REALity Check

As we venture into these weeks of eLearning, many teachers are planning to include video lessons to help their students stay on track with their learning.  Some of these teachers have been incorporating flipped video lessons for years, however, there are many teachers that will be implementing this strategy for the very first time.  No matter your experience level, we want to help make sure that your efforts in video lesson creation are as effective as possible for both you and your students.

In this episode,  hosts Victoria Lobb and Shanna Piggott discuss the key reasons teachers should be grading work in Schoology and tracking the grades to PowerSchool.  Also discussed are the many different types of grading that you can do with Schoology to help improve student/teacher feedback, foster student engagement, increase efficiency, master organization, and move to a more paperless classroom.

In this episode, Shanna Piggott and Victoria Lobb discuss six strategies and related tools for personalized learning as a follow-up to the previous discussion about the three Ps of personalized learning.  For more information about each of the strategies, check out the REALity Check blog post.

We were originally introduced to the three Ps through our district BlendEd work, this idea that we can modify Path, Pace, and/or Place for our students as we design a BlendEd curriculum.  More broadly, this idea of modifying or providing choice in path, pace and place is at the core of personalized learning.  We don’t need to have a BlendEd course to provide these opportunities for our students; they can work in any classroom at any level of instruction.

In this episode, Rachel Lesinski and Shanna Piggott discuss why it is important to respect the students in our classes as individuals and how differentiation and personalized learning can help motivate and engage our students.  This conversation is intended to help frame much of the work that we are encouraging our teachers to engage with.

In the most recent episode of REALity Check, I talked about differentiation more philosophically. Here's I'd like to quickly address  five specific, research-based strategies to addressing differentiation in the secondary regular education classroom.

Join Instructional Coach, Victoria Lobb, as she provides quick reminders about what differentiation is, and what it isn't.

In a few of our previous episodes, we discussed using podcasts and videos as products for students to share their voice and demonstrate their learning.  In this episode, we are going to highlight five other types of products and tools that students (and teachers) can use to create.

In the previous episode, we discussed a bunch of ways to use podcasts as a listening tool to explore passions, hear from authentic presenters, improve literacy skills, and learn content.  In this episode, we are going to discuss how students can create their own podcasts to share their voice and demonstrate their understanding.

Creating a culture in the classroom of student choice and differentiation can be tricky. We want to keep instruction motivating and fresh but we still need to ensure we are providing quality resources. Let’s begin by reminding ourselves that text is more than words on paper and we can take a multimodal approach to content and instruction to ensure choice and differentiation for our students.