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Blended learning simplified and explained in video

Director of Personalized Professional Learning in Denver Public Schools Ben Wilkoff on why blended learning is much simpler than we have tried to make it

You would never ask students to write without giving them something to write with. You would never ask students to read without the right reading materials.

You would never ask a student to collaborate with other students without giving them the right guidelines, processes and tools to do so. For the same reasons, you should never ask a student to learn without allowing for blended learning [1].

Blended learning is really just learning, using ALL of the tools at our disposal.

When a student needs a mobile device to look something up on the fly, they should have access to one. When they need access to paper and markers for demonstrating their ideas, they should have access to those.

When they need access to a collaborative document to work with experts outside of their classroom, they should have access to that. These should be expectations in our classrooms. This type of access breeds equity.

In this video, I walked around Denver talking about why blended learning is much simpler than we have tried to make it.

It isn’t about the percentage of online and face-to-face work kids are taking part in, but rather doing things that weren’t previously possible, using the right technology that allows for the deepest learning. This video is a part of a broader movement for 2 Minute PD, started by a Stanford Design School fellow, Melissa Pelochino [2].

In this movement, we are trying to create bite sized pieces of professional learning for teachers so that they have practical guidance for what to do TOMORROW in their classrooms. If you want to take part or find out more, here are the instructions [3].

Ben Wilkoff is the Director of Personalized Professional Learning in Denver Public Schools.