Live reporting: Middle School blended learning

b. Middle School Blended Learning – MS Principals



Paul Peri, Sean Fortin

halfway through the third year across the three schools

blended learning = online, classroom and combination of the two

The Blended Learning presentation document can be found here
http://www.franklinmatters.org/2015/02/middle-schools-blended-learning.html

"It is not about technology. It is about teaching and learning."

Google Drive and real time feedback is available

"It is about how are students are learning and how our parents learn about what we do"

Aspen - grades
Virtual Town - websites
BBConnectedEd - 
newsletters, blogs, twitter feeds

teachers teaching teachers how to early in the morning before school

O'Malley - blended is the way to go, technology needs to be the ingredient of
couple of questions, majority of students? how many are in the blended learning?

Principals - Every student in middle school has some exposure to it, some teachers are more adept at it than other; need to make sure the human interaction remains at well

O'Malley - if the teachers are coming in at 6:30, you cant trumpet it enough
how about the parents? how are they doing?

Fortin - we are working on the education piece, we are doing a lot of work for the high school, and that is not meant to be negative. There is a tech learning curve. Where we are struggling with two way communications, we are sending out communications, but getting engagement back, getting involved with what is going on in school is a challenge. 

Peri - need to make it user friendly

O'Malley - what do we need to do here to help this initiative? What else do you need to make this more viable?

Rohrbach - I have experienced my own blended learning at the college level, how long has it been in middle school?

Fortin - 8-10, it is evolutionary, it can enhance education. Some things we do that don't exist anywhere else

Peri - exponential growth, 

Rohrbach - it can evlove in a variety of ways? Is there research?

Fortin - there is, part of my thesis. part of it looks at motivation, motivated by the tech or by the teaching? inside and outside of school. There is lots of research but it is all new. Overwhelming positive. Transforming education which was not possible before

Clement - how far are we from mitigating unproductive snow days?

Peri - on the cusp, there is a live component of that, how much really remains to come

Mullen - how are the teachers dealing with it? yu had a bunch of papers to read, now they are being looked at to provide immediate feedback

Peri - together are navigating those types of things, 

Fortin - it does require an approach, it can not be doing more, it has to be doing better, by the time you are getting it, you are seeing the final peice; it used to be writing for the teacher, now you are writing for the world with a blog post.

Peri - there are paradigm shifts. My grade book when I started was mine, what I did with it was mine alone. Now teachers are posting the grades on line

Failure needs to be part of learning, I heard a new term of a snow plow parent, clearing out the way

O'Malley - as this evolves, maybe there is a concept of office hours. Maybe we don't put the student work out in the big wide world, maybe it is more shielded.

Winslow - where this started several years ago, Sabolinski wanted to see this, Sean has been the guineau pig so to speak, it is fascinating to watch and see how you have grown this