Unpacking Education & Tech Talk For Teachers

As teachers, a metaphor that often resonates with us is the teacher as gardener. While we can't force a plant to grow, we can water it, provide light, add any extra nutrients that are needed, and speak gently to it to encourage growth.  And sometimes, we need to support these young plants with a stake for a little while, until they’re strong enough to stand on their own. Project-based learning (PBL) is a nutrient-rich soil that provides ripe growing conditions for our students. We’ve spent time exploring PBL during our last two episodes. Given PBL's complexity and richness, we believe a closer look at three critical questions about PBL will help teachers as you consider implementation during distance or hybrid learning. Visit AVID Open Access for the resources mentioned in this week's podcast.

Meet Annie Tremonte, a digital learning coach and ELA/social studies facilitator in the Renton School District in Washington. Annie joins our Digital Learning Specialists to share her experiences with project-based learning and how she has learned to embrace the complexity, the messiness of the creation process, and the ambiguity of the end result to create relevant learning experiences where her students get to see how their learning can impact the world around them. We explore how to bring PBL into the classroom without having to rehaul the entire curriculum, including easy starting points and implementation tips to provide students voice and choice throughout the PBL process. Visit AVID Open Access for practical, easy-to-use strategies to include in your virtual, blended, or hybrid classroom.

Let's unpack PBLWorks' definition of project-based learning to identify strategies to bring this dynamic, student-centered approach into your classroom in ways that will work for face-to-face, remote, and hybrid learning. Join our Digital Learning Specialists as they review eight essential design elements of PBL that help teachers and students unpack complex problems and explore possible solutions. We’ll talk about how teachers can work hand-in-hand with students to define project scope, while providing guardrails, so that students have opportunities to engage in real-world problem-solving. Visit AVID Open Access for the resources mentioned in this week's podcast.

Welcome back to Teacher Insights at Tech Talk for Teachers. With this series, we celebrate teachers and the important role that you play in our lives and community. We learn about what is happening in virtual and hybrid classrooms across the country—what is working and what's challenging. This week, we meet with Julie Beaver, a middle school and high school math and world language teacher from Zimmerman Middle/High School in Zimmerman, Minnesota. Julie shares her experience bringing blended learning to the classroom pre-pandemic and creating an environment where she felt comfortable failing and being vulnerable with her students to engage them and inspire them to remain resilient through challenge. Visit AVID Open Access for practical, easy-to-use strategies to include in your virtual, blended, or hybrid classroom.

Today, we are focused on exploring how to efficiently and effectively plan for hybrid learning. Many school districts are being asked to pivot their delivery systems on short notice to adapt to new infection rates in their area. This essentially means that teachers must be ready to flex between face-to-face instruction, a hybrid model, and fully remote learning at any time. While this makes a lot of sense from a health and planning perspective, it can very quickly become difficult to manage for teachers. Let's review six ways to structure and plan for hybrid learning. We’ll take a look at how to use these methods to manage the workload while offering rich learning experiences for students. Visit AVID Open Access for the resources mentioned in this week's podcast.

Welcome back to Teacher Insights at Tech Talk for Teachers. With this series, we celebrate teachers and the important role that you play in our lives and community. We learn about what is happening in virtual and hybrid classrooms across the country—what is working and what's challenging. This week, we meet with Leif Voltz, a middle school science teacher from Salk Middle School in Elk River, Minnesota. From remembering the announcement on March 14, 2020—when face-to-face learning was disrupted—to today, Leif, his students, and their families have experienced many shifts. Join our Digital Learning Specialists as they talk with Leif about his experiences during pandemic learning—from his worries about students who he hasn't seen this academic year to how he translates his energy that engages students when face-to-face to the virtual-learning environment. Leif shares, "We do something fun at the start of every day to help students feel safe and normal when everything isn't." Visit AVID Open Access for practical, easy-to-use strategies to include in your virtual, blended, or hybrid classroom.

Let's unpack hybrid learning to identify strategies that can best be used during distance learning. In a hybrid model, students learn some lessons during face-to-face classroom instruction and other lessons virtually, away from the physical classroom. The intention behind effective use of the hybrid model is to provide students with some control over the pace, place, path, and time of their learning, while implementing the best of both in-person and remote digital-learning strategies. Visit AVID Open Access for the resources mentioned in this week's podcast.

We are excited to introduce Teacher Insights to Tech Talk for Teachers. With this series, we celebrate all teachers and the important role that you play in our lives and community. We will regularly talk with teachers from around the country and beyond about their current experiences in the classroom—their challenges, their successes, and the lessons they have learned that they will continue to implement once students are able to return to the physical classroom. We are starting our interview series with a fourth grade teacher from Medellín, Colombia: Trentino Parcells. He brings us an international perspective of the pandemic's effects on education in South America, with stories about how he, his students, and their families have grown together, as the learning delivery model shifts as needed to keep both students and teachers safe. Join our Digital Learning Specialists as they talk with Trentino about his experiences with remote and hybrid learning and how he strives to create a student-centered experience. Visit AVID Open Access for practical, easy-to-use strategies to include in your virtual, blended, or hybrid classroom.

Let's explore station rotation, playlists, and flipped learning—three models of blended learning that can be used to guide and inspire students to take ownership of their learning process. In this episode, our Digital Learning Specialists discuss what it means to be an architect of learning, bringing the art and science of teaching together to design learning that has the structure to support students and also inspires them to learn. Visit AVID Open Access for the resources mentioned in this week's podcast. 

At its core, blended learning is learning that takes place partially in a face-to-face, brick-and-mortar setting and partially in a virtual, online setting. Blended learning leans on the ideas that both face-to-face and online learning offer significant benefits and that the blended-learning teacher will draw upon the advantages of each option. During the time of pandemic learning, teachers are incorporating best practices from blended learning to empower students to become the owners of their learning process. Join our Digital Learning Specialists as they unpack the definition of blended learning and explore the concepts of pace, place, path, and time, as well as the role of student control to provide them voice and choice throughout the process. Visit AVID Open Access for the resources mentioned in this week's podcast.