Читать книгу The Perfect Blend - Michele Eaton - Страница 25

Enter some student devices. As a first step, I changed the environment for the reading response activities to a digital discussion board. I started this transition with some mini-lessons on sharing in a digital environment and writing constructive comments. Students learned about leaving helpful feedback for their friends that moved beyond basic “I like what you wrote” statements. Then an amazing thing happened.

By simply moving this work to a digital space, the quality of work I saw from my second graders began to skyrocket. I had given my students an audience. It may not have been global or revolutionary, but it was someone to write for, peers that were invested in interacting with their work. All of a sudden, the work mattered again. Plus, the feedback on the writing was no longer my sole responsibility. The students were keeping each other accountable, learning how to give helpful peer feedback.

The other benefit that I quickly noticed, which was the spark that ignited my love of blended learning, was my changing role in this independent activity. Before, I was limited in my ability to teach during the stations because I was always with a small group of students. Leaving handwritten feedback in the reading response notebooks was equally inefficient because of the time it took to find each student’s latest entry and then write out my thoughts. I found I could type or record feedback a lot faster than I could write, and with the discussion board, all of their responses were in the same place. More importantly, I started to take advantage of that digital feedback to actually teach. I was able to ask my students questions, give them additional prompts to address when they got back to class, and share resources to expand their understanding. I no longer had to be physically next to students to teach them. My teaching may have happened at 9 p.m. at home or during my in-school prep period, but the metric for success of student independent work time was no longer compliance. I knew how my students were doing, and I could take an active role in their learning.