In other words, it’s a Universal Design for Learning.  Though e-Learning accommodates a few students, it benefits all students.

21st-century Teaching Tools

Below are summaries and analyses of four 21st-century Teaching and Learning Tools.

Google Drive

The dog ate your homework?  Oh, really?  The ethereal dog that lives in cyberspace?

Google Drive is a tool that gives you cloud storage for your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, and other digital files.  These files are accessible on any computer with an internet connection by logging into your Google account, and if you’re afraid of the internet, you can even download Drive for your computer so that copies of all your files are saved onto your computer.  You can keeps files private, share them with selected others, or make them public.  This allows multiple people to edit and write on a document at the same time.  Did I mention it’s free?

Google Drive is an excellent tool to use for a classroom website.  Rather than uploading documents onto your website, simply save the doc onto your Drive, make the doc public, and provide a link to it on your website.  The other bonus is that students can open the doc without having another program, like MS Word. 

Gone are the days where a long line of students waits at the laptop at the front of the class so that every group can type their answers to a question onto the teacher’s computer, which is connected to a projector.  With Drive, create a public document, have everyone type into it using Smartphones and Tablets at once, and then see the document take shape in real time.

Twitter

Twitter is a social networking site, or more specifically, a micro-blogging site.  Each “tweet” or blog post is composed of 140 characters, in which you can write anything you like.  Favourite things to do with those characters include quoting famous persons and posting links to articles, videos, or other websites.  You can also tweet pictures.  Twitter operates much like a running news feed, where the tweets of the people you “follow” will be listed with the most recent at the top.  Your tweets show up on the news feeds of the people who “follow” you, but can also be searched by anyone.  Everything on Twitter is public.

Twitter is an excellent tool for educators, both in terms of its classroom applications and professional development.  Teachers, principals, superintendents, and other folks are always posting articles, links, pictures, and videos relevant to teaching and learning.  Many great resources to use in your classroom can be found by following educators on Twitter.

Twitter also has the potential to link your students to professionals in the field.  For example, when studying plants, your students can follow a horticulturalist, ask questions, and get answers!  For an example of how twitter can be used in this way, see Kristen Wideen’s article in the Spring 2014 issue of ETFO Voice.

Prezi

Prezi is a presentation tool.  Rather than moving from slide to slide, the focus shifts to different areas of one main design or motif, and the focus zooms in and out.  Many of the motifs mimic a mind-mapping setup.  Simply create a Prezi account, choose a template, and fill in the sections.  You can add an almost limitless number of sections and change their order.  You can log in to Prezi from any computer and have access to your slideshows, or you can download them to your computer.  You also have the option of making the presentation public, so that anyone online can see it.

Prezi is a novel tool.  I've seen it used to create class scrapbooks on particular topics that can then be shared with parents.  Prezi will generate gasps of delight among audience members; however, it is and remains a glorified version of MS Powerpoint, that’s more difficult to use and does less.  It’s really fun to watch, but I fear it may soon fade into obscurity.  I hope they prove me wrong.

  

On the horizon (coming to a school near you!)...

etextbooks in the Classroom and at Home

More and more textbooks are becoming available digitally.  The big, heavy, graffiti-filled, thousand-page tomes of days gone by can now be replaced by their digital equivalents.  Students are given access to the etextbooks by their teacher and can then view the book on a multitude of devices, at home or in the classroom.

The nice thing about etexts is that the possibilities for differentiation and accommodation are seemingly endless.  Students who can’t read small print can change the font size.  Students who process written language slowly can have the book read to them.  The teacher can post (such as the homework questions) within the etext itself, and the teacher can post links within the textbook if there’s a youtube video that illustrates a point particularly well.  In the long run, students’ backs are saved because they aren’t lugging a heavy textbook around.

The downside to etexts is that not every student has access to a tablet, computer, smartphone, or internet access at home.  By using etexts, teacher could inadvertently punish students whose parents or guardians can’t afford this technology.

Project Based Teaching/Learning

An example of project-based learning would perhaps be the culminating task for a unit that I came up with for a Grade 9 Applied French class on my third teaching block.  The unit theme was music (Very original on my part, right?) and the culminating, inquiry-based project was that students had to plan a weekend trip to see their favourite singer or group perform.  This project was inquiry-based because the students had to figure out what they would need to make the plan.  They needed to be able to sustain a short phone conversation with a friend to make arrangements to meet up (questions, date, time, and familiar vs. formal language), they needed to be able to buy tickets at a ticket booth (questions, numbers, recognizing methods of payment and when the vendor makes a mistake), and they needed to be able to make a schedule (date, time, basic vocabulary).  They also needed to be able to say who their favourite singer was and why (verbs of feeling; giving good reasons).  All instruction and all assignments were geared toward preparing students for the culminating task.

My experience with project-based learning as a learner is that it can be frustrating.  Inquiry-based learning was the big thing while I was taking my undergraduate degree, and sometimes I felt as if project/inquiry-based learning was an excuse for the professor or T.A. to tell us nothing, yet claim to be teaching us.  I find that this sort of strategy is the kind that the student fails to appreciate on the short term, but appreciates immensely on the long term.  The inquiry-based approach more accurately depicts real-life, which hurls a series of problems at you that you must overcome in order to succeed.

As a teacher, my experience with project-based learning is that it turns you into a resource person, rather than a lecturer.  Instead of tossing water at empty glasses and hoping that some gets in, you give them the pitcher so they can pour it themselves, and they also have the choice of lemonade!  I also appreciate the focus that project-based learning gives my instruction.  No more busy-work, it’s all relevant, or if it’s not, students pick the knowledge that’s most relevant to them.  You can still fulfill all the curriculum requirements, even if students are learning slightly different content.

It’s this ability to differentiate our instruction that makes project-based learning relevant to today’s students.  Our society requires more and more education and is becoming more and more specialized.  In this type of society, the patience for generalist knowledge wanes.  Students want to learn things that are going to be relevant to them, in their future.  Rather than designing a French class where the few students who go on to study French literature will benefit, we can design French classes where all students are learning the grammar and vocabulary that will be most useful to them on their chosen path.

Link for Project-Based Learning:

http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning

It is important that students learn from examples because they have to be able to connect what they’re learning in the classroom to real-life situations and scenarios.  This connection is important because it’s what motivates students to work hard and what engages them in their own learning.  It’s almost evolutionary: unless what I’m doing has a direct link to my survival, do I want to invest a lot of time in it?

The project-based learning strategy can be used to inform and teach students, rather than giving them the information directly, by setting up the project so that the work that those students complete answers their own questions.  Rather than me saying, “Here’s information.  Learn it and you’ll be able to answer this question,” students begin with the question, and then find the answer(s).

This form of instruction could easily be considered individualized or student-centred because as aforementioned, students’ own learning goals are the focus of teaching and learning.

The Changing Nature of Teaching and Learning in the Junior Classroom

I’m taking an Additional Basic Qualification Course through Brock University to become qualified to teach the Junior Division (Grades 4-6), and one of the readings for this course is Michael Fullan’s Report, “Great to Excellent:Launching the Next Stage of Ontario’s Education Agenda.”

Fullan’s report has two main thrusts: (1) the Ontario Education System was “good,” but over the past nine years, it has become “great,” and (2) rather than stay where it is, or even take a step backwards, the Ontario Education System now needs to focus on moving from “great” to “excellent.”

The report proposes that the system become “excellent” in the two following ways:

1.    Sustain Improvement;

2.    Engage in focused innovation relative to higher-order skills and qualities, test what works and spread effective practices.

As teachers, we must focus on continuing to raise our standards for student achievement, ensure that those who are at a disadvantage get the help they need, and build public confidence in the education system.  To promote higher-order skills and qualities within our students, we must interweave teaching, learning, and technology, with a focus on the six C’s:

1.    Character Education

2.    Citizenship

3.    Communication

4.    Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

5.    Collaboration

6.    Creativity & Imagination

The shift from 20th- to 21st-century learning means that qualities like “Citizenship” no longer refer only to one’s immediate community or country, but to global citizenship.  Qualities like “Collaboration” no longer refer solely to team work, but also to social networking.

My personal reflection on this information would be that the main problem that we as teachers face is that we have a very limited idea of what we’re actually going to have to prepare our students for, yet we also know exactly what the future will be like.  The advent of the internet is comparable to the invention of the printing press:

·         Ideas can be disseminated quickly and easily.

·         It’s much easier to undermine existing authorities, whether they be parental or governmental.

·         Censorship and copyright laws cannot keep up to the change, and much of the information to which we have access is unreliable.

The way in which society has educated its children has been predicated on the assumption that change as the world might, there are some things that children will always need to know, like reading, writing, and arithmetic.  However, technology has placed even these three R’s under threat.  Some educators are now asking these questions:

·         Why decode words on a page, or read silently, if a computer can read to you?

·         Why learn to hand-write if you’ll be typing for most of your adult life anyway?

·         Why add, subtract, multiply, or divide, when we’re now quite comfortable with calculators?

Though each of these questions terrifies me, some actually take us backwards, rather than forwards.  In Ancient Rome, texts were more often read aloud and in large groups than silently.  In the first half of the 20^th century, it was common practice to dictate one’s letters to a secretary, and in our day and age, we take much more responsibility for our personal finances than we have in the past, when we left it to the “experts.”  Why not get a little extra help from technology?

What we do know about the future is that (a) there are going to be a lot of problems, and (b) the problems are going to be complex.  So, the only thing we know for certain is that future generations need to be educated in such a manner that they think critically, ask higher-order questions, and persist when solutions evade them.

But really, have we ever needed or asked for anything less?