Reflection Question: What activities do you already do that could be made more engaging or lead to deeper learning if you incorporated the online space?
Online integration is at the very heart of blended teaching. It has to do with how you combine your in-person social science classroom with online activities. (Remember the baker mixing dry and wet ingredients from Chapter 1?) Because the main component of blended learning is integrating online and in-person activities, online integration is a good place to begin thinking about blending your classroom. In this video Mark Stevens explains how he uses backward design to create an effective, meaningful blend.
Reflection Questions: How can you use a combination of primary and secondary sources, and a variety of strategies, in the combined online and in-person settings to engage all types of students? How can you employ backwards design to meet these goals?
This is where you as a social science teacher begin to think about what specific online practices can help you address the problems of practice you identified in Section 1. The more examples of blended teaching you have personally seen and the more experience you have with online teaching, the easier this process will be for you. But even if you are just starting out, you will probably have a few ideas of your own. This chapter will help you explore more ideas. Here are two teachers who share examples of integration from their blended classrooms.
Blended learning is great in social studies classrooms because technology can take you to so many places and to so many times with so many resources. For example, students examining the anti-war movement in the U.S. can be self-guided to locate relevant images, videos, and text-based websites they can use to develop and present an understanding of the times.A group of my students gathered pictures from searches of anti-war protest marches in Washington D.C., music videos from the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in August of 1969, and text from sources accessed through the historymatters.gmu.edu site through George Mason University. Groups of students used what they found to produce a multimodal (text, images, video) presentation that not only showed what they had learned, but supported their friends who were struggling with understanding both the content and the English language in which the content was presented. These students had a greater sense of engagement because they used blended learning to direct their own learning and at the same time helped their friends by sharing what they learned online and in-person.
Large anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. - 1967
Photo: "Large antiwar protest at Lincoln Memorial: 1967" by Washington Area Spark is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Reflections Questions: How did these students grow from their interaction with the students in Tunisia? How did they share what they learned with others?
Before you start, consider this advice from experienced blended teachers—think big but start small. Small beginnings allow you to wet your toes in the process, focus on specific pedagogies and activities, see the benefits and drawbacks, and make improvements on a small scale without becoming overwhelmed by the process. It also helps you keep your mind on the most important thing—serving the needs of your students.
Israelmore Ayivor said, “Accomplish your tasks by one step at each time” (source). In effect this described the start of my blended learning journey. Eventually that led to the desire to do with blended learning what Muhammad Ali described when he stated "If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it—then I can achieve it" (source).
I started trying things with technology just to see how they would work. As the tools were improved, the possibilities expanded. The internet really began evolving, and all kinds of primary and secondary sources not previously available were now in reach. I could teach about the Holocaust not just by telling stories, but by having students watch interviews with survivors. Eventually this evolved into my blending in a way that REALLY has engaged students more than I did before and has helped them learn better.
In this video, Merinda Davis explains how she started, made mistakes, learned, and grew through her beginning steps with blended learning.
Reflection Questions: What mindset qualities does Merinda show in this video? Think about your own mindset. What can you do to prepare your mind and perspectives to be ready for blended teaching?
You can take that first small step by doing the following:
See the following example for how this process might work. The teacher in this example explores several activities that could be blended. You have a similar chart in your Blended Teaching Notebook.
The teacher has identified this problem of practice: empower learners to
Here are some ways this teacher could empower the learners by combining the online and in-person activities, starting with Table 1, showing ways to have students interact with content.
Table 1
Planning for Online Integration: Student-Content Interactions
Student-Content Interactions |
---|
Online Activities:
|
In-person Activities:
|
Connection: Learners are using the online environment to locate sources relevant to their activities. They are also using it by working with individual and jointly editable work documents such as Google Docs and Jamboard. The online environment also supports connections between parents, students, and teachers. The in-person environment is used to make the collaborative work and teacher coaching even more effective for processing content resources. |
Brooke Davies shares how she uses the process just described to help her students develop resiliency.
Reflection Questions: How can you use blended learning to facilitate deeper learning? How did Brooke's students use the content they accessed online to contribute to the in-person part of the class?
Merinda shows another way to use blended processes to interact with content—in this case interacting with place.
Reflection Question: How can you help your students be more aware of place through blended teaching?
In this video, LeNina Wimmer shares how her students use the online space to master content.
Reflection Question: How does LeNina use both the online and in-person space to help students learn content and develop skills?
A second way to plan blended activities to overcome a problem of practice is to emphasize student to student interactions.
Table 2
Planning for Online Integration: Student-Student Interactions
Student-Student Interactions |
---|
Online Activities:
|
In-person Activities:
|
Connection: One of the basic truths of blended learning is that the modes, online and in-person, intertwine. They might be planned by a teacher or decided upon by learners. Collaborative work in blending is one way students can approach understanding. This connection between modes also occurs naturally when learners decide to reach out and informally support each other, or respond to teacher prompts to do so. |
Brooke shows another way to emphasize student-student interaction when history and photography students work together on a project.
Reflection Question: How can you use blended teaching to encourage interactions with students in other classes, other schools, and other levels of students (for example, high school and elementary school)?
Mary Catherine uses student interaction to learn, create, and share content.
Reflection Questions: How can learning vocabulary collaboratively benefit students? In what other ways could students collaborate online to increase learning outcomes and to develop 21st century skills?
A final type of interaction that can be developed during blended teaching is the interaction between teacher and student. These interactions build relationships and help teachers better understand the needs of the students. Some ideas of how to use these types of interactions are summarized in Table 3.
Table 3
Planning for Online Integration: Student-Instructor Interactions
Student-Teacher Interactions |
---|
Online Activities:
|
In-person Activities:
|
Connection: The teacher will seek to use actions possible in the online environment to support their interfacing with students in the in-person setting, and vice-versa. Whereas effective teaching can be done in either setting by itself, intentional efforts to combine them result in more learning. One essential thing for teachers to keep in mind is that student-instructor interactions are not just for what the teacher does to support the students, but how the students reache out to get the help they need. With this in mind, teachers can design various methods, online and in-person, for students to be the interactors, and not just the ones being interacted upon. |
In your workbook, using one of your problems of practice, fill out the Planning for Online Integration table.
If you haven't already opened and saved your workbook, you can access it here.
Mark explains how he uses both the in-person and online spaces to interact directly with his students.
Sometimes I have both the online and in-person environments going at the same time. If we are giving feedback on someone else’s paper, or editing them, I pair them up in the physical environment, but they edit each other’s papers online. They have access to the papers in the online environment but can ask me questions at the same time either online or in-person.
I expanded this experience by sharing their papers online with a class of college students. The college students provided feedback, then their professor sent the feedback back to me, and I distributed it to the students. My students thought it was great that college students would pay attention to their papers.
Once you have chosen an activity or unit to use when blending your social studies, consider which blended teaching model best fits the activity. The models we will here consider are the flipped classroom, station rotations, lab rotations, and the flex model.
Reflection Question: What advantages do both the students and Ms. Keating receive by flipping the classroom?
A flipped approach often uses videos, but it does not have to be limited to that. The following flipped classroom example presents a plan for a unit on WW II, using a variety of flipped classroom approaches. In this unit, students can access the content at home (or during class time). They can work through the information and activities on their own. In-person time is used to target specific learning needs based on a survey the students take after interacting with the content.
The teacher splits the content into separate modules:
Each module is introduced with a short, engaging, teacher-made, multi-modal video (less than 3 minutes).
The content for each module is presented in a Google Site, LMS, or Blog, letting students see engagingly written text, images, and videos that support the text.
If students have difficulties accessing or completing these activities at home, vary the flipped classroom approach by scheduling the content exploration and activity completion online but in the classroom.
A station rotation typically involves students moving from one station to another, doing online, small group, collaborative, or teacher led activities at each station. For a more in-depth description see the Station Rotation section in Volume 1.
In this next video Mary Catherine explains how she uses and trains her students to use a station rotation.
Reflection Questions: Explain how Mary Catherine uses a station rotation at the beginning of the year to train students in how to do a station rotation. What are some other ways you could use a station rotation?
Reflection Questions: What kinds of online and in-person activities did this teacher include in his station rotation? What activities could you include in a station rotation, creating smaller groups of students you can work with?
In this station rotation example, the teacher makes an introductory video sharing the purpose of the lesson: seeing this time in U.S. history through the eyes of the Indigenous Americans most impacted. It provides a brief introduction of each event that wil later be explolred more deeply in one of the following stations:
Each event/story is presented on a different digital station located on the learning management system. Students will have access to the app Parlay so they can chat with other students working at that time on the same station.
At each station students will view a Google Site, telling the stories of the event in text, images, and videos. They will be using the same processing document for each event they pick. The document includes the following questions:
The teacher will announce when it is time to move to a different station, with the goal being to get to at least 4 of the 6 stations done.
Before the end of class the teacher will conduct a whole class discussion (5–10 minutes) about the most important learning points.
Homework: Students will pick one of the events they explored in a station to share their main thoughts. On a shared document included in the LMS for each event/story, students will make comments and ask questions about events they studied. They can answer other student's comments or answer questions. They can respond to as many events as they would like.
In a lab rotation, students rotate as a whole group, on a set schedule, or at teacher discretion. This station is usually used by teachers whose only access to computers is in a school computer lab, but it can also be used in the regular classroom but with students going through online activities as a whole group. This is especially helpful when the order of the modules is important.
In the flex model most of the learning ocurs online. Students work independently with in-person support as needed.
For a more in-depth description see the flex model section in Volume 1.
If a chronological format is used, this unit likely comes near the end of the year. Students may be getting tired and have a harder time attending to their work. The flex model, which gives more freedom of pace and path as students work more independently can help increase engagement.
Blended learning is the strategic combination of online and in-person modalities. But how do teachers decide which activities to do online and which to do in person in a social studies class?
Table 4 contains two examples of the use of the online space and two of the in-person space. Read each scenario. See if you can discern why the teacher might have decided to use each modality. Would you have made the same decision? Why or why not?
Table 4
In-person or Online
In-person | Online |
---|---|
Examining anti-war sentiment in the U.S. during the Vietnam War. In person the teacher tells engaging, first-person stories of Vitenam War protestors or the war itself. | Online, the students are given a Google Slide with links to six different Vietnam War protest songs, such as "Fortunate Son," "I Feel Like I’m Fixin to Die Rag," "Give Peace A Chance," "War" (Edwin Starr), "The Unknown Soldier," and "Ohio." They choose two or three songs, make a slide for each one, and analyze each one using common questions. They share their “findings” in groups that change every 5-10 minutes. |
Holocaust introduction: In this scenario, the online space is used in an in-person classroom, where the teacher introduces the lesson and monitors student work online, using that information to give face-to-face coaching and support. | Watch and listen to Holocaust survivors online. Have students record their impressions and understanding in an onlince document such as Google docs. |
Black Elk and the Wounded Knee Massacre: Ocassionally have the class meet in-person in a whole group discussion. | Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux, shared his experiences in the book Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. An excerpt of the text relevant to what happened at Wounded Knee could be placed on a Google Slide presentation, illustrated to support learners struggling with reading comprehension, and recorded and shared through the Learning Management System. Students then share their understanding, as they work, in the online discussion app Parlay, |
Although the decision of what to do in person and online often becomes one decision, it is useful to consider what you do well in person, so you can effectively mix your in-person practices with online strategies. Look at your strengths as a teacher, the needs of your students, and the strategies that lend themselves to the effective use of the in-person space.
In social studies, where inquiry is often based on specific primary and secondary sources, in-person interactions might support analysis and critical thinking of sources the students have accessed online. These interactions could include student-selected discussion pairs, one on one coaching, small group conferencing, and whole class debriefing.
For example, your students may be investigating Civil Rights activists of the 1960s, such as H. Rap Brown (Jamil Al-Amin), Malcolm X, and Claudette Colvin. You may see several advantages to doing this in person, including some of the following:
Such in-person approaches can keep students from getting stalled in the process and keep energy high. Deciding what activities could be done in person or online may take some trial and error. Here are some questions that can guide you as you make your decision.
Blended learning is not just about using technology in the classroom. It is about strategically combining technology with in person activities to improve pedagogy and student outcomes. When you blend consciously, learning can be better. But most blended teaching takes practice and constantly seeking to improve . The case study below shows one taecher's efforts to improve a blended unit. Click on the Case Study link below to see how the unit improved over time.
Developing as a blended teacher and creating effective blended lessons does not happen all at once. It often takes an approach known as Design-Based, a process that involves cycles of redesign in order to improve practice. The following example shows how an activity can go through that design based-process repeatedly to make the learning experience better.
Digital Internship (DI)—Authentic Problem/Project Based Learning
I designed this activity through multiple iterations over a period of 5 years, each time seeking to improve it in different ways. I started by creating a blend that used content exploration through online resource modules, as well as a small degree of authentic learning. From the beginning I used collaboration with undergrad preservice teachers serving as learning coaches. All of these aspects have undergone revisions as described in the following notes.
Original design:
1st iteration:
2nd iteration
3rd iteration
Notice how in this process the use of in-person and online elements were modified in a continual effort at improvement.
Evaluating your blend is a powerful tool for improving your classroom. We learned in chapter 3 (Chapter 3: Evaluating Blended Teaching) two methods for evaluating a blend: the 4 E's and PIC-RAT.
Here is an outline of a unit about different groups of people and their experiences in and views of WWII. Read through the unit then see how PIC-RAT helped the teacher evaluate technology and its effect on the classroom and on learning in the unit.
Goals of the Unit:
Approach of Unit
Students will have access to modules that allow them to explore these ten groups:
Web-based multimodal technology-enhanced modules present all content in chunks that support and engage learners of any level. Understanding of this content is supported by use of an online note gathering guide and lesson check-ins with the teacher.
Students (either on their own or with a partner) become either the WW II news correspondent Ernie Pyle or news cartoonist Bill Mauldin. They will create a Google Slides presentation that has
The product is posted online where other students and administrators can see them.
PIC
Passive: Some of the technology use is passive—students are reading or watching videos.
Interactive: Students take notes online. Some of the videos could be made more interactive by using EdPuzzle to ask the students questions or by creating online quizzes, flashcards, or discussions about the content.
Creative: Students use technology creatively, using various online tools to develop and share an authentic product.
RAT
Replace: The technology replaces paper, allowing students to easily access materials not available elsewhere.
Amplify: Using resources in various modalities (text, audio, video, images) supports content learning, as well as reading comprehension skills. The use of shareable presentations for the work product amplifies learning as students collaborate, teachers monitor and coach, and other school personnel can enjoy seeing student creativity.
Transform: Technology transforms the teaching by allowing students to learn from a variety of resources to learn content, to practice skills, and to share their work online.
While there are many ways to evaluate your blend, remember that the final evaluation is in the responses of the students. Here Mark shares an insight he gained from watching his students interact with "engaging" content.
Variety truly is the spice of life. We as adults often think like that, and sometimes students do the same. Think of your practice to this point. Have you ever seen students “check out” if you have them process too many sources, even if you have designed engaging activities? Or what is the impact on learning if you use the same format of blending two weeks of classes in a row? Even if the sources are music of the Cold War , which can be very groovy and instructive, it might not be useful to have students identify the message in as many as five songs, and then try to share the context clues they used to show how they reasoned messages in the songs. Sometimes lack of engagement may result not from the activity itself but from the repetition of the activity.
Good blended teaching depends on good blended classroom management. Students need to use devices carefully and responsibly, regulate their behavior so they can work independently, and manage their time. They have to be accountable for their learning, their actions, and their assignments. Mark explains how he approaches such accountability in his classroom, then in the video he discusses a number of strategies he uses to help students.
I still have students say to me to my face, “But I did that.” And then I explain to them, “The online records don't lie. It’s either there or it's not.” And sometimes they will hand in something that doesn’t sound like a seventh grader wrote it, even if they're a really intelligent one. I point this out to them, and show them the website where they got it from. It allows me to just make them a little more accountable for the process and products of their learning.
The key to giving this kind of accountability feedback is to do it in a way that makes it clear you have their best interests at heart. Build relationships with the whole class from the beginning, so they know you really are on their side. Help them see the goal is not only to help them while they are your student, but to prepare them for their future, bit by bit.
Reflection Questions: What does Mark Stevens see as the core principle of helping students stay on task? How can you develop that quality in your classroom?
Establishing routines in a blended social studies classroom is crucial. Starting off the year with clear expectations, as Mary Catherine explains, can go a long way to creating a management system that will help your students understand the structure of the class.
Reflection Question: What routines do you want to establish in your classroom and how can you teach them?
These routines include the following:
In addition, make plans for how to manage off task behavior in a friendly, yet insistent and consistent way. You can prepare for situations that are sure to arise. Table 5 contains tips from teachers about how to establish these routines.
Table 5
Blended Learning Routines
Blended Learning Routines—Teacher Tips | |
---|---|
Student Movement |
|
Hardware Management |
|
Software Management |
|
Student Questions |
|
Classroom Configuration |
|
Off-task Behavior |
|
In this video Ashley describes how she works with students and devices in her classroom.
Reflection Questions: What methods does Ashley use that might be effective in your classroom? How can you prepare to manage your classroom?
Social studies teachers say they typically spend four to six weeks at the beginning of the year establishing routines and expectations and teaching students how to use the technology. But, they say, it pays off in the long run with a smooth running class and increased opportunities for interaction and personalization—all of which they see as positives in their blended classroom.
These routines and practices begin on Day 1 of class. Brooke and Mary Catherine share how they begin teaching these routines at the beginning of the school year.
I start teaching my students my procedures on the first day, going slowly to teach and reinforce for about a month. For example, day one, we're going to open Canvas and change our picture. Day two, we're going to have a discussion board saying something fun, that's building a relationship, but also giving them some exposure to Canvas.
My advice is to build the practices into your classroom management plan at the beginning of the year and slowly build their abilities. I intentionally put some time in the beginning of the year to make sure I get everybody on board with the technology, so we’re all ready to work together.
On the second day I set up stations. At one station students learn how to access the textbook. At another they do a syllabus quiz. At another they fill in an online “get to know you” form. Finally, they learn how to create a Flipgrid video. By the end of the day, we have learned some important technical skills they’ll need to use all year. And I’ve made great strides in learning students’ names. Before computers and Flipgrid, it took me almost two weeks to learn students’ names. Now I can spend five to ten minutes going through the Flipgrid videos, and I learn the names so much quicker.
Finally, your greatest tool may be the relationship you have with your students and your understanding of them. Notice how Mark uses this information to help redirect a student.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper called “The Boy Who Smiled Too Much.” We were studying the Holocaust, and one of my students was smiling. When you're studying stuff about the Holocaust, you shouldn't be smiling, and he was smiling. So, it alerted me to take a look at his document then have a short little conversation about refocusing. He really did get back on track, and it was done with humor instead of aggression.
Online integration, combining the in-person and online spaces, can be a powerful tool in helping students learn and develop important 21st century skills. It may seem daunting at first, but just as your students can learn, you too can learn. It will be an adventure you can share with your students as you learn together.
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