Chris Davis's Blog (38)

A strategy for a simple way to connect with your students each week - send them a weekly task checklist to help them stay focused. It can be personalized for groups or individuals and can be handy organizational tool for them.  A great idea from Penn Hills teacher, Michael Whalen - send the lists out on Wednesdays to span tasks to be completed by the following Wed. Builds a weekend into the plan and saves students (and you) from crazy Mondays.

Robert Krogh has brought up an interesting challenge as it relates to online collaboration. What would you do in this situation... Imagine you have a student that is at an accelerated pace in an online course and is demonstrating complete understanding of the content. Other students are working at a slower pace. When it comes to a collaborative activity, such as a blog or discussion board assignment, do you…

To guide, steer, serve as the model, assist, inspire and contribute; these are the goals of the Blended Schools support team. Our Help Desk is open every weekday to answer your blended or online learning questions. In addition, we are available via Blackboard IM every weekday from Noon - 1PM for instant help!

In my years of working for blendedschools.net, I have learned the most from great questions that teachers ask on the Help Desk. So keep those questions coming!  Soon, my…

This is an exciting week for us here at blendedschools.net! No, not because it's Valentine's Day, although that's nice too. The exciting part is that our new course design is improving even more!

If you haven't already noticed, we are releasing courses with a new design and they are called our 3.0 courses. So far, the transition to the new design has been great!  We are getting some good feedback from teachers, have made some tweaks and are starting to see these…

Imagine that you wake up to tackle a day of work but soon realize that the flu has hit. You can't go to school feeling like this!  You're thinking about the tedious task of getting your classroom ready for a sub and writing the dreaded sub plans.  How can you put everything you do in a day into a simple set of steps a sub could make sense of?  How can you keep your students on-target and allow them to keep moving forward with your content without having to do busy work until you get…

You may have noticed that some of our new courses look a little different. You might be seeing a yellow ScL icon like the one pictured below, with a link beside it. You also might be wondering where all the content is in the lessons. Well it's in there - inside that simple, yet powerful ScL link.…

Many of you have invested a lot of time into creating great videos, activities or tests for your Blackboard classes. Now you can be rewarded for your hard work!



Find out how easy it is to enter our next Learning Objects Challenge by submitting a learning activity of your own. Enter and have a chance to win some great prizes like, video and lesson-building software, graphics tablets, and scholarships to the BSN Developer…

Congratulations to the winners of our Learning Object Challenge!

• Lori S. (Chestnut Ridge School District)
  
  "Circle Test" (Blackboard Test) & "Interpreting Graphs" (Instructional Video)
• Kim C. (Greater Johnstown Career Technology Center)
  
  Decimals to Percents (Instructional Video)
• Evelyn W. (Minersville School District)
  
  7/8 Grade PSSA Math Activities (Set of…

Have you developed a great test for one of your Blackboard classes? Do you know anyone else who teaches what you teach? Share your test with your colleagues by submitting it as a learning object to our Learning Object Library. Learning Objects that are submitted will be evaluated and prizes will be awarded for the best objects. The third and final online training session about Learning Objects will be held tonight and it will also be archived. The topic tonight will be how to export your…

Deanna and I will be doing a series of online trainings designed to help you build learning objects for your students. If you attend these trainings, you will learn how to

• transform your PowerPoint presentations into dynamic videos with your teaching voice.
  
  
• use the powerful Pronto Whiteboard tool
• use a program called SoftChalk to create interactive learning…

If you saw Deanna's recent blog post or email, you may have noticed an upcoming challenge we have for you.

If you have ever thought about developing a course for blendedschools.net, here is a way to try it out through a smaller commitment of your time. We are looking for teachers who are interested in creating small components of lessons, called “Learning Objects.” These…