Five ways to fail at Blended Learning:
Try to make everything available online all at once. Impossible and you would be too tired to teach students face-to-face.
Instead, carve out small goals in reasonable amounts of time. Try making one type of assignment/assessment available online, not everything. For instance, create all your Discussion Posts for first semester this summer. During first semester work on second semester. Next summer create a Help Module customized to how you do Blended Learning in your classroom. Making strategic portions of your classroom available online at a time is a better strategy.
Gate all your content. Ignore the asynchronous possibilities of The Internet at your own peril.
Instead, consider that students working at their own pace mean greater efficiency for your classroom. You can make chunks of content available while reserving the next chunk, thereby allowing some self-selection of pace for students while retaining some traditional teacher control.
A better strategy is to acknowledge that this is not lockstep, accept, adjust, move forward….at your own pace of course. 🙂
Use exactly the same content as face-to-face. Spoiler alert, students act differently online than they do in your class, take advantage of that!
Putting content online means looking at everything from the student/home point of view. How easy is this to navigate? How can I offer fewer, obvious paths to the content? How is this making learning easier, not harder? Do not upload worksheets and expect students to – what – download them, print them out and turn them into you in class? Or maybe scan them and upload them?
{I’ll give you a minute to go delete that worksheet you uploaded recently}
Instead, take activities which lend themselves to online engagement – projects – discussions and consider them for candidates for upload.
A better strategy is to next time you want to share something online consider the User Experience (UX) with your blended learning.
Assume using technology is blended learning.
Instead, start from the place of wanting to teach well, and look for places where technology either amplifies your efforts or those of your students.
Planning for and using technology strategically is a better strategy.
Never update. Links break, content grows stale, and you are missing better resources.
Instead, think of your online content as the part of your classroom presentation to students and parents which you totally control. For once, you can be as close to perfect as you are going to get!
Updating immediately following completing a unit of study or a project is a better strategy.
2017-06-28 at 9:40 am
Thanks for sharing these ideas, Penny! While everything in this post was amazing, I really appreciate you warn educators against assuming that “using technology is blended learning”. This is a great post and I plan to share it with my blended learning teachers right away!