Blended Course Builder's Challenge
School leaders: Take your school model and leadership game to the next level and work with your team to codify a shared workflow that guides how effective blended curriculum gets built at your school. You will be given full authorship over your own YouPD challenge space, a team of your own teachers, thought partnership and technical supports from New Visions. By the end, your team will need to produce a portfolio of work that demonstrates to other educators (and funders) a compelling and scalable vision for blended learning.
Teachers: Design an epic curriculum module and share it with the world! Working with leaders and colleagues at your school, produce and exhibit a unit of instruction that engages students in rigorous, highly-motivated, and personalized learning. Connect with the other schools doing the work to get help, share resources, and grow your professional community.
Challenge Facilitators
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Challenge Sponsor
Overview
School leaders: Take your school model and leadership game to the next level and work with your team to codify a shared workflow that guides how effective blended curriculum gets built at your school. You will be given full authorship over your own YouPD challenge space, a team of your own teachers, and thought partnership and technical supports from New Visions. By the end, your team will need to produce a portfolio of work that demonstrates to other educators (and funders) a compelling and scalable vision for blended learning!
Teachers: Design an epic curriculum module and share it with the world! Working with leaders and colleagues at your school, produce and exhibit a unit of instruction that engages students in rigorous, highly-motivated, and personalized learning. Connect with the other schools doing the work to get help, share resources, and grow your professional community.
Preview Action Steps
Welcome to the "Blended Course Builder's Challenge." You are presumably taking this challenge because you are interested in trying or extending a "blended" instructional approach in your classroom, assuming we can agree for now that "blended" is a broad category of teaching practice that aims to increase the personalization (differentiation) and impact of the student learning experience through online and other technology-enhanced methods.
You are also taking this challenge as a teacher in one of five schools participating in a Ford Foundation funded digital learning initiative, with the goal of building your capacity to integrate publisher-produced online content and/or author your own content in support of authentic, rigorous, interdisciplinary learning experiences. This work puts us at the forefront of a community of practice that is re-conceptualizing teaching and learning with the help of rich digital tools, and represents a tremendous professional learning and networking opportunity!
As part of the work, we have asked that teachers in the five schools join the YouPD community and engage in the action steps outlined in this challenge space. Why? Watch this video to find out!
This discussion thread is where all users taking this challenge will have an opportunity to learn about one another, define their existing areas of strength, and share hopes and apprehensions before embarking on this quest.
Each school's leadership team has full authorship over a sub-challenge. With help from New Visions, they are working to develop a series of action steps to provide some shared norms for what effective unit design looks like at your school, and to create a worthy challenge for you.
Click on the appropriate badge to join one of the challenge spaces below and see what your school leaders have in store for you!
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Use the discussion post below to share links to proven or promising tools and techniques with everyone taking this challenge.
Stuck on something? Need ideas or resources?
Pose a question to the discussion thread below and you can pick the brains of the whole group of teachers currently taking this challenge!
Help us make this experience even better by suggesting improvements...
Strengthen your professional network, get live feedback on your works in progress, unwind with a cold one!
While this step gets checked off "on your honor" (i.e. it's optional), we would LOVE to have you join us for one of the Tuesday EdTech Blenders happening this summer, where professional development gets blended with happy hour.
As a culminating step in the "Blended Course Builder's Challenge," we are asking you to use your products from the action-steps in the school-level challenge to create a 5-10 minute screencast (hack) that provides others a tour of the unit or module that you produced for this challenge. The audience for this work will be the larger professional community of YouPD visitors, so you will want to spend some time making it good!
Based on numerous requests for more support in this area, a separate (optional) challenge has been created on the site to allow novices the opportunity to gain an important introduction the following helpful tools for screencasting:
- Prezi
- Camtasia Studio
- the Wacom Bamboo Tablet (optional)
We strongly encourage you to join and work through the Screencaster's Challenge by clicking on the icon below
While joining this challenge space isn't mandatory for this challenge, it provides a set of potentially very helpful resources and will allow you to earn "Cred" while adding some valuable tools to your teaching toolkit.
The YouPD "hack" is an educators' take on the fun meaning of the word originally coined at MIT to describe creative if sometimes ugly solutions to engineering problems, shifted for the classroom to describe what we believe all good teachers constantly do: strive to innovate amidst imperfect and ever-changing conditions, live feedback, and accumulated wisdom about student learning.
Whether you're planning a course, designing an activity, integrating a new tech tool or resource, re-arranging your room, or constructing a whole new instructional system, think about the nuggets of technique or thinking that are focused responses to problems of practice you've faced in your teaching.
A good hack should define it's problem clearly and be organized around presenting a solution. In some cases, defining the problem of practice is straightforward. In others, it might take a bit of working and re-working, because the problem is very broad, like the problem of teaching a specific content area, in which your solution might be a unit or series of lessons or activities in a way that you believe is likely to be effective. Often, planning for next year is framed around what didn't work last year, which might provide great inspiration for your problem statement.
If you have followed this challenge, you should now have some great techniques in your bag of tricks to make the "hack authoring experience" a fun one that also builds your competency in a powerful additional tool to use in your classroom teaching.
See who's joined so far
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Browse submissions
Enjoy browsing through the challenge submissions. Recommend those you like!
- Problem of practice:
Teaching Integrated Algebra can be a challenge when you have students that don't have many of the prerequisite skills needed to be successful. Example: I am able to teach students on how to use the Pythagorean Theorem to find the missing side length of a right triangle. When the answer isn't a whole number, they need to round off to the nearest tenth or hundredth. Frustration sets in since they can't round. Or how about the student that was absent? How do I get all students on the same page?
- Solution:
Khanacademy.org: Students make use of an extensive video library, practice exercises, and assessments from any computer with access to the web. Teachers have unprecedented visibility into what their students are learning and doing on Khan Academy.
- Problem of practice:
The problem I was experiencing in my curriculum was having students take notes efficiently and have them be useful when studying for the Regents.
- Solution:
I needed to teach this skill asynchronously, so I created a screencast that modeled note-taking skills.
- Problem of practice:
With the upcoming changes to the core curriculum standards, how do we still prepare students for the English Regents Exam quickly and efficiently?
- Solution:
Using some simple steps for quote analysis as well as methods for essay writing, we are able to teach the critical lens essay within a matter of days.
- Problem of practice:
How to help students, particularly 9th grade students who are notoriously disorganized, improve their homework completion rate, and improve their understanding of class work.
- Solution:
Google site where homework is posted, resources are linked, and all vocabulary, materials discussed in class, etc., are available for students to review.
- Problem of practice:
I have used technology in my classroom as a tool to get students to learn at a deeper level. The problem of practice is that I wanted to make the tools that I used more efficient. Some of the improvements that I have made are using the comment stream in the google docs to get students to communicate with each other.
- Solution:
Some of the improvements that I have made are using the comment stream in the google docs to get students to communicate with each other.
- Problem of practice:
How can I incorporate technology to promote student choice and differentiation to cater to an engaging curriculum?
- Solution:
Incorporating "Wikispaces" with the choice of a traditional discussion or a voice embedded discussion. Also by incorporating WebQuests, which are alternatives to the traditional modes of research. It allows students to create their own content sites.
- Problem of practice:
How can I design a course website which will use technology to reinforce classroom material? How can I use video, presentations, and course documents to create resources for students to use to study through the website?
- Solution:
I used prezi presentations, embedded videos where I used a document camera, and generated .pdf files of materials to complement these lessons. Using a highly organized site, I posted announcements which shared these resources with students.
- Problem of practice:
Classes that do not meet every day often cause students to become disorganized and fall behind. For teachers who have many students but may only see them once or twice a week, it can be overwhelming to try to keep all students on track.
- Solution:
A classroom site where all handouts, powerpoints, video clips and class notes are organized and available to them to catch up or to simply study from.
- Problem of practice:
To provide a platform for differentiated, self-driven learning with immediate feedback, which will complement the in-class component of the AP Calculus course at ACTvF.
- Solution:
Using Camtasia screencasts, Google Forms with the Flubaroo script, and discussion groups, students will be able to get quick feedback, continue discussions outside of class, as review/learn at their own pace.
- Problem of practice:
How do I design and implement a "blended" instructional approach in my ELA classroom, and thereby increase the personalization and impact of the student learning experience through online and other technology-enhanced methods?
- Solution:
I have used Jing/Screencast.com and Google Docs to design a unit that "lives" online. Students may work at their own pace, and select their own line of inquiry through asking questions and determining their importance.
