Beginning Gamification with Classcraft

My goal in gamifying our blended learning rotation during reading groups is to increase motivation and engagement when students are working independently. Since students are working on their own, and not in a whole group setting, I was in need of a sophisticated gamification app to both deliver online content and assess student learning. 

While I like the idea of being able to customize game settings to best meet the unique needs of my learners, I really needed an app that is easy to use for a complete novice in the gaming world (that’s me!). Classcraft is a perfect fit. It’s really great, guys! I can easily customize settings for my class, and it has online support via chat, community forums, and all kids of video tutorials. All those resources made it really simple to get things all set up for my class. 

Basic Features

I created accounts for my students and assigned teams in only about 10 minutes. Once that is done, individual students are able to create their own character. Student teams work together to gain points, protect one another from possible negative events, and ultimately, level up in the game. This collaborative aspect of the game provides an extra layer of motivation through peer accountability. As the gamemaster, I can assign students or teams points or damage based on their class behavior, very much like Class Dojo. All this is free for teachers! 

Teachers can view student profiles and add points from
 a computer or smartphone. 

Delivering Lessons and Assessments 

It gets better! What I’m really excited about is quests. I decided to pay for a premium account so that I would have access to this feature. Quests are a series of lessons and tasks that I create for my students. This is how I deliver online lessons and assessments. Each task is accompanied with a story, where I write a narrative of what is happening in our fictional world of the game, and what characters must do to complete the quest and win. 

This map outlines the seven tasks students must finish to complete the quest.

As students work their way through each task, they reveal a new part of the map we are playing through and earn rewards for their character and team. When students earn enough points, they level up, making their character more powerful and acquiring new skills. Students can also use the gold pieces they have earned to get a pet for their character or buy new accessories to make their characters look extra awesome. 

Personalized Learning 

Another great feature for quests is that I can personalize learning for my students. Within each quest, I can create multiple paths for students to reach success. If Student A is completing tasks well, she can continue on the normal path, or even choose a more challenging path. When Student B shows that he has not mastered a skill, I can set up the quest so that he automatically follows a separate path to receive reteaching and extra practice before progressing to new skills. How great is that!? 

After a bit more practice, I plan to start creating quests with these more complex paths to personalize student learning. Here is my first attempt. The yellow path is the most direct route and requires basic mastery of skills. The red detour includes reteaching and remediation activities, while the purple detour challenges students to apply their learning in new ways. 

This map shows multiple learning paths for success. 

Initial Implementation

We have been using Classcraft in our reading groups for about two weeks now and we LOVE it! My students are so engaged and motivated. When students have failed at a task, they have asked to try again so that they can further develop their character. They have even asked if they can "play" Classcraft at home. Wow!! This is winning!

My next goal is to maintain this motivation after the honeymoon phase wears off. I can’t wait to see how my students learn and grow using gamification! 

Leveling Up: Gamifying Instruction to Increase Engagement

I told my students that my goal for 2018 is to have fun. I stopped straightening my hair, my husband and I set up a 15 foot trampoline in our family room for our kids (no really, we did that), and I committed to gamifying part of our instructional day. Let the fun begin!

Gamification Basics

I was introduced to the concept of gamification during my graduate course work last semester. Gamification is a fancy term that basically means using game design principles in a non-gaming context. It can be as straightforward as transforming learning activities into games or a more subtle application of game design principles to learning tasks. Game design principles include concepts like cooperation, competition, point scoring, genuine challenges, and character development.

Gamifying your classroom can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make it. Some teachers choose to make their own game for their classroom in order to customize features including backstory, characters, rules, and objectives. At the same time there are many user-friendly apps that you may already use in your classroom:

• Kahoot A quizzing app allowing students to compete against classmates when answering questions.
• Quizizz A quizzing app that can be teacher or student paced.
• Class Dojo An app focused on building positive classroom community through teacher feedback.

Student Benefits

Playing games is part of our culture, and students can be highly motivated by game-based learning opportunities. Honestly, not of all my students are motivated by the grades they earn, but most are willing to spend hours working to beat a challenging level in their favorite video game. Pairing student motivation related to game playing along with learning tasks has the potential to increase student engagement.

Like with coding, failure in gaming does not usually result in immediate frustration like we so often see when our students are given a challenging educational task. In gaming, failure is an opportunity to gain immediate feedback on a mistake and try again. This type of growth mindset goes a long way in helping students develop perseverance and problem solving skills. If incorporating game design into learning tasks helps my students view challenging academic tasks in this way, then I’m all for it!

My Goal

My goal for this grading period is gamifying the blended learning portion of my reading groups.

I use a blended learning model for my guided reading groups because I want to maximize student learning when they are working independently. Last year, I created online lessons for students to complete independently. When we met face to face, I would provide instruction to further their progress based on their achievement so far. We experienced so many benefits of blended learning, and I found that my students were highly motivated to complete their online lessons at first because it was something new for them. There were also excited to have the responsibility of working independently on their Chromebooks. Unfortunately, when the initial excitement wore off, some students tended to stall out, and they lost interest in making progress.

My answer to that problem is using gamification to prolong student motivation and engagement while working independently. I’m looking forward to trying this with my students, and I’ll be sharing our experience in the coming weeks!

If you’re interested in learning more about gamification, watch this interview with gamification guru James Paul Gee. He makes some great points about teaching to meet the needs of today’s students.

Encouraging Student Agency and Ownership

My friend Michele recently sent me this teaching video saying that it reminded her of my math workshop. I was so encouraged by the teacher in this video! I love that Ms. Scalzetti is increasing student agency and ownership by having students decide what kind of support they need for each math lesson. It sends a clear message that the students are in charge of their own learning. There are many resources for them to learn from, but they decide their own learning path.

Seeing this teacher’s work made me start thinking about how I might also begin to encourage students to take ownership of their learning during my math workshop. So far, we are loving the small group instruction and differentiation that the workshop model affords us. Now that we have settled into the routine of our workshop, we are using data to drive our daily instruction in order to guarantee that every student receives the support they need to reach our learning goals. Here is a quick overview of three typical lesson types that we teach and how we have started increasing student agency.

New Skills

When we are first introducing a new skill to the students, we make sure that we see every student in a small group. We typically make these groups based on unit pretest data. We have also created student groups based on how students learn and how quickly they typically pick up a new skill.  Sometimes we extend our whole group learning time when introducing new concepts that students have very little prior knowledge of. During these types of lessons, we ask students to evaluate their own learning, encouraging students to take responsibility for their learning so far.

Progressing Skills

On days that we are continuing learning from previous lessons, we usually use our mini-lesson time to briefly review the previously taught skill. At the end of our guided practice, students complete a few problems on their own. Student groups are created on the spot by my co-teacher and myself based on student performance. In this case, we still meet with every student, but our lessons are differentiated. While some students are receiving additional guided practice, others may engage in a reteaching lesson or be challenged to apply their mastery in new contexts. We increase student agency by allowing students to gauge their learning and notify us when they think they are ready to work independently.

Near Mastery Skills

When our class is nearing mastery of the skill, we use a quick check to determine the best learning path for each student. Our quick check might take place as an entry ticket the day of the lesson, or as a exit ticket from the day before. In this case, we do not meet with every student. Some students spend our math block working without teacher support. During this point in our learning progress, students usually use a teacher-created teaching video so that they can control the pace of their work while assessing their own understanding. Targeted groups of students meet with the teachers to move toward mastery. Students working with teachers have been teacher-chosen in the past, but recently, we have encouraged students to decide if they need to work with a teacher, much like Ms. Scalzetti does in her class.

Making a teaching video using my document camera. 

Reflection

My co-teacher and I have started taking small steps toward increasing student agency in our math workshop. We are wrapping up our current unit and we required students to choose if they met with a teacher today for review. Students who did not meet with a teacher were also given choices of teaching materials to use to review independently.

I had two students that I know needed further help but chose to work independently. I had them sit close to my instruction so that I could keep an eye on their progress and pull them into a group when they needed help.

Today, one of my students asked, “What if I used to need a lot of help, but I know I’m getting better. I still need some help, but not a lot. Should I see the teacher today?” Wow! She has really been monitoring her learning closely, and she is invested in progressing. I was so pleased to see my students reflect on their learning to determine their own next steps toward success.

Next Steps

Ms. Scalzetti also mentioned that students who do not attend the seminars for the day work on applying their learning to the real world and creating something using that skill. I think this would be a great next step for our own math workshop. Right now, our independent activities are mostly review and independent practice. I like that this teacher is having her students apply their learning to new situations, increasing rigor and requiring students to deepen their knowledge. For our future units, I’d like to create more challenging independent tasks and projects.

Personalization and Universal Design for Learning

So far I feel pretty great about getting blended learning up and running in my class. My students are able to work independently and solve most of their own problems. I’m able to teach more rigorous lessons during my guided reading groups because students have already learned and practiced the skills during their online learning portion of the day. We really are off to a great start. So, what’s next?

As I consider the online content that I’ve created, I notice a few things. At the end of each online lesson, my students take a survey to give me feedback about parts of the lesson that were confusing, difficult, or just plain boring. They also share their favorite parts of the lesson so that I can design engaging content in the future. Not surprisingly, most students say that they like the video content and games, so I try to incorporate some of those elements in each lesson I create.

Beyond student feedback though, I’ve realized that my online content is pretty basic. Each student is completing the same content in the same way. Ideally, I’d like to create content that is more student centered. One benefit of blended learning is the ability to personalize learning for students, and I plan to focus future content creation around this concept.

What is Personalization?

Personalization is similar to the concept of differentiation in that students are learning the same content, but in different ways. With differentiation, the teacher controls the learning. She decides which students are doing what activities, how they will represent their learning, and when they will do these tasks. With personalized learning, the teacher creates the content, but each student makes learning decisions for themselves. Students are given the opportunity to choose how they will engage with content and represent their learning.  One benefit of personalization over differentiation is the increase in student agency, or a student’s ability to take initiative in their learning.  

According to Leila Meyer’s article The 4 Common Characteristics of Personalized Learning, personalization can take many different forms, but there are a few common characteristics, including: student ownership of their learning process, a focus on the learning process rather than big end-of-year tests, competency-based student progression, and anytime/anywhere learning. My next logical step is to move toward student ownership of their learning process.

Universal Design for Learning

The concept of personalization is closely tied to another topic I’ve been reading about called Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This 4 minute video does a great job explaining UDL.

The three main principles of UDL are:

• Engagement- student learning is most meaningful when students are naturally motivated.
• Representation- students learn in different ways, so it is imperative to provide multiple formats for student learning.
• Action and Expression- students can demonstrate their learning of the same content in many different ways.

When I consider these three main principles as they relate to blended learning and creating online content, it all boils down to student choice.  As much as possible, students should have the ability to choose the content they will be studying- allowing for maximum engagement. While that is not always an option, giving students choice whenever possible is best. It is also important to provide multiple pathways for students to learn the content and then express their understanding.  

Consider my students here. They have very different preferences for learning and expression. UDL would suggest providing paths for all these learners to find the best possible success.

These girls prefer auditory learning. They like hearing instruction and
expressing their learning through verbal explanations.

My students here are visual learners. The need to see models,
and they prefer to show examples of their learning. 

Written expression is a strength for these learners. They have very strong
vocabulary skills, and they enjoy being challenged through writing. 

Designing Personalized Content Using UDL

My next step in content creation will be adding student choice into the lessons I’m creating. I will most likely continue to have my class work on the same lesson, because I just don’t have enough content created yet to branch out in that way. While they are working on the same content, though, I will design lessons in such a way that students can choose their learning path through the UDL principles of representation and action/expression.

The principle of representation focuses around giving student multiple ways to engage with and learn the content. I can see my online lessons giving students multiple resources to use and having them choose a certain number to engage with. These resources could be teacher made videos, online content, teaching charts, songs, online books, infographics, interactive images, etc.

The principle of action and expression promotes student freedom in showing what they have learned. Students could express their understanding of the content by simply writing or solving simple problems, making an audio or visual recording explaining what they learned, creating a teaching tool for other students, writing a book, or creating an infographic.

Universal Design for Learning Example

A few months back I created a digital project based learning resource for my students in which they are tasked with the challenge of persuading a chosen audience to take action in conserving and protecting our natural resources.  After learning about UDL and personalization, I think my resource shows all three principles of UDL:

• Engagement- students are tasked with persuading others about a real problem. They can choose the topic they wish to learn about from a provided list.
• Representation- students choose from videos, websites, and online books to learn the content.
• Action and Expression- students choose from a variety of projects to complete. They can write a song, make a TV public service announcement, create a radio commercial, write a letter, design a poster, or give a presentation aimed at an audience of their choice.

As I go forward, I would like to not only incorporate opportunities for students to choose their learning path in everyday online lessons, but also create more projects like this one to incorporate into our units.

Do you have ideas or strategies to increase student choice in learning? Share them in the comments here. I’d love to hear your ideas and try to incorporate them into my classroom!  

The Secret of Blended Learning

If you’ve read some of my other posts, you know there are many benefits to using a blended learning model with your students. It increases student engagements, allows students to work at their own pace, and encourages students to take a more active role in their learning experience. See my post The Student Experience: Blended Learning to hear what students had to say about the online learning portion of our blended learning model used at Tech Camp.

Lately I’ve been working to implement blended learning with my whole class. After taking some time to reflect on our progress this week, I’ve realized some pretty amazing benefits of blended learning that I hadn’t considered yet.

Using Blended Learning to Problem Solve

In their book Blended, Michael Horn and Heather Staker explain that blended learning should be used to address a specific problem so that it has a direct purpose, direction, and clear goals. I’ve chosen to use blended learning to address a particular recurring problem during my guided reading groups.

I don’t know about you, but over the years I have tried multiple strategies to increase student learning during independent reading time. I’ve tried centers, response journals, partner work, book clubs, reward systems...does this sound familiar? I’ve even switched back and forth between these ideas in order to keep students engaged and learning.

These strategies helped most of my students stay engaged during their independent learning, but I need a solution for my students who have to work independently for our entire guided reading block on some days. It’s just not ideal. Believe me, If I could, I would have every student working with a teacher everyday to improve reading skills, but it’s just not possible. Or is it?

My Discovery

Here’s the secret that I discovered while implementing blended learning with my students during reading groups: I’ve basically cloned myself and created my own digital co-teacher. Seriously, alert the media. It’s a big deal.

Rather than having my students read and respond independently as part of our guided reading group time, they are now engaged with my digital co-teacher, participating in meaningful learning that I created for them. Better yet, communication with my digital co-teacher is a snap because I can easily see exactly what each student is working on, who is struggling with certain skills, and who needs enrichment.  

I want all of my students to learn at a high level. Like many of my colleagues, I continually struggled to find time to teach highly rigorous lessons because my students needed more support mastering the skills on a more basic level. It was frustrating. Now, I can use blended learning to solve this problem. My digital co-teacher can teach these reading skills while I go deeper and help students apply those skills in more challenging ways during our face-to-face time.

My face-to-face time with students has become so much more productive and engaging for them. Believe it or not, they want to learn and practice skills in rigorous ways, especially when I’m right there to help them. Before, my face-to-face time with students was admittedly a bit predictable. That’s a nice way of saying it was a little boring. We would read and practice skills, but it was pretty basic. Now my students are excited to come to my reading table and see what challenge I have for them.

Blended Learning as a Pre-Teaching Tool

This is my friend Rachel Lamb. She’s a special education teacher at my school. I have the amazing opportunity to co-teach with her throughout the day. Lately she has tried out blended learning with one of her reading groups. She decided to create online content to pre-teach her students for an upcoming fourth grade unit. Immediately following their online learning, Rachel meets with her students to support and reinforce the topics they just learned. Her goal is to prepare her students so that they will be more successful during whole group instruction.

Here is what she has to say about her experience with blended learning so far, “I believe that we are reteaching so many skills throughout the year that my students always feel behind. With pre-teaching through blended learning, my students will be able to participate in the whole group instruction more, and they will better understand grade-level content. I haven’t seen the direct impact blended learning has made on the grade level standards yet, but I have seen an impact in my time with my reading group. My students are more confident with answering questions, and less direct teaching and modeling has to occur.”

Are you looking for a way to improve your guided reading groups? I highly recommend giving blended learning a try. Rachel and I have found it to be effective in two different, but equally important ways. Whether you are wanting to find time to implement more rigorous instruction, or you are looking to better prepare your students for whole group instruction, blended learning could be a solution for you.

Creating Online Content: Advice from a Pro

If you are a classroom teacher in a traditional school wanting to implement blended learning, chances are that you are going to need to develop online content. Unfortunately, it turns out that simply converting even your best face-to-face lessons and activities into online formats doesn’t guarantee great online learning for students. So what does it take to create meaningful online content for your students? I’ve recently spent some time planning, teaching, and learning with Michele Eaton, Director of Virtual and Blended Learning for the M.S.D. of Wayne Township. In this post, I will share what she has taught me about creating online content.

First, though, I’d like to introduce you to Michele. She focuses on staff and course development for Achieve Virtual Education Academy and provides leadership for the district's blended initiatives.  Michele is a CoSN CETL and 2016 Next Generation Leader, President of the ISTE Online Learning Network, IUPUI online instructor, Conference Chair for the Indiana Connected Educators organization, and moderator for the #INeLearn chat. You can follow her on Twitter at @micheeaton.

Online Vs. Print Reading

It’s important to realize that we read online text much differently than we read printed text. In general, individuals skim much more online than they do in print sources. Of course we want students reading more, not less, but the fact of the matter is online readers are more likely to search text for needed information and only read relevant selections based on their needs. We must keep this in mind when designing content for students.

Most teachers lesson plan by preparing text resources before finding visual media to supplement and support the lesson’s objectives. When creating online content, though, Michele recommends designing visual media first. Students will naturally look at images, infographics, videos, and animations before they read text. Many students are taught to do this from a young age when they are prompted to “take a picture walk” and make meaning from visual media before reading a story. By planning the visual content first, we can then fill in with text and avoid redundancy.

A word of caution: while visual media is an important aspect of student engagement and lesson design, it must be meaningful. When we add in extra media content just because it looks good, we are actually distracting our students from our learning objectives.

Basic Design and Information Overload

Have you recently visited a website that was visually obnoxious? Maybe there was too much writing or the color scheme made it difficult to concentrate on the text. With the wonders of Google, it’s pretty easy to simply leave an overwhelming site and find a similar resource that is visually pleasing. The last thing I want my students doing is skipping over content I’ve created because they feel overwhelmed by it. Consider these tips regarding presentation.

Designing the look of your online content doesn’t need to be difficult-in fact, it should be simple and consistent. Text should be clean and easy to read, using no more than two fonts. As fun as colored text looks, it actually causes eye strain, so keep the bulk of your text black. Too many colors also leads to distraction, so use no more than three colors for your overall theme.

As learners, there is a limit to the amount of information we can process at one time. That’s why teachers break up learning and reading tasks into manageable chunks for their learners. Online content should be designed to aid student learning in the same way. Rather than filling one space with all of the learning content, spread it out into reasonable pieces. This allows students to easily navigate through the content we provide for them. They can easily locate the information they need, and they are less likely to become overwhelmed by too much text.   

A good amount of white space helps students when learning online. It minimizes distractions, allowing students to focus on the content. It also increases legibility. Students can easily read the content, helping them to fully process the information they are learning. For these reasons, it’s best to avoid overfilling your learning space.

Interaction is Key

Let’s be honest. A boring teaching video is no more engaging than a boring lecture. In fact, it’s probably less engaging because students can simply skip forward. They don’t really have that option when we are face-to-face. When learning online, students should have an opportunity to interact with each piece of content that you provide for them.

Interaction engages students in their learning in a way that goes beyond the mindset of clicking through content and guessing on assignments. It also increases student accountability and allows teachers to catch student misunderstandings and provide necessary support. There are three main ways to ensure interaction.

Students can interact directly with the content you have created. If you are incorporating a teaching video, consider using PlayPosit to modify the content. It allows you to embed questions directly into video content, requiring students to respond before resuming the video. There are many interactive learning games that you can also incorporate. Students can take a screenshot of their score at the end and submit it to ensure student participation. Thinglink is another great resource. It allows you to make images interactive for students.

Students can also interact with other students when learning online. Discussion posts are an easy way for students to share their learning, question one another, and provide feedback for their peers. If you are using Google docs with your students, you can easily assign groups and have students collaborate directly within projects and assignments you create. Another interesting idea is collaborative note taking. Essentially, students are assigned a section of notes to complete within a shared document. Students share ideas and support one another as they learn their content. See this great blog post from Shake Up Learning for examples.

Finally, students interact directly with the teacher. The most direct way to do this is for teachers to provide feedback for online learning. Most importantly, though, teachers should be extremely intentional about using actionable data from online learning to influence face-to-face time with students. This is a great way for teachers to provide reteaching and enrichment for students.

A Note on Delivering Content

There are some really great learning management systems (LMS) out there that allow teachers to easily design and deliver content to their students. If you have access to a LMS through your district, take some time to learn how to use it. A little bit of invested time here can go a long way in creating online content.

If you don’t have access to a LMS, consider using HyperDocs to deliver your content to your students. A HyperDoc is an online document where you link your lesson content for students to access. All you need is Google docs or Office 365. The Hyperdoc Girls have a great book, The HyperDoc Handbook, or you can see their website for tips on delivering your online content this way. They even have templates you can copy and customize for free!

The Student Experience: Blended Learning

We are wrapping up our week of tech camp, where my co-teacher, Michele Eaton, and I have implemented blended learning with 23 fourth grade students. We structured part of our day using the station rotation model of blended learning (see my blog post on the models of blended learning for a full explanation). Our students completed online lessons followed by face-to-face group learning on the same topic.

It was interesting to see our students transition to independent online learning. Honestly, I was surprised at how quickly and easily they made the switch. It only took about two days of direct support before they were able to navigate through the online lessons on their own. Our students were on task, engaged, and persisting to complete their work. Of course, there were times when a few students needed technical help or redirection to focus on the course work, but as a whole, it was such a smooth transition!

Student Perceptions of Blended Learning

I asked students what they thought of our new learning model. Most students responded that they liked working online because they could use their Chromebooks. Here are a few highlights that had me cheering.

This kiddo is an English language learner. I was so impressed with his growth this week. He seemed to really take in the instruction and apply it to his projects. He stated that he liked that he could take his Chromebook home and continue to work on the online content because sometimes it takes a little longer for him to complete his work. When I asked him about understanding the content, he said that he liked that he could play videos and audio directions as many times as he needed.

Our friend here enjoyed practicing the skills we were learning about in small group on his Chromebook. He liked that there were games incorporated within the online learning modules.

She likes that she can learn on her own first and then practice the same skill with the teacher in a new way.

Benefits of Online and Face-to-Face Connection

A critical aspect of blended learning is having a strong connection between online and face-to-face learning. My co-teacher and I were very intentional about creating online content that provided us with actionable data to use in our face-to-face instruction. We could easily tell which students needed more practice and how to best support their learning during our face-to-face time.

At the same time, our face-to-face learning could piggyback off of what students just learned online, allowing our time spent together to be extremely productive. When basic content is covered independently online, the teacher is better able to support students in applying and transferring their new knowledge to more challenging tasks.

In all, I noticed that our students made significant progress in the skills of making inferences and theme. I feel that we made more progress in this week than we would have if had we taught using a traditional classroom model. Using blended learning to teach these skills was incredibly beneficial for our class!

Implementing Blended Learning

What Does Blended Learning Look Like?

There are four main models of blended learning. Many schools and teachers mix models together to fit the specific goals of their program and the learning needs of their students. All four of these models meet the three criteria of blended learning set by Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker in their book, Blended.

• Online learning:  allows the student some control over the time, place, path, or pace of their learning.
• Brick and mortar learning: students spend some amount of time in a traditional school setting.
• Connected learning: online and brick and mortar learning are connected so that one supports the other.

I’ll give a quick overview of each model here, but if you are looking for a resource to go more in depth, check out Blended Learning Universe. You’ll find short videos depicting each model and its application in real schools and classrooms. The four models are:

• Rotation
• Flex
• A La Carte
• Enriched Virtual

Rotation

Students rotate on some sort of schedule. There are four main types of rotations within this one model. This model allows teachers in a traditional setting to implement blended learning at the classroom level.

• Station rotation- students rotate between a series of stations, one of which is online learning.
• Lab rotation- this is very similar to station rotation, but rather than having students complete their online learning within the classroom, they rotate to a computer lab setting to free up space in the classroom.
• Flipped- In a traditional classroom, teachers create and teach lessons in which they model content and guide students toward independence. Homework typically allows students to continue practicing these skills. In a flipped model, students do the learning part of the lesson online either at home or at school, then they practice and apply the skills they are learning with direct teacher support.
• Individual rotation- This model allows for significant personalization of instruction for students. Student data can be used to group students based on need and then provide the type of instruction they will most benefit from. Individual rotation can be highly flexible when student data is used for specific standard or skill based teaching.

Flex

The flex model has students working on course material primarily online at school. Teachers are on sight and available to support student learning through small group projects, collaboration, and intervention. Students have a considerable amount of control over their learning in this model.

A La Carte

Students can take a few classes completely online while also attending a brick and mortar school. This setup would be very beneficial in providing advanced or specialty courses online if a school is unable to provide those classes on-site for their students.

Enriched Virtual

Students learning through an enriched virtual model do most of their learning online and off campus. Some face-to-face learning is required and can be individualized based on the student's progress in their online learning. Scheduling is individualized by course and student, so students may meet on campus only a few days a week for a set amount of time.

My Implementation Plan

I have a unique opportunity to try blended learning for the first time. I’m very fortunate to co-teach with my district’s director of virtual and blended learning. We will implement the station rotation model of blended learning during a week-long spring intersession for fourth graders at my school.  The theme of the week is Tech Camp. Students will use various technology tools to create different projects while practicing key reading skills. Our time will be divided between whole group activities and small group stations.

In order to meet the three criteria of blended learning, we want to be very intentional that the online learning will support the face-to-face learning. At one station, students will complete online learning modules covering our key reading strategies of the week.  Student performance on the various tasks within the learning modules will inform small group lessons with me, where I plan to reinforce, practice, and apply the same skills at a deeper level.

After Tech Camp, I plan to implement station rotation within my daily reading groups in much the same way. I love the idea of my students taking more ownership of their learning and controlling the pace of their learning in order to build competency and mastery of reading skills. I think using the online learning portion of our rotations to inform my face-to-face instruction will be really powerful!