4 tips on getting started with blended learning in the vocational classroom

You have been asked to change your classroom delivery over to a blended learning model. What is blended learning? Read my previous post.

How do you do this? You need a Blended Learning Design Plan. Here is one I developed you can use. Please acknowledge my authorship.

Here’s my 4 Blended Learning Design tips:

1. Analyse your efforts. There is no point in spending large or small budgets on multimedia creation if you cannot get a report on student participation. A fantastic but unwatched instructional video on applied marketing concepts in business is as worthy as an unread book on the same subject.
2. Know your LMS and its capabilities before you start. Don’t ask for an assessment item using an app if you can’t then mark it as competent in your LMS.
3. Apply teaching principles to your blended learning strategy. You may have to also teach your students how to search the internet, take notes from instructional videos, or how to navigate your lesson Prezi. Scaffold their learning and use comprehension checks at the end of each technology or class session.
4. Blend with care. Don’t make students watch a 30 minute video if you could say the same thing in 15 minutes. Technology should be used to enhance the learning, not replace your teaching.

blended learning wordle

image sourced: http://blended-classrooms.wikispaces.com/

Like this Wordle? Create your own here

ExitTicket – just the ticket

Technology in the classroom isn’t just so your students can enjoy a more interactive experience in their learning journey.  It’s also for teachers to measure training effectiveness and have tools to be able to adjust their pedagogy and re-measure.  Once this feedback is shared with your students, you can safely bet that their competitive spirit also kicks in, and they want those stats to improve!  It’s a very empowering experience for the student cohort to be in charge of their learning progress. A win – win for the whole teaching community 🙂 Who thought an app could do this?

The app I am talking about is ExitTicket.

ExitTicket

What’s an exit ticket?  This is an end-of-lesson checkpoint that your students have understood what you were on about in the past hour or so.  Here is a great explanation on how the ExitTicket app works: https://www.edsurge.com/exitticket

Are you a flipped classroom type of teacher?  Just use this as an entry ticket to your next class so you can instantly measure comprehension of tasks set for your students, and discuss the results collaboratively in groups or as one group.

The ExitTicket concept was created from the simple need to massively kickstart and accelerate student growth. To solve this problem, the ExitTicket design team parked themselves in a classroom and over time developed ExitTicket directly with teachers and students.

Inside the Toolkit (http://exitticket.org/toolkit/) is a growing selection of resources to help teachers capture the same type of growth for their students. ExitTicket was designed and honed by classroom teachers. It’s intuitive but feature-rich. It’s flexible for different teaching styles and content-areas but it improves instructional practices. ExitTicket provided teachers with authentic, longitudinal data showing how students’ comprehension grew and what concepts -not just assessments- needed intervention or earned celebration.

Did I mention it’s free? 🙂 Why not try it for yourself and let me know how your students’ responses helped you adjust your teaching style.

ExitTicket also supports the 4Ms of sound instructional design – meaningful, motivational, memorable and measurable.

I’ll be using it in more depth next year when mentoring teachers who work with English as a second language (ESL) students, so watch this space for my ongoing review 🙂

ExitTicket Module

KISS instructional design

This is part 1 of 3 parts:

1. K.I.S.S. your instructional design,
2. Lesson Plans for Teaching online, and
3. Make assessments S.M.A.R.T.

I’ll go over each of these parts separately, as you may only be interested in one part, depending on whether you work at the start of the e-learning cycle, middle, or the end 🙂

e-learning Mix

K.I.S.S. your instructional design

K.I.S.S. means applying the principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid, as all too often we developers get caught up in the latest tools, or let technology drive the pedagogy (that sound like a good name for another post, lol)

Our Certificate I and II courses (entry level studies) are designed acknowledging this is possibly the first experience of e-learning for the student.  Often they are not comfortable with participating in webinars, forums and chat rooms.  This can be due to learning support needs or low computer literacy.  Keeping the course navigation simple (log in, open the course, and start your learning from the top of the menu) assists in developing computer confidence for the user. 

One of the first courses I wrote still has a LOT of text online but it is broken into learning bites, so the student doesn’t need to scroll to read everything on the page – and every page has a relevant and supportive graphic.  Why the compulsory graphic? It helps grab their attention, keeps the learning authentic (when a workplace image is used in the right context), and increases the learner’s confidence they are still on the right path to a successful outcome (these instructional design principles are discussed further in ARCS Model of Motivational Design by John Keller). 

These learners actually preferred to read the text.  They liked the effort and discipline required, and it gave them sound reading habits that assisted in higher level studies when they had to research and analyse further information.  Of course this approach doesn’t work for every learner group, and some may like the list of 10 web addresses and being sent off to complete their WebQuest.

An example of an e-learning module with simple navigation:

NWP203B