Mentor High School Blended Learning Example

As a blended and personalized learning coach, I get to travel all over to work with schools and educators on how to implement blended learning into the classroom.  This past week, I was asked by the Mentor team to work with a couple of teachers to showcase what blended learning might look like when teaching a new concept to the students.  

The teachers asked me to demonstrate to the students how to build and construct a digital portfolio using to website creator, Weebly.   I knew that the students have not been exposed yet to digital portfolios and I was only given two class periods to work with the students.  After planning with the teachers, we came up with the idea to generate Tribe groups.  

What's a Tribe Group?

A Tribe group places four students together on one team, aka Tribe.  Each member of their tribe was asked to go to a different activity for ten minutes.  After the ten minutes were up, the tribe would get back together and they would share out what they had learned at the different activity.  

---

How did the Tribe Groups Work?

In my opinion, the Tribe Groups were a great success.  Each person was able to share out what he/she learned at the different activity and they all worked on their communication skills in order to get across the main ideas and concepts.  

What were the different activities?

The students had the opportunity to go to one of the four activities.  Below the actives are listed and will showcase a quick example of the directions, materials, and resources for each part.  

• Mini Lesson
• Independent
• Digital Content
• 4C's

<

>

One student from each tribe came to a mini lesson with me, Marcia Kish.  As soon as the students came to my lesson, they were asked to Google Search themselves.  This gave me time to make sure all the students were in the right locations and that they understood what to do while at that activity. 

Next the students logged into PearDeck.com to view the mini lesson prevention.  The presentation broke the big idea of building a portfolio into six steps.  (See slide examples below). 

Since, I was using the program PearDeck.  All of the slides and notes went directly to the student's Google Drive. They were able to share out the notes with their Tribe during the sharing session.  

One Tribe member went to the Independent Activity.  This activity showcased all of the different items that can be included into a digital portfolio.  Students had to sort what they thought would go into the portfolio and what they thought should not go into the portfolio.  

One Tribe member went to the digital content activity.  In this activity, the students were exploring and looking at the quality of sample portfolios.  I provided them with website links and a rubric that they could use to evaluate the different portfolios.  

One Tribe member was asked to participate in a 4C's Gallery Walk activity.  The student had to travel around to five different posters.  Each poster focused on the different elements of the student portfolio.  Needless to say, this was the most popular activity because the students got a chance to write on the walls. 

Do you have a video that I can watch?

Here is a video that you can watch that will highlight the different activities along with the directions that I gave the students.  Notice, that I did not go into much detail about the activity, instead the students were just told where to go and the directions were located at each activity station.  

---

Other post to read

---