 Welcome to this week's Wednesday webinar. This is the second webinar in the blended learning series entitled, Blended Learning. Why Should I Do It? The first webinar was on what blended learning is. Now I'll cover the why and then the how is to come. Just a reminder, blended learning is a pedagogical style of teaching that combines online learning with traditional face-to-face learning. I like to tell teachers and administrators that blended learning is renovating the way we teach. You don't throw out everything and start from scratch. It's not anything that's brand new. You take the good parts of what you're already doing and you add some new renovations. You make a few things better. Possibly you add the online component or you're already doing stations and now you're going to do some formative assessment and some flipping your lecture that the kids will listen to in a small group or something. So you're not completely starting over. You don't have to rebuild. It's strictly a renovation project. So why blend? According to this article that I have linked here, it gave four good points and I really think these are the strongest points of blended learning environments. It engages students more of the time. You don't just teach them to the middle of the class. It improves student achievement and it helps prepare students for college and beyond. Now let's look at each of those. Increase student engagement. Students are more engaged in their learning as they are working on their online curriculum, collaborating in small groups or they're working with the teacher in a small group or one-on-one. There really isn't much time for a student to check out. Also since they have some control of the path of their learning they are learning more deeply about the topics that they're interested in. This keeps them engaged. No more middle of the road. I think this quote just really sums it up. I'm here for the learning revolution. When you blend your classroom you differentiate your curriculum and you're meeting individualized student needs. This allows students to dig deeper into things that they are interested in and pursuing. They can gain more broad or a more specific knowledge base on a topic. If a kid is really interested in something so many times we say, oh that's the end of the page or we're at the end of the chapter, we're done with that. But this allows them to personalize that and to go deeper if that's what they want to do. It also allows the teacher to remediate student instruction for those that need. Because you're constantly monitoring through formative assessment and seeing if students are gaining the skills that they need if they're not then you as a teacher have more time to work with them one-on-one and you can give them the individual skill remediation that they're missing. Improve student achievement. I think that this is so true and I know it's a little bit out of date but this little part of the quote where it says instruction combining online and face-to-face elements has a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction. And I think especially with the age of kids we're working with K-12 they still really, really need that face-to-face not just being in an online environment. And this research shows that combining the two is improving the student's achievement. And it prepares them for college and beyond. Right now the number of college courses that a student takes online during their college career is over 50% of their curriculum in some cases. So that probably means every student is taking at least one online only college credit course in their career. And so this prepares them for that. They've got that experience of working in an online environment, working in an LMS type of a system. And so when they are college age and ready for that completely online environment they're prepared for it. I know that my daughter in college, because she was a college athlete for her schedule, she took two or three online courses every year it seems like. Kids want to work more. This frees up their schedules. I know a lot of adults that go back and further their education or continue it after they've been out for a while. The online allows them to do that in their schedule. And that's what kids want. I'm going to end with a short video here and this comes from the Highlander Institute. And I really just think this sums up why blended learning is so powerful and why it works. It's been implemented in all academic areas of our classroom. During our reading it has enhanced our whole group instruction. Students are more attentive and tend to participate more because they want to be involved with the technology. During our math blended learning students are more independent and self guide themselves through their math learning and gives teachers more opportunity to work one-on-one with students. But with the blended learning it's a whole other world they're all learning the same skill. They're engaged. One is called a vertex, say vertex. Blended learning gives me the opportunity to work with let's say nine kids and if I have ten kids on a computer I can concentrate on what the other kids are doing and what their needs are. I love reading the title. Nice and loud so I can hear you. It's the independence that the Kindergarteners get. That's the most exciting to me. We have such a wide variety of learners in our room because we are inclusion. The visuals that the technology provides is awesome for our visual learners, our hands-on learners that need to be able to do it. There's a lot of interaction activities with the smart board, with the laptops. They're starting to kind of learn on their own and take ownership of their learning and it makes a big difference. Highlander and Sean have been amazing. Sean especially he has hooked us up with other teachers that already were using the smart boards. Highlander has been a great resource for me because the people that work for Highlander, they used to be teachers and so now they're support groups. Teachers understand teachers so I think it's great that Highlander they know where you come from. We've been playing with Rover because it's more kid friendly but if Rover starts to give you any problems, try the Puffin. Comparing last year to this year, it's a completely different environment. Even within a month it's amazing how much growth I've made as a teacher and how much growth they've made as students. It's amazing. I love it. I think it's wonderful. I think we're able to reach every child and I think that's so important because the minute the child feels that they can succeed, they can challenge themselves more. And I just want to finish up by saying if you ever have any questions, feel free to contact me. There will be further webinars on blended learning, the how, the tools, the instruction, how to design your instruction, building an LMS course, coming up in the future. But I also plan to have some more face-to-face along with blended learning opportunities for teachers also to learn about blended learning themselves so then they can further put that into their classrooms.