Flipped? Blended or Personalized?

As I continue to grapple with my role as an educator, I am haunted by my ever present action plan…in which I feel not enough action has taken place. This is not to say that I have not been implementing what I have been learning or experimenting with new ideas or techniques-because I have-there is just so much to learn and apply in an ever changing environment.

One of the challenges for me is defining my action plan. Is it Personalized Learning? Blended Learning? Or am I creating Flipped Lessons? I can’t tell. And can you really define a lesson as one or the other? So, I am seeking your advice on a recent “lesson”.

After being inspired by @MrsGanley, I was excited to have my Gr.10 class, edit, revise and peer mark their last set of essays online. Each student went through a series of three edits: a self-edit, an automatically distributed anonymous edit and one of their choice. This provided the students some choice over who they could edit, while still ensuring that everyone received valuable feedback. This also provided me the opportunity to track the changes and evaluate the students on their editing and revision skills. Questions in the edit process included:

1. Restate the thesis. Is it specific? Arguable?

2. What is the writer’s plan of action?

3. How does the author support their thesis?

4. Does the author provide sufficient support? and is it credible?

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After they submitted their final copies online, it was my turn to try my hand at editing online. Unlike @MrsGanley, I did not use the screen capture voice over tool to edit (maybe next time-baby steps this time), but I did provide online typed comments that redirected my students to online resources to aid in their understanding and development of the writing process and the correction of common grammatical errors.

The editing process took twice as long, but it is my hope (as I embark on my second set of papers) that it will get faster. However, I do believe that the quality of feedback, with embedded links, was much better than my previous hand written comments. As the students follow my embedded links to make corrections to their essays, I find myself asking, is this personalized learning? A flipped lesson? or a form of Blended Learning? Your thoughts and comments would be greatly appreciated.

9 thoughts on “Flipped? Blended or Personalized?

  1. Hi Sarah,

    Thanks for this post, and for creating a great foundation for discussion too! Flipped, Blended, personalized, are strategies that can have various incarnations. This wouldn’t be a flipped lesson per say, because it isn’t set up to have the “Student’s homework as the traditional lecture viewed outside of class on a vodcast. Then class time is spent on inquiry-based learning which would include what would traditionally be viewed as a student’s homework assignment.” (http://www.flippedclassroom.com/help/definitions.php) However, it could be if you then had students directly implement, wrestle and refine these ideas in the class time with you as part of a designated lesson.

    What you have created is a highly personalized form of feedback that incorporates a blended approach. Blended, in this sense, is the use of another modality (your links) to enhance student understanding. It is using a highly personalized form of feedback. I wouldn’t worry too much about what to call it, but rather how effective it is.

    If you look at this through the use of the SAMR lens, what level would you say that you have entered here?

    Thanks, I look forward to your response,
    garth.

    1. Thank you so much for your feedback. I think you are right, this is a form of personalized feedback through a blended approach. However, the next step for the students is to review the comments and feedback and amend their paper for publication. Ideally, I would like all work to be work in progress and for the students to create a continuous writing portfolio that they can amend throughout the year only for final publication at the end of the year. Hopefully, this is something I can work towards for next year.

    2. With regards to where this lesson sits on the SAMR model I think it may be “Augmentation” because students are using technology to enhance the editing process by following links to improve their writing. ???

  2. …….”is this personalized learning? A flipped lesson? or a form of Blended Learning?

    Sarah – great post and thanks for sharing. Stepping into the unknown and asking good questions along the way is what the “action plan” is all about”.

    At the heart of this assignment was your desire to expand the editing/feedback process to allow for more collaboration in the writing process and rich feedback in timely manner. I think you achieved that goal. It certainly takes longer but the experience more actionable feedback for the student. With practice and refinement I also think the cycle will shorten.

    As the feedback process can happen “anytime/anywhere” I can certainly see this kind of activity being incorporated into a Blended Learning “toolkit”. It takes an activity (the editing/feedback process) and expands it considerably allowing for new ways for it to enrich the writing/editing process.

    Like Garth mentioned above don’t worry too much about what you call it but rather how effective it is in achieving your learning outcomes.

    1. Thank you for your feedback. One of the nice things about this type of PD is that you can experiment with new ideas and technologies and reflect openly about them in a safe environment. As much as I feel I have not accomplished much in terms of my action plan, I feel that my lessons are much more engaging.

  3. Sarah,

    Great post! Thanks for the food for thought.

    It almost seems like “flipped conferencing”. With this heavy lifting done outside of class, perhaps it could free up time in class for revising.

    1. I think you are right Alan! My primary goal was to provide more indepth, personalized feedback for students, but also make better use of our class time. After they read the comments and watched the videos for homework, I could than use class time more efficiently to clarify questions and aid in the final publication of their piece. However, the comments and videos did the majority of the “heavy lifting”. Thanks for your insightful comment.

  4. Sarah, this infographic is a great explanation of what blended learning is: http://www.knewton.com/blended-learning/

    Essentially, if there is a combination of face-2-face and online learning (well, what we are actually doing with our Cohort 21 learning), then you can call it “Blended”. I see your students’ feedback experience as definitely under this blended learning umbrella!

  5. Sarah, I really enjoyed reading this. There can be so much cross-talk and jargon in education that terms end up all blending together. I try to focus on the ideas we talked about in that the purpose is more important that the tool that helps you accomplish that purpose. Whatever you label it, you are doing amazing stuff with your students! What I really like about this plan is, as students become more comfortable with these skills you can start to alter which parts of the process you are able to “flip”. While you may have needed to walk them through significant portions in class in this first round, next time those elements might be able to be flipped and allow you to focus on other aspects in class.

    I have also really tried to embed links and videos in my comments to help students work on issues that appear in their writing. It would be great to collect a library of these great videos and links so that you can easily fire them off to kids. It’s probably a lot of work, though. Maybe @teach_tomorrow can help.

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