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Ok Ms. Holliday always brings me happiness!!!

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Ok Ms. Holliday always brings me happiness!!!

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This is an intuitive and versatile communication tool with an inviting interface that avails students the opportunity to comfortably share content. The virtual sticky platform is novel and is a method that keeps conversation accessible and varied.

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I spotlight specific students who have a good understanding of a skill we are learning PE and let them lead the class through the skill.

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6th Grade SS students will begin a project next week to apply their knowledge of places and features in Europe. They will be creating a slide or poster presentation.

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6th Grade SS students will begin a project next week to apply their knowledge of places and features in Europe. They will be creating a slide or poster presentation.

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Allowing students to use the whiteboard feature to explain their learning in small breakout sessions.

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Allowing students to use the whiteboard feature to explain their learning in small breakout sessions.

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I am setting up small groups in 5th grade for students to share research ideas and help with design plans as they build their projects to attract organisms to their yard.  Students are grouped based on the organism they are choosing to observe.  They have already been sharing great ideas on design sketches!

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This could be a great communication tool. I can't wait to learn more about it.

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I love using breakout rooms to have students share their writing. This gives them an opportunity to practice speaking skills, listening skills, and learn/ be inspired by one another. I like the chat feature too, to get quick participation during shared readings. Going to start using the padlet next week along with google classroom discussion boards this week to get students to understand how to post thoughtful responses and reply to one another. 

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I love using breakout rooms to have students share their writing. This gives them an opportunity to practice speaking skills, listening skills, and learn/ be inspired by one another. I like the chat feature too, to get quick participation during shared readings. Going to start using the padlet next week along with google classroom discussion boards this week to get students to understand how to post thoughtful responses and reply to one another. 

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4th Graders have been using GarageBand / Clips to make an audiobook using a book of their choice. After receiving instructions the first few minutes of class, they leave Zoom to work in GarageBand while I have stayed in the meeting to provide help / tech support to students who need it.  The audiobooks will go into a "Virtual Library" (link below). After students have submitted their books, I am going to have them "browse the library" and use Padlet to offer peer feedback on the books they viewed / listened to.

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Social Studies- My Georgia

Students will create their own model of the 5 geographical regions of Georgia.

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Trying to create lessons that engage students in exciting PBLS. For example: Students will grow a plant and measure it using pennies. Students will collaborate with a group and compare their plant growth and ask themselves why their plant is growing or not based on plant needs. This hopefully will link into other PBLS throughout the year. Padlet would provide an asynchronous learning platform for students to collaborate on this project! Students can post pictures of their plant and then comment on their classmates pictures with a video or written response.

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I would like to try Padlet to try "Check In" to see how students are feeling that day!

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Students will be studying science standards related to plant needs by growing a bean seed sprout and documenting this is in a journal template. The students will share their collected data and observations in small groups, FlipGrid could potentially be a great way to have students share without having to be live.

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Helpful resource for creating Learner Centered courses for remote learners

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Helpful resource for creating Learner Centered courses for remote learners

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Several studies revealed, time and again, that a student-centered approach to learning is far more superior than any other methods of instruction. This booklet published by the Cambridge University Press , for instance, found that such approach helps students cultivate a "can do" attitude. It allows for autonomous, active learning. Autonomy, positive psychologist notes, is key to motivation. It's what makes people wake up in the morning and do the work they love.

The learner, after all, has his/her own unique situation, personality or set of experiences. These personal factors significantly influence how learners retain information, interact with fellow learners, solve problems and apply knowledge. Taking a teacher-centered or a content-centered approach while ignoring students is a surefire recipe for failure. Obviously, information is important and critical to learning. But information is only part of the formula. eLearning courses need to understand learners.

Here's how to make your courses more learner-centered and more learner-driven:

1) Challenge

Challenges, without a doubt, stimulate the brain. They force the learner to think about their previous knowledge, process the new information, reflect, and then make a decision. Learners who face appropiately challenging decisions require them to apply knowledge, not just recall it.

As an eLearning developer your main goal is to engage learners and challenge their understanding at all times. To include this element, focus on the question: "What challenges will students face along the way, and what can they do after completing the course?"

2) Engagement

Forget clicking! Engagement goes beyond clicking a mouse. Genuine engagement happens inside the brain. It's called thinking. You can easily encourage students to think by adding moments of thoughtful reflection in your program. Make them pause for a while and ask them how the content they have just consumed relates to their work. The content has to reach them intellectually and emotionally as well. Only this kind of deep and meaningful engagement allows for lasting change to happen.

There are many ways to engage students. You can drop them into real or imaginary situations where they have to decide using your material. Use case-based learning and scenarios that get the learner to analyze information and put it within a frame of reference. The skill of making sound and reasonable decisions is definitely an outcome of a learner-centric approach.

A learner-centered approach, first and foremost, is personal. It takes into account the real situation of your student, not everyone's ideal student. You may find that learners doing your course prefer reading to listening. Or you may discover that majority of learners who complete your program appreciate on-time feedback through emails.

Students have different learning styles and come from diverse backgrounds. It only makes sense to make your material suitable or fit for their needs than ask them to adapt to your course. Such adaptability has to be part of the design. Package your content in multiple formats for people to learn from - videos, graphs, charts, quizzes, activities and so on. This will help you to reach each type of learner. Get to know your learners before creating the course. Ask them questions about their educational background, interest and goals.

All of the elements mentioned earlier won't work if you don't give students a sense of control and responsibility. You need to empower learners. Learners who can control their own pace and pick what they want to learn are much more effective than learners who passively receive instructions from the teacher. Trust that your students will spend more time on chapters or sections they have not yet mastered.

Learning isn't a solitary activity. Learning is a symbiotic relationship. We learn in a group inside a classroom, with a partner, or from an author. Let students collaborate with each other by giving them opportunities to actively seek and share information, construct meaningful insights, produce a diverse set of ideas and appreciate multiple perspectives. Encourage dialogue and social interaction so that they can take ownership in the learning process.By introducing the element of collaboration you are at the same time encouraging students to learn more from each other.

Relevance has a lot to be with student-material connection. Every course should address a learner's current needs or learning gaps. Will your course resonate among students? Will they find it both useful and meaningful? Make sure they answer yes to these questions before you hit publish. Otherwise, ask them for feedback and modify your course to accommodate their needs. It is the goal of learner-centred eLearning courses to bridge the gap between what is learned and the real world.

Final Takeaway:

The core of eLearning design is centered on the interest of the learner. Learners should be active participants, they should be able to learn at their own pace and use their own learning techniques. As well, learning needs to be more personalized than standardized. But most importantly, problem-solving, critical thinking and reflective thinking are at the core of the learning process.

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Six Key Ingredients of Learner-centered eLearning Courses

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Several studies revealed, time and again, that a student-centered approach to learning is far more superior than any other methods of instruction. This booklet published by the Cambridge University Press , for instance, found that such approach helps students cultivate a "can do" attitude. It allows for autonomous, active learning.

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Students are choosing a  planet, the Sun, or Earth's moon to research and create a presentation (of their choice) the teach the other students about their chosen topic.

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Checking for students' understanding with an exit slip.

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Checking for students' understanding with an exit slip.

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Student Centered Classrooms

We are using breakout rooms during math instruction. When students are in the breakout room they are collaborating and peer teaching. Every student gets to pick a number and they call out that number in standard form.  The other students are responsible for writing down the expanded and written form of the number that their peer chooses. This gives the learners a since of responsibility for the learning process.

Other ideas that we plan on implementing include random grouping. Doing this will allow students to depend on their partners rather than their teacher.  Overall, learning from multiple theories

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The students are using virtual manipulatives to practice solving problems in math. I love this idea of using Padlet to share how they solved a problem. It allows others to see the process they took to solve the problem.

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Would like to use this:)

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How can we conceive of or plan for lessons that are collaborative as we consider some students may be in person and others may be remote?  Are we developing assignments and projects to take into account the need for personalization of students being in different settings?

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We are using breakout rooms during math and having students work collaboratively with their peers to create math problems for their peers to solve. They are in charge of creating the problems, finding the solution,  checking each other's work and providing feedback.

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Padlet is a great place for students to reflect on their learning. They can use words, images, or voice.