As part of my Teaching with Technology course, my cohort was
asked to investigate one of three online resources to help organize our online
lives. My assignment was Blendspace - an online instructional tool that enables teachers to blend their
classrooms with digital content by creating dynamic, interactive lessons. Unlike some of the other resources assigned,
I had never heard of this tool, but I am so glad I was given the opportunity to
find out.
Blendspace helps students
who are both visual and audio learners, giving them the opportunity to be
engaged with content through almost unlimited media choices – videos, images,
audio, text, PowerPoint, customizable quizzes, and more. As the content plays, students (and teachers)
can provide feedback on the fly. The
format is incredibly fluid allowing the creator to arrange their digital lesson
in almost unlimited ways. After just a
few minutes of creating my content, I knew this would be a big help to me – and
others – in future classrooms.
I also believe Blendspace
has other interactive uses: 1) Teachers can use this resource to ask students
to build their own lessons. I believe
this would be an effective way for my students to increase their learning and
teach them responsibility. It would also
be a great way for interactive presentations on topics the class as a whole
would be learning, and 2) Teachers can utilize BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
with Blendspace. For students with a
smartphone, they can access the Blendspace content using a shared link.
This link can be shared at the beginning of the lesson, written on the
whiteboard. Additionally, laptops (if available) can be passed out for
students who do not have a phone that can easily stream the content. The
purpose of allowing secondary devices is to allow engagement with the material.
Students can annotate within Blendspace and write comments on each video
they’re watching. They can also rate the content as it’s playing.
Finally, incorporating BYOD and school laptops will allow each student to
complete quizzes efficiently at the end of the lesson.
I really liked your suggestion of having students create their own lessons on Blendspace. I hadn't considered that before! But I think this would also be an effective way to get a sense of how the students in your classroom like to learn. By seeing a lesson that they created, the teacher can get a hint as to what works for them, and what doesn't.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your blog Matt and having you literally in my group to present BlendSpace was awesome. I really liked how we both learned from Rory how to export powerpoint and documents into Google drive. I feel that Blendspace is a wonderful teaching tool. You had a novel suggestion to have students create their own lecture or presentation and I thought that was an excellent suggestion. I really love the quiz and poll aspect of BlendSpace and I want to thank you for going through all the knooks and crannies with Wilbur and I because I feel I have a much better understanding of the site.
ReplyDeleteLike Tahani, I really like the idea of having students create their own lessons. I think that you mentioned it in class, but I had not thought about it since then, and am glad that you mentioned it in your blog! Blendspace is super user friendly, easy to access, and it has a wealth of appropriate digital content. I think that students would find creating a lesson fun! I once had a teacher who asked that we create lesson plans, on paper at the time, but the incentive was that if we prepared a stellar lesson, she would use it to teach the following semester. I think that an incentive like that is a quality motivator for some students, but blendspace in itself is just a fun tool.
ReplyDeleteI was also assigned Blendspace, and I have to admit, I found it to be just as awesome as you did, although one thing I noted (and you mentioned it in your post,) was that students were allowed to comment on the "slides" within the presentation. To be honest, this made me a combination of nervous/confused. For one thing, I was nervous because, based on past experience with the internet, comment systems are something which have the potential to go horribly, horribly wrong. :) . I was confused, because I really wasn't sure exactly what the benefits of comments were in this case, as the comments were kind of tucked away in the ugly pull-out drawer part of the interface, and didn't seem to be something that was terribly natural to access or use. That being said, your comment in the post about using the comments in conjunction with video is very compelling to me, and to be honest, something I hadn't really considered.
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