Blended Course - Mixing it Up!

#blendedcourse #instructionaldesign #flippedclassroom #technology #technologyintegration

I am on the 9th week of my second curriculum and instruction class and thrilled to share my experiences with creating my blended course. I chose the unctions unit for making my blended course. This unit is one of my favorite units in the 8th Garde Math curriculum, and I was at the beginning of this unit when I started this course. Aside from these, the functions unit has great real-life applications that students will definitely use. I focused on creating the blended design with slope-intercept applications, and I had never imagined creating different activities for this topic. I was able to use it in my classroom and have a class that does not only focus on the traditional way of Math teaching, where teachers will solve problems on the board, and the students will have drills to practice.

Blended learning is integrating technology in classroom instruction. I have been using technology in my classroom, but I do not use authentic assessments to measure students' skills. The technology integration I used before was math drills only on the computer. It wasn't easy to think of activities that would allow students to use their skills or apply the concepts they learned. The weekly assignments helped me look into different ways to integrate technology in creating authentic assessments.

The most challenging assignment I encountered in designing the blended learning course was integrating social media into the classroom. I am a by-the-book person regarding instructional materials used in school. I was also using the materials I am designing in my classroom, and I needed to secure parent permission slips when they made the TikTok entry for one of my assignments. The parents were very supportive, and they think that using TikTok to see their children's output in my class is a great way. The school district where I work uses Schoology, but most of our parents are not familiar with this learning management system.

Using the ASSURE instructional design model helped me create activities for my students. Through following the steps for instructional design, I was able to identify the available resources for my students. I would try a different learning theory framework if I did something different with this blended course. Also, I will explore various online tools and focus more n creating interactive videos. Most of the videos that I made for this class are not interactive. Using info pic for my daily warm-up will be a great tool to get the students' attention, and utilizing infographics in summarizing the lesson is something that I wish I could have done when I was designing the course.

All in all, I learned a lot of experiences in designing this blended course!!!