K-12

It’s hard to believe – but summer is winding down! Still planning how you’ll go active in your classroom? Laying the groundwork for a great new year is important for any age group – but keeping active learners engaged after a summer outside the classroom can be a challenge. Activities that emphasize social learning and other engaging tactics can help keep things moving. Just in case you need some help- here are some lesson plan ideas for digital natives to get you started this fall:

1. Make Your Own Lesson Plan. Easing students back into the classroom groove is always a challenge – why not start the year off by showing them that their education is in their hands? Ask them to make a lesson plan that would help show their peers what they learned over the summer. Showing the active learner that you know that their education doesn’t end in the classroom is a great way to encourage them to continue learning from life.
2. Focused Small Group Discussion. Since active learners have the world at their fingertips they often have a lot to say about a lot of topics. Break your students into small groups when discussing a topic that is content rich and ask them to brain storm together to identify key points. Encourage them to work together while using mobile devices to provide some supporting material – a perfect way to integrate mobility into the learning framework.

I was lucky enough to attend the “Julie and Julie” session at BbWorld 2012! Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow, and Julie Young, President & CEO of Florida Virtual School shared their thoughts on Personalized Learning. Both agree that students are looking for ways to use technology in order to make learning more relevant and successful according to their own individual needs, goals, and preferences. And, both mention that children are using mobile phones, social networks, and the internet with such increasing frequency that it is becoming a must for schools to incorporate these tools into a student’s learning, instead of shutting them down.

Can you guess what student profile this describes?

Today’s digital natives – those who have had access to computers, cell phones, email, and other forms of technology since birth – expect their professors to integrate media into the curriculum to augment learning in the classroom.

Kaltura, a market-leading open source online video platform and a Blackboard Premier Partner, helps universities deliver on this expectation by allowing faculty to easily create, edit and upload videos with a click of a button. Once the videos are uploaded to the platform, students can view the videos from any device in any location.

For those of you who weren’t able to get to New Orleans for the Connections Summit, I wanted to briefly share with you some of what we talked about earlier today in my keynote address, and that’s debunking the myths about online learning.

I’m sure that it’s a conversation that you’ve all had with colleagues who fear that online learning is not sufficiently engaging for students. The fear that online learners will be isolated, miss out on non-verbal communication with their instructors and their fellow students, and not have access to the help they need. That their motivation will be low, which translates into poor outcomes. And then there is the fear that the technology that makes online learning more engaging isn’t quite there yet.

Working backwards, I can assure you that the technology is there.  As you’ll see in Blackboard Collaborate 12, pretty much everything we do is aimed at making the online learning experience as fully engaging as that of the physical classroom, especially when coupled with your institution’s LMS.

And given how wired in today’s students are, we’re getting to the point where it can be argued that bringing real-time collaboration technology into both the physical and virtual classroom mix is becoming the only way to guarantee full engagement.  (I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s seen a couple of kids sitting in the same room texting each other.)

I’m going to make a bold statement here: if you’re using an LMS, you should be using Blackboard Collaborate. Asynchronous courses can be personalized with instructor comments via voice authoring. Students can get the help they need from their classmates and instructors with instant messaging.

Whether a course is delivered asynchronously, live online, or in a physical classroom, project collaboration using web conferencing is an excellent way to engage students and help them build their networks. And for today’s students, who are seldom if ever without their iPhones and iPads, being able to participate in class and meetings with a mobile device is rapidly becoming an expectation.

I’ll end by saying that we’re looking forward to showing off Blackboard Collaborate 12 , and debunking all those myths about online learning.

Summer has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, and that means academic technology leaders are busy preparing for the start of the 2012-2013 term. One of the first places that K12 technology leaders gather is ISTE, which I just came back from. It was a great conference to connect up with long-time customers and hear their experiences with our products.

As I talked to our customers, it was clear that the whole concept of the “Active Learner” – today’s students who don’t just want to be spoon fed information but want to actively engage in their quest for knowledge – is really the right path. These students have been at the forefront of our minds as we’ve been developing our newest products. As we gave a few customers sneak previews of our latest technology, I was overjoyed to see the positive response. I can hardly wait to see all our biggest customers at BbWorld and Connections Summit and share the innovations we’re about to roll out, including mobile capabilities.

See you in New Orleans!