 Good afternoon and welcome to the School Education Gateway webinar on blended learning, creating your unique blend. Before we start, I would like to remind you that this webinar is being recorded and it might be used for dissemination purposes. Today we will talk about the concept of blended learning and what it might look like for teachers and learners. And moving from theory to practice, the discussion will focus on the need to plan for blended learning and design blends that are fit for different contexts. But, and to start, we have the honor to have with us a very special guest and I would like to introduce to you the European Commissioner for Innovation Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Maria Gabriela. Commissioner, thank you so much for choosing to be with us this afternoon and the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. First of all, it's a real pleasure for me to be here together with you and it's a honor to open this webinar. So allow me to start immediately by saying that blended learning will be the team of the month on the School Education Gateway and this is also a team that raises many questions still but many opportunities too. So it is through exploring brainstorming and exchanging best practices that we can effectively bring these opportunities into the everyday life of pupils and teachers and it is through meetings like this one that we can make real progress towards achieving the European education area by 2025. So the digital transformation in education is indeed at the heart of our policies and here I will talk immediately to our new digital education action plan because with the digital education action plan we want to provide a new comprehensive approach to digital learning and education at the European level and the strategic priorities of the plan allow us to respond to two main pressing needs. First, the need to improve and extend the use of digital technologies to improve teaching and learning practices and blended learning is an example of how we can do this and second, we need to equip all learners with the digital knowledge skills and attitudes to life, to work, learn and thrive in a world increasingly mediated by digital technologies and addressing those two aspects of digital education requires policies and actions both at national and European level and this webinar is an example of what I think is one of the most valuable tools we have at European level to effectively contribute to the development of quality and inclusive education and training and I really count on you to propose ideas and solutions so that together we can achieve our goals and yes it is easy to see the many benefits that a smart mix of different tools and methods what we call blended learning can bring both to teachers and learners the combination of IT tools from mobile digital devices to artificial intelligence with books science equipment and arts allows a better and more effective way to nurture children's personality and creativity in other words if used effectively and you know that better than me blended learning can make the best of both worlds in fact through technology pupils can access create and share digital content in a much more engaging and collaborative way and this stimulates and supports their autonomy and through the physical experience of visiting a museum a scientific research center an engineering lab or local parks and forests children can establish a direct link between theory and practice and teenagers can get a direct outlook on the different professions on a variety of fields and I see that the school education gateway has already published successful examples of blended learning approaches for example to cater for all those children who cannot physically attend school in class because they are sick or following parents on traveling professions and blended learning can contribute to include more pupils into the education system by providing the flexibility they need and this is fully in line with what we want to achieve given that inclusion is one of the commission's priority and I cannot accept still today in the European Union that one in five young people does not reach appropriate levels of competencies in reading mathematics or science that early levers from education and training still represent 10.2 percent of young people in the European Union and we know that unfortunately socioeconomic background continues to be one of the strongest determinant of educational outcomes and we can and we must do more to give all children a chance to succeed in their digital education and flexible approaches are essential to achieve that goal and I do not need to tell you what challenges the COVID-19 brought to our education systems I see the resilience and the strength you have shown for the past year in adapting to an unprecedented situation and being as present as you could for your students and I know that you can also be parent yourselves and you need both to be present for your students and your own children who might have to stay at home because of school closures your work and commitment in this time has been exceptional and I will continue to repeat that not only now because that's the situation but we have always to remind your extraordinary engagement creativity and mobilization and allow me here to say too that we have also seen that alternative ways of teaching come with difficulties the recent experience showed that many schools educators pupils and parents were unprepared somehow in terms of digital competencies connectivity resources and infrastructure and I always have in mind this study conducted by the OECD in 2018 before the crisis that we have this 40 percent of our educators that are not feeling themselves well or very well prepared for using digital technologies in their daily work so I think that we have to use this situation as an opportunity because that's not anymore the case we all have seen how it was extraordinary the access to this digital technologies the use of them and I think that what is important is really to use these good examples that we all have seen during the last one year and at the same time it's true that there is teachers that need to have better access to those digital technologies to trainings and that's why count on my support too that together with our digital education action plan to continue to ensure support via targeted actions and funding to increase these digital skills for teachers and students and I think that here with the framework at our digital education action plan we have these range of actions to support member states and educators increase the basic digital skills and competencies and I will continue to work together with all of you and our member states in order this time to seize the momentum in order to have real investment in this because that's not anymore our future you are our present and in this context I would like too to make an announcement in a few months we'll propose a council recommendation on online and distance learning in primary and secondary education as part of the digital education action plan and of course always we are hoping that this recommendation will help develop a shared vision and understanding at European level of the approaches needed for learning environments and tools that are effective inclusive and engaging and of course I count on you in order to define and to have positive actions based on previous research and emerging evidence from across Europe but especially what I would like to see is practical examples examples of blended learning model to demonstrate how the effective use of different environments and tools might be supported and of course we'll also encourage our member states to provide guidance to school directors teachers and families on top of the many resources and opportunities provided by us such as the school education gateway e-tweening and terasmos plus mobility and cooperation projects additional funding of course will be available in the framework of the resilience and recovery facility but here I think that we should all stay continue to be very mobilized because not all our member states are presenting their national plans with the right level of investment that we would like to see in that what what I would like to see now coming from our member states is how to join words and actions because it's time to do it and yes finally what what I would like to to say is that I count very much on you it's really important that we continue to explore and support synergies synergies between school education and higher education between education culture and sport to promote blended learning where it can make a positive difference to young people and support for organizing events like this one will also remain on our agenda as we believe that the sharing of practices can help schools across Europe to create meaningful and inclusive learning opportunities so again thank you very much for joining this webinar today I'm sure you will engage in fruitful discussions that will bring new knowledge and new perspective to your work thank you very much well thank you for being with us for again for choosing to be with us today and for the insightful and motivating opening of this session also and for the great news that are coming up so we are very excited to see what is coming up for all the community of teachers and educators so let's continue with this webinar but before we continue I would like to remind you that at the end of this session we will have a moment for questions and answers unfortunately the commissioner cannot stay with us the whole time but we will have Hannah Clemson from the European Commission available to answer all your questions so please do not hesitate to pose your questions and let's engage in a very interesting conversation at the end of this session okay and for the questions you can also find in the webinar page a padlet where you can post your questions there or you can just use the chat function here on this live session and now I have the pleasure to introduce our next guest speaker Michael Halacy from H2 Learning Michael is a former primary teacher and national ICT advisor in Ireland who has worked in the field of digital education for over 25 years he's currently working with educators across all levels in designing and implementing engaging online and learning experiences Michael thank you so much for accepting our invitation to be here with us and the floor is yours thank you Ruta and it's great to hear the commissioner and great to hear her speak to us today so that's really great I hope you can see my slides and yes so I will kick off because I have a lot to say and not very much time to say it so the title of today's presentation is blended learning creating your own unique blend and hopefully that will become clearer and I suppose the key messages that I want to try and cover today are I want to start by looking at emergency remote teaching and just why it's different from blended learning I really want to echo what the commissioner has said about the new array of knowledge and skills that our teachers all across Europe have developed and how we can move that forward by providing them with opportunities to develop this knowledge further I also want to make the point that blended learning is not a new idea but it is a contested one and we really need to figure out what it means in our context and that means that we need educators like yourselves to make those decisions and ultimately it's about helping teachers design good learning experiences for their learners and to capture and to share those I think the sharing of practice is key and that we learn from each other because it's such a big area so I'm going to base my presentation around this infographic that I and the number of colleagues Professor Deirdre Butler in the Institute of Education in Dublin City University and my partner in H2 learning John Hurley have developed and we have created this timeline called BC, DC and AC and I want to quickly look at BC very quickly and then I want to focus on DC which is during COVID and AC which is after COVID and where I see huge opportunities for blended learning so we all know this but it's no harm to remind ourselves that before COVID everything pretty much took place in a school in a classroom or in a school building or in a school grounds and then during COVID everything stopped from the classroom was taken away from us so the environment where instruction, teaching, learning was taking place and we moved to this thing called remote instruction and all of a sudden our homes became places busy places that where they were supporting teachers working they were supporting parents working teachers were were involved in teaching and also young people were involved in learning so they became very very busy places and not all of them were as neat and tidy and as spacious as the one that I have in the picture there were challenges for many people in finding suitable spaces and this thing called distance learning arrived and we had lots of different models emerging this is a cartoon from the United States and it captures there was some in person teaching and people with masks there was some virtual where young people were on machines and then there was the virtually impossible where some people got lost and they struggled and it was not a very nice experience but in all of this we this this phase and I we're still in it and has been called many things but I prefer to use the terminology emergency remote teaching and it's worth remembering that it is different from online learning and I'll show you that in a minute from virtual learning and distance learning and in the main because well planned online learning experiences are meaningfully different from courses offered online in response to a crisis or a disaster because we didn't really have that much time and even though during the summer people retooled they upskilled and they made some adjustments we didn't have control of all of the elements and during the school year and when I contrast emergency remote teaching with two projects that I have been involved in myself where we had time to plan I can see these big differences and one of these projects is a project we have in Ireland it's called the go out the e-hub project and in Ireland we have our own language it's the Irish language and it's spoken predominantly on the west coast and you can see in yellow there areas where the language is spoken and they had a problem that they had a shortage of teachers so our Department of Education trained up teachers to set up an online school where they were prepared the schools were prepared we trained up they we gave the young people supports it was very well planned and I contrast that very much with ERT where people on one day were in a classroom and on the next they were working from home another example of a project that I've been involved in I was involved in this project called iSchool which is for young people young teenagers who are out of school and it was designed to reconnect them with school and in that project we again put a lot of time and effort into the design supporting the teachers we have mentors with the young learners and they learn in centres and they learn online as well and they learn outside in the environment so it's a very planned and a very different to what happened during emergency remote teaching and we all know that there were lots of challenges around emergency remote teaching and again like the commissioner I'm not going to dwell on these but there were issues with access there was issues around digital competencies there were issues around motivation for some learners inferring and and around engagement and despite all of that there has been a tremendous array of innovative practice that has been displayed by teachers all across Europe on Saturday just two days ago I had the opportunity to participate in an online conference organised in Ireland called enhancing teaching and learning post pandemic and I heard from lots of teachers of the wonderful work they did and one of them actually I've just got a slide on it there on screen captured a really innovative blend of where a teacher who was teaching English he was teaching Romeo and Juliet got the boys in his school to write with a pen old technology to a girl school their Romeo and Juliet letters and then they upload them digitally to their classroom and they shared them and it was a really fantastic experience for everybody got everybody motivated and it gave them a chance to work off screen as well but it was a lovely blend and there's so many more and examples of that all across Europe and like the commissioner we need to capture these also another teacher shared with me earlier today a and our in schools in spectra have been involved in an evaluation of practices among teachers and schools during the emergency remote teaching and this school when their students were asked how they enjoyed the emergency remote teaching they said that they liked it on three fronts that it was structured it was organised and it was achievable so despite all of the challenges there is lots of good practice coming out of the emergency remote teaching and one of the biggest ones is that teachers have learned to use an array of digital technologies I like to think of the the array of digital technologies when I started out was quite small you could count them on one hand but now there are so many and teachers over the last 12 months have learned how to use new tools nearly on a weekly basis and this this is something that we call technology knowledge and they've learned how to use many of the tools that I have on the screen here and in addition to that they have also used older technologies some of them have put learning packs together which they have sent out to students and we've even seen a return of television to help our students to learn and this the knowledge of these these tools in in is known as our technological knowledge and I'm going to use a framework I promise this is about the only uh uh academic piece of the of the talk but it's technological knowledge and it's a very important piece and it's the functional knowledge of how to use digital uh technology but it's only one part of the picture and we also need to remember that we need to remember our pedagogical knowledge how to teach a particular subject or a particular of the curriculum and our content knowledge and when we put those three together we get this thing called TPAC and I call it hitting the bullseye and it's technological pedagogical content knowledge and I think at the moment there is an opportunity for us to build on the tk that teachers have developed over the last 12 months and to really move forward with this now and develop new blends and all of these blends will be relevant to the context in which teachers are working so I'm sure in most countries you know many of you are now returning to school and the question is so what are we going to keep from emergency remote teaching and what may get lost uh example my own son went back to school today and today is the day where 350,000 pupils in Ireland have returned to school so we now have to ask ourselves the questions what are we going to keep and what's going to get lost and I want to look back even a little further before I before we answer that and when we look back to previous pandemics and this slide shows some screens from 1918 and the flu pandemic in the United States we learned that teachers even back then were using the technologies of their day they were using newspapers and they were using cinema film but also in the picture on the right you can see that they were learning outside out the different environments they were out in the open air and this is something that came out one of the positives that came out of that particular pandemic and when we look even further on we see that there has been a role for technology and supporting remote instruction going back to the polio pandemic in the 30s there has been use of television and there has even been use of telephones when young people were in hospital so remote instruction has been there for a long time unfortunately when people have come back in to school after these these pandemics oftentimes the technology gets lost so we need to make sure at this time round that we take a constructive approach to ensuring that the knowledge that teachers have developed and the practices that students have enjoyed are allowed to continue and I think this is where blended learning comes in and now I'm going to take a few minutes just to talk about blended learning and to give you some ideas I suppose around what it could be in our in our own in 2021 first thing I have to say is that it's not a new idea and the idea of blended learning has been around since the early 90s and it is an idea that originally developed in the world of learning and development in industry and then it made its way into higher education and it focused a lot in the early days on a very narrow focus between online use of the internet and face-to-face classrooms and even in the early days people weren't that happy with it in the in the world of schools and there has been some work done on it but there's definitely need for more and this book that I have here on the slide blended using disruptive innovation to improve schools was written by Michael Horne and Heather Staker in 2015 and here again the the internet is very much to the fore in the in the definition and it says blended learning is any formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online learning with some element of student control over time, place, path and our pace and this this the last piece of this I think is really important that and this was has come out in during the emergency remote teaching that actually students have enjoyed the fact that they have control over time, place, path and our pace but I would suggest like others that maybe we can go even beyond just the online and it's more than that and I really like the definition from the school education gateway guideline document which says blended learning is understood as a hybrid approach that combines learning in school with distance learning comma including online learning so it's much more expansive and distance learning there can include those environments can include learning out in the open air it can include going to museums you name it it's a much more inclusive form of learning that it you know takes into account the context of what the students are learning and where they're learning so what I want to say to you is that there is no one size fits all definition of blended learning you may think oh that's a problem no I would argue it is not it is actually an opportunity for you to use the tools the spaces at your disposal to create blends that actually fit for your context and particularly for your students and in blended learning we we always have to remember that we particularly for this group that we have two two big cohorts to look at we have primary and we have secondary and some of the blends that may work at secondary and I'll share some of those in a few minutes may not work at primary and vice versa so context is very very important in designing the blends that we are going to develop and now I'm going to look AC after COVID and I'm going to look at when we are back and when we are back in our physical spaces and when we can fully implement blended learning because at the moment we are curtailed in what we can do and again like the commissioner I am going to refer to the policy and the digital education action plan which is a really good document and there are it's been really well developed very thoughtful and it's resetting education and training for the digital age and there are two key priorities within it one is the fostering the development of a high performing digital education ecosystem and the other is enhancing digital skills and competencies for the digital transformation so when I spoke earlier about TK that was probably under a strategic priority too but all of this is leading to a council recommendation on online and distance learning for primary and secondary education and this is going to happen as we heard this year and its aim is to support education systems to develop blends of different learning environments and tools that are effective inclusive and engaging and I think this is now where we are all focusing on at this time so to do that I believe that we need teachers as professionals who are making decisions around designing blended learning experiences for their learners again referring back to the TPAC framework which was developed by Mischa and Kohler it's very much grounded in this idea of the professional knowledge of the teacher that specialised knowledge that they make decisions around how they are going to combine the technological knowledge with the pedagogical knowledge and the content knowledge and applying that for their learners so with that in mind I think I know it's early in the day but I think of the idea of blending and I think of the blending of gin okay I don't think of food blending because I think sometimes you can when you blend something in a food blender the bits become a little bit too small so I like the idea of the botanical and with my colleague Deirdre Butler we have come up with this idea that you depending on the botanicals and the measures that you mix you get a blend and you get unique blends depending on how you put the blend together and there are three at least three areas that we need to think about when we are putting our blend together so the first one is where does our will learning take place and we need to consider are we a blend that's going to fit for our students and we need to consider what are we going to do with our learners when we have them back in school in the physical spaces and I should probably even extrapolate that out even further and put in when we have them out with us on field trips or if they are out in the open air and they're working in the school learning in the school garden or visiting a forest or wherever so in those physical spaces right that's the first thing we think about what are we going to do there the second modality our space is live online this has really come to the fore over the last 12 months this time last year I'm sure many of you had never heard of zoom or maybe even teams or google meet or google hangouts these are now everyday technologies that teachers are using with their learners and the question is how are we going to use these in the future are we going to use them in the future and are we maybe going to use these tools so that some of our learners if they're not in school can join us on a daily basis or are we going to use these live online spaces so that experts can come in and visit us and we can have conversations with them it's it's it's these these online events could be very active events they don't need to be passive just one way and then we have this other area over here on the right which is self-directed and that again is is not a new idea and it's where learners maybe go off on their own or they can go off in pairs or in teams to work on projects on their own they can do homework etc etc and this is something that came to the fore a lot during the emergency remote teaching and actually we're starting a new Erasmus Plus project this week with colleagues in Flanders looking at this whole area of self-directed learning so these are these are this is the where so we need to think about that that's the first thing we need to think about then the next decisions we have are around how learning takes place and for this I've been heavily influenced by the work of Professor Diana Laurie Lard and her colleagues in University College London and they developed a thing called the ABC framework and I and my colleagues have taken it and we have adapted it even more and they focus on six learning types and these six learning types are as follows acquisition, collaboration, discussion, investigation, practice and production and we have added into the mix social and emotional well-being and assessment opportunities because we all know that assessment particularly summative assessment has been turned on its head in the last 12 months so this this this framework is based on Diana Laurie Lard's work around the conversational framework and she envisages that in any learning event we any learning event we should have a blend of these learning types and it may not all happen in the one sitting or the one period but over the course of a number of sessions or interactions with your learners that you would use all six of these so there would be some element of acquisition there would be opportunities for collaboration and collaboration is typically combined with discussion etc so these are and this is the core actually of what we're looking at the learning types that we want to create and only then should we start to think about the technologies the how so on this slide here we have created what we call the teaching symbol wheel tech wheel and for each of those six learning types we have identified some tools that could help you to implement a one of those learning types so for example if you wanted to do acquisition you might share a youtube video with your learners before you meet them and you might ask them to you know look out for something in the in the youtube video and then when you meet them in class you would spend more of your time on discussion so these are some of the tools it's not a definitive list by any matter of means but it's just giving people some ideas on what is possible and of course i still have on the left hand side those older technologies so these two need to be in our blend they need to be in our mix and a model that i particularly like around blended learning and one that i see in ireland is coming to the fore particularly in secondary education is the flipped classroom model and again this was covered in the school education gateway guidelines and this this is the in their in their document they call it the the three event model so the before event so what will you do with the learners before you meet them that is often itself directed online discussion self assessment you can check to see level of understanding before you meet the learners and oftentimes there can be acquisition in here as well and then when you come to the live session it is less about sharing content but it's more about dialogue deliberation collaboration and sharing and then there tends to be an after event afterwards as well where the learners may have to go and do some practice and production and some consolidation of their learning and what this what this requires is for the teacher to make decisions what will i do in advance what will we do during the live session and what will i get the ask the learners to do afterwards and this then produces opportunities for learning design and this is some new ideas that i am colleagues have been working on and it's based on on work out of australia ala mary and and colleagues and it's this idea of the three different types of blends and the first one we call is a low impact blend and that is adding extra activities to an existing course or program and again i'm seeing a lot of evidence of this at the moment and this might be where a teacher adds a Kahoot quiz to their class for formative assessment purposes and and they they add it they and they use it then to see if the students understood what was covered and if not they make changes to their teaching and they they help those students that were struggling so that's a low impact blend and i just want to say that just because it's a low and it's a low impact blend on the teacher so there's not a lot of work required on the part of the teacher so it's a really nice way to help teachers to actually start to use technology with their students but a low impact blend such as the one i have just described can have a very high impact on student learning the second type is a medium impact blend and that is where you replace an activity that you have in an existing course or a program with with something else so here it might be that a teacher would record a presentation which lots of you did during the emergency remote teaching in advance of the face to face session and then you ask your learners to access it in advance and you might even ask them some questions you might embed some questions into the activity so they've they're doing their homework before they come to class and then the face to face classroom session is shorter and it's focused more on discussion and deliberation flipped classroom so that's a medium impact blend and again the it's a medium impact on the teacher and on the school and then we have a third kind of blend and this is building the blended course from scratch and here a blended course it's this is just an example that I've used in another context it's where you build it from the ground up the the learning outcomes are defined you just you outline the pedagogical strategies and you go and you seek accreditation for the program or you get permission to run the program and in the earlier slides I gave you two examples one of the iSchool model and the other was of the go out to the hub model and both of those would be high impact blend because there was a big impact or a high impact on the organizations that were offering those and a lot of planning and preparation had to go in so I think this is a nice way to think of blended learning as we go forward and ultimately whatever kinds of blends that we put into action I would argue on others as well that we would need we need to prepare and again based on the teach nimble blended learning framework we have developed this simple glance card and it allows teachers to think about what they're teaching they get some to think about the learning types they want to use gets them to think about what they will do before class what modalities they'll use what kinds of learning types will they have what technologies etc and they can add in lots of other ideas in here as well and recently some schools in Ireland have started using this they have been embedding it into teams as part of the beetle app and it's very interesting and we're hoping to develop this further so ultimately and I'm about to finish now all of this is that there is no one size fits all when it comes to blended learning and that we really need to think about it on those three fronts where learning is going to happen the learning types that we want to put into our blend and also the technologies and we need to think in a very holistic way when we are doing that and that takes planning and it takes sharing trying to do this on your own I think is very very difficult and where I've seen is working really well is in schools where there is a culture of collaboration where teachers are working with each other where they're sharing their blends where they're sharing what they have tried what has worked and what has not worked and it's also important that we learn from those things that did not work and a culture where failure or mistakes are actually looked on as positives rather than being afraid to make those mistakes I think is really really important so I believe that the future is very much there for blended learning I think blended learning is going to be something that we we've probably been using in the past we didn't even know but we are definitely going to use it more and more in the future and with the new range of tools and technologies that are coming our way it is going to help us as teachers to design learning experiences that will truly benefit our students so thank you thank you very much Michael yes we do have questions there's a lot of questions popping up on the on our chat and on our padlet and but before for the questions and answers as I mentioned earlier we also have a special guest to answer your questions and I would like to introduce her her name is Hannah Greiner Clemson as I mentioned already from the European Commission Hannah thank you so much for being with us today as well hello and actually I would like to start so thank you first of all to all participants that already posed some questions very very interesting questions I cannot promise that we will answer all of them but we will do our best to answer the majority and I would like actually to start with Hannah we have some questions addressing specifically the commissioner and one of which is the important it's related to the importance of the blended mobility in the new Erasmus Plus program so let's focus first on the speech from the commissioner and try to address these questions so how important will it be the blended mobility in the new Erasmus Plus program can you give us some examples of how this could be combined yes absolutely it's I think actually the the development of Erasmus program very much mirrors what Michael was talking in that actually in a way a lot of this is not new if we think about the way in which Erasmus projects work you would in a strategic partnership project get in touch with other schools in other countries have a conversation online you may meet up occasionally but some of the work would take place in your school or in places around the town or the city as we often see with Erasmus projects so in that respect I think Erasmus projects have been blended for quite a long time and particularly with language learning we've had some wonderful examples of classes actually coming together live and this was another example that Michael gave of using the technology in order to actually meet pupils without actually having to travel this is of course where we link in with the with the Green Deal with our being conscious for the for the environment so I think in that respect thinking about different ways to engage but not miss out on that all important engagement with learners with professionals in other countries I think will be an incredibly part important part of the future program yes wonderful thank you so much Hannah still on that note we also have another question and I'll just read it to make sure that I read it correctly the proposed placing of teachers and teacher education at the heart of the new generation or is on Europe actions on the EEA is very welcome are you hopeful that this professionalizing conversations will lead to real empowerment and meaningful engagement for teachers at this important new frontier absolutely I mean I think that that question also picks up what Michael was talking about at the end of his presentation there about the crucial part of professional learning and peer learning I think for us in particular it is sometimes quite easy to say we need more professional development it's absolutely true but what does that actually mean and I think there's probably three parts to that firstly there's a more formal approach perhaps to initial teacher education to preparing future teachers to professional development courses those kinds of opportunities that can be perhaps more structured facilitated guided so that's one part the second part of it would be the more informal exchange that it equally needs as much support to happen which is your everyday conversations your sharing of materials and so on which is a crucial part of professional dialogue but then I think the third part of it is to see this very much within the whole school ecosystem that if this dialogue happens between professionals there is perhaps a risk that it only stays at the teacher and school level but what we want this kind of dialogue to be is actually filtering through different levels of the school system where municipal authorities where policymakers are able to listen to professionals to their experiences but also professionals can listen directly to the vision that those people working in policy have and actually move on and evolve in their perspectives so I think the important thing there is not to see professional development as just something that is done to or for teachers it is about building communities and it's about building spaces for dialogue and absolutely ultimately if we want this bright future for blended learning as Michael says it needs to filter between different levels of the system that's wonderful and you already replied to several other questions on the on the role of the blended learning in the future and having well everyone experienced the past year and the impact that the different well different circumstances that we lived caused in the in the school but not only in the school but also in the workplace so thank you so much for that and on that I would like to now ask Michael another question and somebody mentioned on this the asked on the chat if blended learning could be described like personalized learning what do you think about this um yes I mean it can I mean it can definitely facilitate personalized learning definitely I mean I think they're the what it what it does is it gives the the teacher and also the learner more choices so I think I've seen some really good examples over the last 12 months of particularly where you know students or learners who may have struggled previously and got lost they were they weren't identified but teachers through formative assessment and other strategies using a range of technologies have been able to identify who needs help and then work more individually with that learner so yes I think it can support more personalized learning but that's not the whole story yeah of course of course in that sense actually we have another question which I think links very well with this one which is what is the effect of blended education model on teacher success and motivation yeah well yeah I will look I mean I I subscribe I think this is about your beliefs and attitudes and my belief my belief is and I have seen this I have been lucky to do to have worked with um one of the working groups in the commission over the last number of years I think my view of teachers is they are professionals they are highly skilled individuals they have a very highly developed knowledge and I think the sorry can you repeat the question because I just lost it there for a second no we were talking about the motivation or the motivation yes yeah so on the motivation side I I think that the blended learning provides opportunities for them to work in collaboration with their colleagues and I think sometimes teaching can be quite an isolating profession but I think with blended learning sharing your stories those professional conversations that Hannah referred to is really really important and I was speaking with a deputy principal of a large school in Ireland today at post primary school that's really doing fantastic work in the area of blended learning and he said to me that at the moment you know they are at the stage where they've had some wonderful collaboration across subject departments but also they have digital leadership teams within the school and those conversations have really helped them to grow as a school I think and what he's saying to me now is his next step in his school is to move beyond that and actually to move outside his own school and to have more conversations so I think it would be highly motivating for teachers because I think they will see that their practices are valid and that they can capture them that's why I share the framework I think we need frameworks so that we can capture those practices so that then we're all talking the same language and that we're not talking across purposes with each other and if I could come in there if that's okay of course I think attitudes is not to put a negative stunt on the discussion but I think it is a serious challenge for us given the diversity of experiences wouldn't you agree Michael and I I'm wondering what you you think about the challenge of I know that some people might say well my school head isn't very happy about the idea or authorities don't seem to want our schools to be doing this or I have colleagues who are scared of innovating and I think that can add to the pressures that are already felt and that's absolutely the last thing we would want and of course you we want to present a vision that is ambitious that is attractive and we want to be able to support that but I think we have to manage expectations don't we that's you know I think it's really important to support leaders to give to give some level of autonomy but also with guidance that it's often the experience that it is that guides your attitude and I think that's where I found it really interesting that you were talking about low impact for the school or the teacher where if you can make start to make small changes and have small positive experiences that might lead to something bigger in the future I think for us also there's a need to perhaps to look outside the education system that to put the whole responsibility on schools is perhaps not the right approach to say schools you must go out and find a museum to work with you must go out and find all of these contacts to find all of these other professionals to engage with I think we need investment and a bit more of a wider societal approach to this to for them to meet in the middle to actually come together to have things that are mutually beneficial for these cultural organizations for these sports organizations for all of these different places for these forests and parks who are wanting to engage young people in in sustainability projects or whatever it is I think as the commissioner said this kind of way of coming together of education with other sectors in order to help young people to see the relevance of their learning to make it meaningful in practice is hugely important so I wondered what you also thought of those dealing with those slightly negative or fearful experiences well I yeah I know and I I mean I'm in violent agreement with what you have just said I mean I think that that is what it's about and I I think the idea of the low impact blend is actually a nice idea and I'm borrowing that obviously from Alamira and his colleague and and the colleagues there but I think it's something that we are actually going to build on because I have met many teachers who are wonderful wonderful teachers and I actually wrote a piece in one of our own newspapers this time last year where you know a good teacher all of a sudden cast into the emergency remote teaching and who never used digital that much was was was fearful and there was a lot of anxiety etc so I think we need to have that low impact blend and we need to support teachers and actually a key question in all of this for me either you know and it goes well beyond blended learning is why bother why and I think this is the key question teachers should ask I like in minority countries build owned and sorry now for my poor pronunciation but this critical look at digital technologies in teaching learning and assessment and ultimately I think that is what we need to be getting out here and that's where I am going with the TPAC idea that that our teachers we support them and I agree with Johanna it's much more than just a one-off course you know it could be professional conversations it could be bite-sized professional learning and there's a wonderful document from the JRC on this so I think we need we need lots of supports in there and it's going to take people everybody is going to go on this journey at a different pace and we just need to make sure that at the school level we're not leaving people behind either. Thank you so much and maybe we can still stay on you Michael to answer the next question and then I'll pass the floor because I want to ask this question to both of you it's actually very interesting question which puts the person that asked I'm sorry I it was not mentioned who asked this question so I cannot refer to the person but this person put herself in a position like how what can I do to support this opening up of the education through blended learning in an institutional framework and so if you had to give some recommendations to our listeners today everyone that is listening from actually can see that we have some people from formal learning and non-formal learning as well so everyone that is listening to us what can they do in practical terms to support this opening up of the education area to blended learning. Yeah so I think the first thing that they that they need to do is actually to sit down and reflect on what has happened during emergency remote teaching I think that is the first thing that we need to reflect we need to look at what has been going on again I have been doing this myself with educators quite a lot of them actually in the further education and training space in recent months and we have been reflecting and we have been using the the framework the six learning types and looking at what we were doing and then looking at some of the tools and the technologies so I would start there and I would start by making those low impact blends how can you start to move things out and ultimately it's about purpose Ruta it's about purpose what is the purpose and once you become more comfortable and more familiar then you can extend it out but I think let's walk before we run. Thank you so much Hannah what do you think about this? Yes I mean I would absolutely echo what Michael has said there about the need to to start small the also the need to really think what is best for our learners for our community this is again as you said this there is no one size fits all and that would be certainly from the school perspective I think if I was to then shift that to what could we the commission do I think there is certainly there are certainly tools that we already have and things that we could develop we know that we could develop to directly help schools such as the selfie tool which is a self assessment tool for schools to understand better understand their digital capacity and the new tool that we're developing specifically for teachers that can help them to understand where they're at and where they actually want to go to in the future as professionals and we also have other tools relating to inclusion and those are available on the school education gateway which can help with the dialogue that needs to happen anyway but I think there are tools that that we can provide and these are all based on research evidence based on even ministry dialogue that that I think are actually can be quite useful as well so we recognize that but of course it's ultimately about helping systems to help schools to help teachers to help learners. Actually there's a lot of questions on the need of having infrastructures that support this path and basically they are asking how can they reach out to these infrastructures as I understand from your comments and your answers first we need to start this dialogue and then we can implement the infrastructures please correct me if I'm wrong on this and actually there's already some infrastructures and maybe I don't know who wants to answer first this question but actually it was addressed to Michael but let's see we can have both answering the question is we already have some infrastructure in place that may support part of this development of course there's a lot that still need to be done in the different systems but Michael based on your experiences down the years and this was this question was posed by Connor Galvin from Dublin what would you see as the most useful role of the initial teacher education university teachers faculties colleges of education etc what would be the most useful role that they can play in relation to the challenges facing schools in terms of quality blended learning well I know Connor of all so of course he asked me that hard question and yeah it's a great question I mean I think I think actually and Connor was with me on one of the delta events where we actually looked at teacher education I think initial teacher education is very important in all of this and I think ultimately we need um those coming out of initial teacher education to be really critical of you know using the tools getting as many opportunities to try them out but also to you know to look at them and see where they're actually having an impact and you know ultimately that they're enhancing the students learning I think if we can start to look at that and help them to develop those the skills because they need to know how to use the tools but more importantly how to use those tools if they're teaching English or Spanish or French or mathematics and to really look at it and see what they're what what they're designing and how it's impact on learners and to have some rubrics and frameworks to even start making decisions I know they'll be early in their careers but they this this critical critical users of digital is I think what I'd love to see coming out of all of our initial teacher education programs wonderful Hannah would you like to add something yes if I can quickly add there are there are three things that spring to mind about both about professional development but also about infrastructure one of those is that absolutely the the expertise that's in offering in higher education because of their research but also because they naturally have been part of training teachers for a long time is that they are able to even support the professional learning of for example museum educators or musicians or dancers or sports professionals to help them to understand learning as an as I suppose as an art or a science if you could call teaching and learning that a great example is again from Ireland their creative schools program where they actually it wasn't just about putting artists into schools for a period of time to work in different environments and in different ways but they actually gave them a period of training to understand teaching and learning better and I know it's also been done in other countries as well another example is actually from sports I know it from Flanders education system here in Belgium about there have been football initiatives where you actually working with and that includes financial support for sports organizations to actually work with young people who are not spending the whole time in school but actually encouraging them to follow their academic studies alongside sports training which has proved to be incredibly effective for those for those young people and then another example that we have is just simply paying for buses to go somewhere that as I we heard in a recent webinar with it was an international webinar many countries were saying that is a simple gift to schools that can have an incredibly high impact just the ability to take young people who would not normally have the opportunity to go somewhere and learn in a different environment with their teachers so it's all very still structured has been has had a huge impact on the way in which schools can give more variety to the learning and give more meaning to the learning so absolutely I mean these things have to go hand in hand wonderful thank you so much Hannah and I see a lot of comments on the chat unfortunately we cannot answer all of them but to launch my last question to both of you and maybe we can start with Michael again and then finalize with Hannah sometimes when we hear new things and this is just my consideration and when we hear new things or new approaches or a different path of course all the obstacles based on our old habits come up so we see already a lot of obstacles and we don't see exactly how to you know overcome those obstacles so in your view leaving a message to all of our attendees today which actually would have a great audience thank you so much for your commitment and engagement and what would be your main message in terms of biggest opportunity and benefits to use a blended approach? Well and it actually goes back to an earlier question that I thought of the an answer to afterwards I think it goes back to the learners some of the feedback that I have been looking at from learners across the sectors from higher education down to further education and to the schools I gave you some feedback earlier from a school that I was talking to today is that actually learners even though they they really missed not being in school with their pals and meeting their teachers and looking them in the in the eye and all the rest of it and the masks and then all that they did not like that but they really liked some of the flexibility that was given to them by some of the blends that they encountered during emergency remote teaching. I think they liked that control over you know when they were going to learn and how they were going to learn and what they were going to learn so I think these are these are where I would start with actually and you know when I said about asking your teachers how they got on I'd also ask your learners what did they what did they what was the experience like what were the things that they liked and would they like to continue and what were the things they definitely don't want to see again so I think that my message is focus on the learners. Wonderful thank you so much what about you Hannah? Oh gosh how to how to bring it down to one thing I think I'm going to go back to something that I heard an Estonian school head say in a very early visit in my career as part of the European Commission is that his question is always how do I make my pupils happy and I think out of all of this really well-being and actually being happy feeling safe feeling confident as a professional learner or as a young learner in school in schools that can often be as volatile as the home can be how can we actually make that a better more positive experience I think that really has to guide anything any change in education but I think blended really still has the has the opportunities to support that that's wonderful and I think it's a great note of inspiration to finalize our webinar we are already a few minutes ahead of our time but I think it was a wonderful conversation I really want to thank both Hannah and Michael for staying a little bit longer and answering all of these questions and engaging in this interesting conversation I would like to ask you please don't forget to complete the feedback survey but I also would like to remind you that this webinar is part of a series of professional development opportunities on blended learning that the school education gateway is promoting and you can actually enroll in a massive open online course called bridging distance and in school learning blended learning in practice to gain a deeper understanding of purpose process and benefits of blended learning so actually if you didn't see some of your questions answered in this webinar and you really want to dig in more in this topic please enroll in this massive open online course is free and starts on Monday the 29th of March and open to teachers and school stakeholders from any country so I would like to wish you all a great afternoon and once more thank Michael Halsey and Hannah Clemson for being with us today and of course our commissioner for the great opening that we had was a lovely end of afternoon and I wish you a good day