EDUCATING ALL STUDENTS
80% WILL ACHIEVE 80% OR BETTER THROUGH BLENDED LEARNING & TEXTBOOK ELIMINATION
"I like a teacher who gives you something to take home and think about besides homework." - Edith Ann
Textbook Elimination
Our classroom had a goal this year to release our reliance on textbooks and move all courses to the completely Blended and Digital environment using online resources exclusively. Although this was a very difficult goal, all courses learned without paper textbooks in the 2013-2014 school year. In Accounting, iBooks were used as a classroom resource, in Micro/Adv Micro complete video instructional series were used and in Multimedia a combination of online reading resources combined with video tutorials were used.
Blended Learning
See our portfolio Differentiated Learning page for a list of all the Blended learning examples we use in our classroom. Within this blended learning environment, students can work more at their own pace and it allows for students who miss class due to illness or extra-curricular activities to easily see digitally what we have done in class and work on it at their own time. In order to manage this environment, our classroom uses a system of 'Finished With Work' cards (viewed at the right) in order to allow students who work at a faster paste and have all digital information submitted to get their own time on the computer. This is an excellent system for management in our classroom. Our classroom uses iTunesU (see screenshot below for image of Accounting & Tech Int & Apps courses) & Moodle for our Course Management System (CMS).
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Pre and Post Exam Scores to Support this Method of Instruction
The Final Exams were taken at the beginning of the courses in order to determine percentage of growth in class content. Every course went up at an average of 40-45% on the exam. Shown below are two course scores in charts. The Advanced Micro course and Accounting course still need to take their final exams but starting scores were 38% & 39% respectively.
Entrance/Exit Google Form Survey Results to Support this Method of Instruction
Students in Micro/Adv Micro went up nearly 30% in the categories of very proficient and/or expert in Microsoft Word (similar results were shown in Excel & PowerPoint). A total of 100% of students said they now feel they are very proficient or an expert in Microsoft Word. Note: The top percentage is the incoming percentage and the bottom is the outgoing percentage.
Students went up 90% in their awareness of important Web 2.0 tools in the classroom.
Students now understand where computers come from and how they work as seen below. Notice that nearly 100% didn't know much about the topic before the course and nearly 100% feel knowledgeable at the conclusion.
Probably the most exciting statistic from my point of view is the growth in the following topic. Students are much more aware of what is out there for them educationally.
Most students were not comfortable with GMail before the course. All 100% were in the top two rankings after.
There is a multitude of information in the Google Forms data collected at the start and finish of all our classrooms. For more information, see Mrs. Leiker. Hopefully this excellent method of analyzing student growth can be used school wide soon.