One of the many exciting parts of starting a new school is envisioning what you want the day-to-day activities in your classrooms to look like. One approach that is making big headway is using blended learning to enhance and improve the traditional classroom experience. By combining in-class and online activities in a variety of ways, teachers and administrators can create the blended learning program that works best for their class or school. These blended-learning models allow for teachers to more easily differentiate instruction, for parents to be more active and involved in their child’s education, and for students to build technology literacy while working in their core academic areas.
At this point, you’re probably wondering how blended-learning fits into your soon-to-be school. The great thing is that you can incorporate blended learning in just about any way you can think of. If you’re just getting started, you might want to try one of these blended learning approaches:
- Flipped classrooms – Think of a flipped classroom as the exact mirror image of your traditional classroom. Rather than students getting lectures or reviewing their texts in class and practicing with homework at home, students in flipped classrooms watch videos and read their lessons at home and come to class ready to tackle problems and have discussions – putting their learning to work with the teacher there to support. Flipped classrooms are another type of blended learning that can take advantage of an LMS like Twine. Teachers can post lecture slides, videos, project guidelines, or other reading materials for students to review at home, so there is more class time to focus on practicing and refining skills at school.
- Station or lab rotation – In this method of blended learning, students rotate between different labs or stations, some computer-based and some not, completing tasks and activities at each one. This method is useful because it allows teachers to incorporate digital learning without it being the only part of the lesson and for students to take advantage of situations where access to devices might be limited. Elementary classrooms, in particular, could easily take advantage of this method since many of these students are already working in stations on various activities.
- Supplemental blended learning – Not every lesson can be completed in one class period and not every lesson has a nice clean ending where we can walk away finished. In these circumstances supplemental blended learning is perfect. It allows for critical learning objectives to take place in the classroom – the biggest of the big picture ideas – but then leaves the finer details and supplemental knowledge to be completed outside of class.
- Mastery-based blended learning – Ever seen a student utterly bored out of his or her mind because he or she had already mastered the concepts the rest of the class is still working on? Mastery-based blended learning puts the power in students’ hands to move on to new concepts when they are ready, making learning truly student-centered and encouraging students to work to the highest of their ability – even if that is beyond their grade level.
At Twine, we are excited about helping schools, passionate about transforming learning and focused on improving student achievement. We are proud to provide technology solutions that help schools achieve their goals. Want to learn more about how Twine can help your school get off the ground? Please contact us and we’ll walk you through it.