Technology Professional Day: Blended Learning

Today 8 teachers from our school are attending a full-day professional day on using technology in the classroom. Our topic is blended learning, the mixing of classroom instruction that continues the same conversations after hours online. We are ready to hear how we can use both channels of instruction most effectively.

Stay tuned! I'll post throughout the day.
Wow! What a day of learning! I wish all professional development was this good!
We previewed lots of teachnology: Haiku, chatzy, google docs, blogs, voice thread, jing, Ted conferences, protagonize, wikispaces, etc.--too much to digest. But we were always asking about student learning first, not technology first, and that seemed right. We learned about reverse learning--or flipping classtime with homework--so that introductory lessons happen at home, then applied use of that learning in critical thinking groups in class. We got a taste of so much that our heads are swimming.

At the end of the day, in the parking lot, one teacher was asking 'What should students learn?' This question had been asked before all the technology barage was unleashed, and it should guide us. Digital literacy is one more skill for us to include, but it seems a useful one, not to crowd out others, but to integrate. The effort to integrate takes prep time, which is overwhelming at first. But this feels like the future, like the path toward reinventing education. Stay tuned!