First Week Struggles

First Week Struggles

    I have decided to use this Blog as a record of our first big stab at getting Blended Learning up and running at our school.  A little background on the purpose of this blog.  In May we were officially chosen to be a Blended Learning School through a very generous grant from the Janus foundation.  Most of the schools chosen only picked specific grades and classes to move forward with the project but we decided that if we were going to do this, we were really going to jump in and do it school wide.  This offers us a unique opportunity to be a IB school and a Blended Learning School all while implementing CCSS.  We have enough pedagogy to kill a small animal.  Nonetheless, onward and upward we go. 

   I have spent all summer trying to think about hat this is going to mean for my students and my practice.  I almost feel like I am a first year teacher again.  What structures will the kids need? Where to even begin?  When in the heck is our technology going to arrive?  What LMS do we want to use?  How do the computers offer new opportunities for inquiry and engagement in the world?  How in the world do we get the parents on board?  Zoiks!  

   Like I said, I am trying really hard to use this Blog to record our struggles and victories and to act as a record for next year when we want to try and add onto the work we have already begun.  I want to use this as  a professional reflection page for myself in the distant hope that it might help others struggling with how to get this amazing beast off the ground in their own school.

    So far, we have gotten the kids on-line and established their Google Accounts.  I have 23 very excited emails in my inbox of kids who have never sent a email in their lives!  We also discussed the Essential Agreements around emails and the need to understand the severity of what will happen if they would choose to cyber bully someone via the emails.  We have also established a wiki space with our partner school in Malmo, Sweden.  We hope to get the kids first international project online next week.
The kids will use some Guiding Questions to research the name of their partner student in Sweden.  They will turn this project into a short Animoto movie to introduce their buddy to the class.  Once the Wiki is live and all of the kids are logged in I would be happy to share it with anyone in education who happen to stumble on my blog.  I will also embed our essential questions here for anyone trying to start a Blended Learning opportunity with a partner school in other countries.  We are also going to set up folders in Drive for every Unit of Inquiry that will operate as digital portfolios.  We are also creating some Blended Learning Playlists in Math that I will also post for reflection and maybe (fingers crossed) some insight.

     Our first unit of inquiry is on Civics.  We have been having the kids examine Maslow's hierarchy to discuss WHY the rules in our classroom have to be in place to ensure safety and security.  This will allow us to get to all those yummy higher level things like Creativity and Critical Thinking.  We have been apply this thinking to technology and how we should respect and treat people in a digital classroom.  We have also watched some great TEDed videos and lessons on equality and a great high level video entitled Who Invented Writing?  I am hoping that these discussions will be base builders for Socratic Seminar.  Also on deck this week is showing the kids how to use a Goggle Word Doc to record their reading everyday to help with their AR testing.  Not bad for a first week and that is without the technology getting here on time.  Just wait till we get those Chromebooks in the class.  Please feel free to pass on any ideas or questions you might have if you have accidentally ended up here.  More to come soon.

Keep mixing it up,
Janine 

Week 2 MOOC:

Hi Everybody,

I thought the MOOC was great this week.  It has really pushed on my practice and has me thinking a lot about IB and how I can make what we are already doing so effectively in classroom practice and make it digital.  I thought the videos Dan posted helped to answer a question that has long dogged me when it comes to digital project.  Often times I have seen things presented at Tech conferences that look really cool from a tech perspective but lack the depth and rigor I would expect from a student.  It is very clear to me now that the backend part of the project probably wasn't as explicitly laid out as it needed to be to get students to mastery.  In other words, the inquiry process should be student based and rooted in the real world so it will speak to students, but the planning of it should still have all the elements of backward design.  I know I have experienced the same problem when I use technology on my classroom.  I think I now know where my issues lie.  For me, a lot of my projects have the "dessert" feel that Dan was discussing.  They are add ons after the students have encountered the learning not driven through inquiry and presented digitally.  In addition, I have not designed these projects to be self guided.  My students are always asking me procedural questions instead of letting me use my time deepening their inquiries.  This weeks MOOC helped me see that I need to go back to the drawing board next year and use these lens to evaluate all of our units of inquiry technology pieces.  The great news is that this model fits so beautifully with the IB philosophy and mode of instruction that I can see this being perfect for the PYP program.  

Long winded, but I wanted to save my thinking here so I can reflect on this during planning for next year.  

I decided to take the "When Will We Ever Use This?" Challenge.  

I am thinking about the work that my class does around positive and negative integers.  this is a lesson, or series of lessons that we do at the end of the year in 5th grade.  I know that upper math teacher will point out that they will need this skill for higher math skills all the time and that negative numbers are an essential element of number sense.  I agree whole heartedly but this can be a concept that is difficult for 5th graders to understand why this knowledge is important in their lives.  I was also thinking about the woefully neglected standards thrown in with Social Studies on economics and personal finance.  These poor standards are often treated like a forgotten package of tofu.  We have the best intentions to use the tofu, we really do, but life and the standardized test get in the way.  In addition, these are both areas where I find my practice and application with my students really lacking.

Here is my new plan for unveiling these standards using Inquiry Based Project Learning:

Learning Objective:

IWBAT identify the median income for an average worker based on educational level

IWBAT use this average income to plan a budget for my family.

Initiating Activity:
Students will watch a video on people talking about the importance of budgeting and the difficulties that they have in making the money stretch when they are limited by their education.

Students will draw cards that gives them the level of education that they have completed.

Students will research the average or median income of people with that level of education.  (We will discuss outliers and how some people are able to make more than the average incomes because I know Bill Gates will come up)

Students will brainstorm all the different costs associated with running a household with 4 people in it.

Teacher will do some direct instruction on the rules of positive and negative integers.

Students will create a excel spreadsheet to manage the budget. 

Students will draw chance cards every day in class.  These will include some positive cards but most cards will include the usual whammies that most of us experience.  

At the end of the week, students will analyze their data and decide what to move around in their budget to keep themselves in the black.  

At the end of 4 weeks, students will write a cause and effect essay on their data and make some correlation between their income and expenses and how their budget ended up.

It would be nice to see if we can have Junior Achievement Volunteers work with the students to set up the budgets.

At some point, students running in the red will be offered a credit card with 24% to help with expenses. We will do some lessons on compound interest so they can get the idea that credit cards are not free money and that they can prove dangerous.  

Week 1 MOOC

Hello Fellow MOOC participants,


My name is Janine Logar and I am a 5th grade teacher at a IB PYP school in Denver, Colorado.  I began hearing whispers of this thing called blended learning and flipped classrooms about 2 years ago.  Curious, I tiptoed my way into a tech conference held by my district where it seems everyone spoke in code: Web 2.0 tools, blended learning. flipped classrooms, digital portfolios and something about a cloud, where quite frankly I felt like I was.  I came out of the day armed with a few ideas about revamping my classroom and a few hundred questions on what to do next.  I then attended the TIE conference in Copper Mountain over the summer.  It became apparent to me that these whispers were about to become a roar and these concepts were about to crash into schools and take them by storm.  My school is a International Baccalaureate school so the idea that blended learning could make a classroom truly inquiry based, inter-disciplinary and differentiated while making my students ready for the upcoming PARCC tests and 21st century ready seems to resonate deeply with myself and many others in my school.  It is my hope that we can help champion the cause of Blended Learning in Denver and bring it to the IB organization as the next step in their already student driven approach to learning.

The MOOC is a great place for us to start getting our feet wet and our minds ready to think strategically about how this might look for us in the upcoming years.

A reflection on my learning so far:

The way in which students receive instruction can be viewed as a continuum.

• Traditional brick and mortar classrooms: Students receive instruction during the designated class times mostly through the planning and control of the teacher.  In my mind, the pros of this are the interactions students can have with their teacher and their peers.  Cons:  It offers little time for true differentiation (here I am literally speaking of an individualized course of instruction based on need).  Also, it offers little interaction with the parents aside from a phone call home or a special school night where students share their work. 
• Total On-Line courses: Students receive instruction any time and any where in the digital universe.  Interactions with peers and teachers is strictly on line  Again, in my mind their are pros and cons to this model.  Pro: Students can decide when that are ready for instruction, it allows students to engage in a platform they are familiar with (the internet), and allows for students who struggle in a typical classroom a option.  Cons:  I believe peer and teacher collaboration in a very important part of the whole child development of the human psyche.  While on-line programs can be robust, I sincerely believe that nothing can replace the importance of a person who believes that you are important.  Also, I think our students need to learn the value of compromise, collaboration, and communication as well.
• Blended Learning:  I see Blended Learning as the Goldilocks of these two models.  It allows for the social and emotional benefits of engaging in a classroom without compromising the individuality of students academic needs

Next I would like to speak quickly about how I see the three major benefits of Blended Learning affecting my personal practice:

• Engagement:  I have experimented a bit with Blended Learning this year.  One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how much cooler an more interested the students are when they get to do the task on the computer.  This holds true for whether the task is a video and some practice problems, game, or a project using Web 2.0 tools.  I have seen a reduced number of boredom and   behavior incidents as a result.
• Assessment:  I like assessment that helps drive my instruction.  In the end, if a student can not do a task independently then they have not transferred their learning no matter how much they paid attention.  I can see blended learning really improving my ability to set tasks, analyze results, and intervene instantly if a student has not obtained mastery.
• Differentiation: This may be the key to both of the benefits listed for blended learning.  How can you have a different lesson plan for 24-30 kids in every subject?  The key is differentiated tasks.  We know that kids act out when the ZPD is too hard.  We know that they will never be able to build on a concept if the foundational concept was never in play.  What about our poor GT kids who have to hang in there for 20-30 minutes on something they got in the first 5 minutes.  Blended learning really can help here.

Quickly wanted to say that the live Webinar was a great foundational video for schools and districts who are interested in doing blended learning right.  This is definitely a concern that I have going into this huge paradigm shift.  It is not enough for districts, schools, and donors to back the money truck up if a strategic plan is not in place for teachers.

Thanks,

Janine