This week, I received a comment to my blog asking: What do you feel is the biggest difference between playlists and choice boards? Would you say a playlist is more data-driven and a choice board gives more variety in learning modalities? These are great questions! I have heard teachers use these terms interchangeably, yet there […]
Student agency, or a students’ ability to make key decisions about their learning experience, is an essential aspect of blended learning. Student agency requires that we design our lessons to offer students meaningful choices. These choices can help us universally design learning experiences that strive to remove barriers and invite students to decide how to […]
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On Saturday, I wrote a blog sharing an offline choice board teachers can use to blend offline activities into their online classes. On Twitter, Barbara McInnes suggested teachers add a wellness activity to their offline choice boards. I loved her suggestion and immediately started working on a choice board dedicated to health and wellness activities. […]
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Schools in California will not reopen this year. Teachers are scrambling to move their offline courses online to ensure that students continue learning for the remainder of the school year. Understandably, the focus is on online learning as that is a new and unfamiliar learning landscape for a lot of educators. I am fielding questions […]
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Choice boards are a fantastic tool for honoring learner variability and providing students with meaningful choices. Not every student enjoys the same task, so giving them options is critical to maximizing their motivation and focus in a lesson. Choice boards allow us to honor our students’ preferences, needs, and interests, making their learning experience more […]
My children love “would you rather” questions. Would you rather go to the beach or the snow? Would you rather eat a cookie or a brownie? Would you rather watch a movie or read a book? They enjoy being presented with two options and getting to choose one. In a workshop last week, I was […]
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This week I had the pleasure of training a group of elementary teachers on blended learning strategies. As a group, they wanted to focus on: Differentiation Student choice Assessment One of the strategies we discussed with the potential to weave these three areas of focus together is a choice board. There are several different approaches to designing a […]
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Let’s start with a quick review of the playlist, or individual rotation, model for those who have not heard of it. A playlist is a sequence of learning activities designed to move students toward a desired result. Most playlists culminate in a performance task or artifact that demonstrates students’ ability to transfer or apply what […]
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How can pulling feedback into the classroom help students develop confidence and improve their self-regulation skills? Feedback is one of the most powerful tools a teacher has to support students in achieving standards-aligned goals. Feedback also Despite the myriad benefits of focused, timely, and actionable feedback on learning, it is often neglected due to time […]
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As the landscape of education continues to evolve in response to global disruptions and digital advancements, blended learning models have surged in popularity. Among these is the flipped classroom model, a strategy that leverages video instruction to mitigate potential obstacles that make it challenging for students to access information presented live. However, I often hear […]
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Spend less time preparing for tests! Generating high-quality review materials and engaging review games takes time. It is also a cognitively challenging task since it requires thinking about the key concepts in a unit or learning cycle and producing a collection of questions to guide students in recalling information and developing a deeper understanding of […]
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A Customized Approach to Professional Learning Just as there is learner variability when we work with students, there is variability when I work with teachers, coaches, and leaders. Every organization, school, and group of educators is different. My goal as a professional learning designer and facilitator is to customize and personalize each training session based […]
