Tag Archives: blended learning

Summer chat with Robert Martellacci @MindShareLearn

I dropped my mom off for her first hair appointment since covid hit, and there isn’t a waiting room to hang out in… so off to Starbucks for a coffee and then a parking lot chat with Robert Martellacci from MindShareLearning.ca.

I hope that you enjoy this episode of This Week in EdTech’s MindShareLearning Report. 🇨🇦

Notes:

My Twitter is @datruss (not dtruss in the tweet above)

Free e-book: Twitter EDU

My Daily-Ink about students/parents showing my wife appreciation.

Inquiry Hub Secondary (iHub) ~ And our website for educators.

Learning Experiences

Last month I wrote, ‘Just shifting online or shifting the learning?‘. This post looked at how to effectively shift engaging learning online, from a distance, as we moved to remote learning. Now we need to think about what we’ve learned, and what we want to bring back into our schools.

There will be limits that social distancing will challenge us with. But when we final normalize what school looks like, how will this global experiment in teaching remotely change what we do in schools post a Covid-19 vaccination? What lessons will we take from this?

Six years ago, I wrote,’Flexible Learning Opportunities‘

In this post I said,

“Blending won’t be something done to classes or students, rather it will be the modus operandi… the way teaching and learning happens. In fact, even ‘distance learning’ could have synchronous ‘face-to-face’ meetings in virtual worlds. It will be an exception to the norm, in a very short while, to have a class that is strictly face-to-face or solely online/asynchronous.”

I got timing of ‘a very short while’ wrong, and it took a pandemic to make it happen, but now I think we are approaching this. When students return to school are teachers going to just revert to old ways or will they rethink how they spend their time in class?

One of my schools that I’m the principal of is the district online school (Coquitlam Open Learning). For a while now, I’ve been talking to my teachers about the fact that over 95% of our online students are local, and asking how we can leverage this? Here are a couple examples:

1. Math teachers running a Numeracy event, where they brought students from many different classes together to solve numeracy problems and help them prepare for the provincial numeracy assessment.

2. The Biology teacher running fetal pig dissections to teach about the different body systems. Second year university med students taught our online & Inquiry Hub students about the different systems and did rotating demonstrations, then our students taught gifted middle school students in the same format later that day, with the university students assisting.

In both these cases, when the online students came together, it was for an ‘experience’, not just a lesson. How can we think about this as we bring some of the asynchronous learning to our synchronous classrooms? How can we rethink the experience of school when students all have access to resources, digital conversations, and videos and lessons that they don’t need to be together to see and do?

How can we leverage the digital access and connectivity to change what we do when we meet kids face to face?

Can we give them more guided time to work independently, with teachers providing just-in-time support?

Can we focus more on learning experiences, rather than lessons?

Are we just going to shift the learning back into classrooms, or are we going to start thinking more about how we can shift the learning experiences we provide while kids are in our schools?

A concrete example of this is that students at Inquiry Hub Secondary have about 40% of their day when they are not in front of their teachers. During this time, they work on assignments teachers give them (imagine group work where students never need to meet outside of school), they work in digital components of their courses (like video lessons), and they work on some pretty interesting student-designed inquiry projects (that they get credit for). You can learn more about how we make Inquiry Hub work here.

Are we just shifting the learning back into schools or are we also shifting towards different kinds of learning experiences?

Gears aren’t aligned

Have you ever ridden a bicycle when the gears aren’t aligned properly and so every full cycle of the peddles ends up with a jarring ‘clunk’ that breaks the flow of your peddling? If you have, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, imagine walking and every second step with your right foot it feels like someone tapped your knee with a finger. At first it’s uncomfortable, then you just kind of accept it as the norm.

I feel like March was a long month of the gears being misaligned, but we just got used to it. Now the Match break is over we are back at school and we have to adjust to a whole new misalignment with students staying home and the reality that Covid-19 will likely impact us for months to come. So April begins with a new misalignment that we need to adjust to, and while we know the ride won’t be smooth, we know we will get used to it.

I am excited about how this year will change the dynamic of teaching and learning in the future. In 2011, I wrote that ‘the future of education will be open and distributed’. In this post I said,

“Within 5 years, every student from Grade 6 or 7 right up to Grade 12 will be involved in some level of distributed learning.”

I was wrong. Things go much slower than I envisioned. In 2014 I wrote about ‘flexible learning opportunities‘ and I shared this graphic:

I said in the post:

“I think we are only 5-7 years away from the term ‘blended learning’ being obsolete in the same way that the term Distance Learning is now.  Here is an analogy to think about: The move from ‘Distance’ to ‘Distributive’ learning was the switch from having a ‘phone extension chord’ to the cordless phone. The switch from ‘Distributive’ to ‘Blended’ is the switch from a cordless home phone to cell phones. Now, the ubiquitous use of data-rich phones everywhere is similar to the leap we will see.“

It looks like we might get there.

While I think that teaching students, who are not coming to our schools daily, is going to finally catapult us forward in ways that I thought would have happened years ago, I also think it will take some time to get over the feeling that gears are misaligned. In fact, for the next while, it’s going to feel like we are riding up hill in the wrong, clunky gear.

I’m excited about where we are headed. I’m just feeling like the ride to our destination will be a bit uncomfortable. Hopefully by May we feel like our gears are aligned.

Novel ideas can spread from a novel virus

I travelled to China during the early H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic in 2009. Concerns were low in Canada and there wasn’t a travel warning at the time. On my flight to Japan there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. However after leaving Japan, when we landed in Chana we were asked to stay on the plane and remain seated.

A team of people masked and dressed in white came on board and used an infrared thermometer to take our temperatures. Two rows in front of me a person that was coughing and unwell, and her husband, were escorted off the plane first. I remember thinking, ‘Oh man, sucks to be you!’

I thought that was it, but after leaving the plane I guess that we passed a heat sensor camera because I was tapped on the shoulder and pulled aside. A lady in a mask, shining a red light on my forehead, took my temperature and said, “Too hot.”

To say that I was freaked out is an understatement. I was visiting for 1 week to learn about my future job as a school Principal, and visions of quarantine in a foreign country, where I don’t speak the language, swirled through my head. Fortunately, a second reading was done and I was fine. I think a coffee right before landing, plus the fact that I run a little hot anyway, might have been the initial trigger.

Still, that shook me a little. I wondered about why these measures were not happening elsewhere? The response in China seemed preventative, while in other countries it seemed merely reactive. I’m not sure too many lessons were learned and the novel Coronavirus currently spreading across the world will likely have a significant impact on our globe before things get better. Yet I don’t mean that to sound like foreboding, and ominous foreshadowing. This virus will run its course, then some valuable lessons will be learned that were not learned by viruses like this in the past. Lessons that will hopefully help prevent the severity of a future pandemic.

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I read in interesting article, “How the coronavirus will shape the future” and want to expand on one section as it relates to schools and education:

If the growing novel coronavirus outbreak becomes a lasting pandemic, it could accelerate fundamental changes in the economy, politics and the workplace...

Going remote: Videoconferencing and remote work have exploded as the virus has spread.

  • According to Kentik, a global provider of network analytics, videoconferencing traffic in North America and Asia has doubled since the outbreak began.

  • Led by tech firms like Twitter and Facebook, companies are encouraging and even requiring their employees to work from home, both to slow the spread of the disease now and prepare for the worst should offices be closed in a quarantine.

  • Many experts believe business leaders will come to see that central offices and face-to-face meetings are less vital than they thought. “We’re going to see that work can be tied to productivity anywhere rather than putting time in an office,” said Peter Jackson, CEO of the digital collaboration company Bluescape.

At Inquiry Hub Secondary every assignment is already available online. Students have access to Moodle, Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft Teams from any connected computer or mobile device. The Microsoft tools also have immersive readers and dictation tools to support students no matters where they are learning from.

Using Teams, I can invite colleagues or students into a virtual classroom, sharing video including either my or a student’s screen, and we can all link to resources in the Chat. Students could collaborate and do presentations, submit work, and get feedback without entering a school. That creates a lot of opportunities that weren’t previously available. I have no idea if this is something that will become necessary in the coming months, but in some parts of the world schools have already been closed, and so the idea that this is possible becomes a topic of discussion.

Discussion about the possibility of remote learning invites questions about blended learning where some of the work, both asynchronous and synchronous, is done remotely. It also invites conversations and questions about what we should be spending our time on when we do get together?

We might not have to change anything to deal with the Coronavirus, but the fact that this virus is impacting the world the way it is might impact how we think about operating our schools and businesses in the future. What excites me isn’t the idea that more work might be done remotely, but rather the ideas behind what we do when we connect face-to-face, and how we use that time? Will we focus more on collaboration, team building, social skills, construction and creation of projects, and more personalized support? How will we engage students in learning when they might not be coming to school every day?