Late last year, I was doing some presentations in El Salvador and Honduras for a textbook company my company works with . The presentations were for teachers and I tried to cover a fairly broad range of topics: differentiated instruction, the use of e-learning and b-learning in lower income schools, and how we as educators can inspire our students to learn. I also touched on the topic of social media as an education channel, and was surprised to find that many of the teachers were unaware of the wealth of resources available to them.

Being in the education business and a future parent, I’m obviously very interested in the future of the education industry and the tools that will be used by my company and to teach my child. An article from Mashable, “3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Media” by Greg Ferenstein, is a nice introduction to the topic. It also inspired me to investigate further in preparation for my next presentations.

Hopefully this series of posts will provide some insights into the ways technology, and social media specifically, can be used to motivate our students and children to learn and prepare them for the future.

How do we view education?

To start, we need to admit two things: first, the world in which our children and current students are learning is very different  than the one in which we learned, and it’s just going to keep changing; second, educational institutions and practical educational theory are not keeping up (despite the efforts of some truly amazing teachers) and this is causing some serious problems.

In my presentations, when I discuss the problems teachers are facing today, one of the most frequent comments I hear is that, “students don’t want to learn”. I just don’t believe this is true. Over the holidays, I watched my 9 year old sister-in-law invest hours learning how to play “Guitar Hero”. She was dedicated to mastering that game. Make no mistake, children want to learn; that is the way our brains are hard wired. So, the problem must be that children don’t like the way we are teaching.

How can we change this?

Differentiated Instruction and b-learning can provide us with some answers. Differentiated Instruction is an educational theory that recognizes the various learning styles and skill sets that exist in a typical classroom and provides teachers with tools and strategies for delivering content in a meaningful way to all students. Carol Ann Tomlinson has done some amazing work in this field and her books The Differentiated Classroom and How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed Ability Classrooms are definitely worth reading. I will discuss differentiated instruction in a later post when I write about social media and learning styles.

Blended learning (or b-learning as it is frequently called) is a more of a strategy than a theory and needs some further explanation. To put it simply, b-learning is a strategy for organizing resources to maximize their educational impact. Today, most educators look at b-learning as a combination of face-to-face (f2f) instruction and e-learning. But I think we can take a broader view of b-learning that will be more beneficial to educators, especially those working in environments with limited resources.

How are we deploying our resources?

Like any good strategy, b-learning requires us to first define our objectives. In this case, learning objectives can be divided into three categories:

Concepts: The student understands why the subject is important.

Content: The student understands what information is important about the subject.

Skills: The student understands how to apply the concepts and content in a meaningful way.

In order to meet these objectives, the teacher needs to decide what resources or communication channels he or she will use to deliver the information to the students. These channels can be traditional (textbooks, blackboard) or more modern (computer presentations, web quests).

Now it makes sense that any time we combine two or more communication channels in the delivery flow, we are increasing the educational potential of the information being delivered. In other words, an instructor with a textbook is more effective than a textbook on its own. A new view of b-learning would allow us to recognize two things:

1. The combination of any two resources or channels is effectively a blended approach to teaching.

2. Every resource and channel we use has its own particular strengths and weaknesses.

So, how do you decided what resource or channel to use to deliver specific information? That is what I will discuss in the next post.

How are you using the resources in your teaching environment? What creative strategies do you employ when resources are limited?

You can read Part 2 of this series here and Part 3 here.

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