Blended learning offers amazing benefits to the classroom, with ISTE reporting it meets many of the organization’s Standards for Students and Teachers and leads to a “more rigorous, challenging, engaging, and thought-provoking classroom.” While true, blending learning has to be implemented correctly to provide engagement and teach classroom lessons.

In its simplest definition, blended learning integrates digital content, like Legends of Learning educational games (edgames), with face-to-face learning. The more technical definition says blended learning integrates digital content with traditional teaching methods; typically requires the physical presence of the teacher and students in a classroom; and gives the student some control over their time, space, and learning path and pace.

27 Blended Learning Tips When Setting Up Your Classroom

To create a blended learning classroom, use some or all of the following 27 tips. The tips can be categorized into three areas: planning, implementation, and improvement. As such, you should find a relevant suggestion for wherever you are in the blended learning journey.

1. Redefine Your Role In The Classroom

You, the teacher, perform a critical part in encouraging deeper learning. However, the role is evolving, particularly in blended learning environments. TNTP, a nonprofit organization dedicated to positive change in public schools, says teachers who employ blended learning should learn to see themselves as people with three distinct responsibilities. These include research and development, integration, and guidance. The three responsibilities may be owned by an individual teacher or shared amongst a team.

2. Start With A Description Of The Curriculum

Writing down what the next two weeks or semester will cover often identifies learning goals, objectives, and outcomes. The description also ensures your familiarity with the curriculum content and helps pinpoint potential digital resources, such as edgames, online quizzes, and videos.

3. Outline Your Goals

Goals strip a curriculum description of the fluff, leaving you with a clear focus and targets to hit.

4. Determine Learning Objectives

Learning objectives quantify goals. Set these so that you can measure classroom and student performance in real time and at the end of a learning block.

5. Define Learning Outcomes

Outcomes define how students will achieve objectives and demonstrate competency in the subject matter. Specific outcomes could include classroom participation, online assignments, oral presentations, et cetera.

6. Choose A Blended Learning Model

Once you have a clear picture of what you want to teach and desire students to achieve, you can choose a blended learning model. The common models number six: face-to-face driver, rotation, flex, online-only, self-blend, and online-driver. Most of the models contain nuances. For example, the rotation model spans rotation stations, lab rotations, and individual rotations. Another common model includes the flipped classroom, in which online content and instruction is delivered online and at home. Students then come to a brick-and-mortar school for in-classroom projects and practice. Some teachers use one or more models to make their classroom content more engaging and rigorous.

7. Explore Different Teaching Methods To Complement The Model

Different models and teaching roles sometimes mean changing up your teaching methods. Some blended learning classrooms, for instance, use team teaching.

8. Use The Right Technology Tools

Software changes often, so it’s important to set down the fixed matters first. Goals, learning objectives and outcomes, blended learning models, and instructional methods should dictate the technology choice, not the other way around. In addition, remember that you may need more than one tool. Students learn differently and have unique needs. It’s unlikely that one edgame or digital resource will work well for all.

9. Aim For Relevance & Fun, Not One Or The Other

This tip relates to technology in that the tool should be relevant AND fun. That is, the digital content should complement learning objectives and achieve outcomes. If it doesn’t, the tool is irrelevant and ineffectual. The tool, though, also needs to be fun. Students won’t use a tool they don’t like.

10. Design The Classroom As A Blended Learning Environment

Layout and aesthetics affect student morale and the ability to learn. Plus, if you use a specific learning model, you may need to move desks and chairs around. You don’t necessarily have to do the work on your own; Mark Philips, a teacher and educational journalist, notes in an Edutopia article that student involvement in classroom design and layout can “empower them, develop community, and increase motivation.”

11. Know The Traditional & Online Content

To build trust with students, you need to know the content inside and out. This means revisiting the curriculum content, as well as testing digital content and edgames. You want tools that cement knowledge, lead to application and critical thinking, and motivate learning, not ones that sabotage your efforts or frustrate students.

12. Create Individual & Collective Learning Goals

You established overarching learning goals earlier. Now, combine them with individual learning goals. Students work at different paces and may be on another learning path than another student. Learn to incorporate that information into your blended learning planning to see success with students and the classroom as a whole.

13. Develop A Classroom Culture That Embraces Blended Learning

Esther Wojcicki shares her process for creating a blended learning culture in the book “Moonshots in Education: Launching Blended Learning in the Classroom.” She uses the acronym “TRICK,” which stands for trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness. With those values embedded in the classroom, students want to learn, grow, and help out their teacher and classmates.

14. Set Expectations

Students achieve when given goals, so set expectations. Let them know how to succeed in the classroom and at home, and they will.

15. Share An Overview Of Classroom Activities, Projects, Playlists & Outside Resources

With overall expectations set, share daily and weekly assignments. The process might not look all that different from standard homework tasks except that they involve online content and opportunities for in-classroom game play. Sharing additional resources for study can be a good idea, too, especially if you claim a couple of high performers or students who need to skip around assignments to stay engaged with the classroom content.

16. Provide Clear Instructions & Routines For Game Play

Students need to know to log out of an application and turn off computers or tablets before moving to a different classroom activity. The specificity is important; students probably don’t have to log out at home, so they won’t think to do it in the classroom.

17. Give Students Control Over Time, Path, Place & Pace

It can be hard to relinquish control, but students excel when given the chance to direct their learning. They become more engaged with the content because they have a personal stake in their success.

18. Encourage Collaboration In The Classroom & Online

Collaboration gives students the chance to work through complex concepts and to help each other learn. It also offers opportunities for dialogue, which teaches students to position their points with facts and hard evidence. Collaboration should occur in the classroom and online; quieter students, for example, could become extremely vocal online. If you need more reasons to employ collaborative learning, the Global Development Research Center lists 44 of them.

19. Incite Curiosity, Imagination & Critical Thinking

Students start wondering and thinking when you ask, “What if?” You can raise that question through traditional teaching methods and online content. And, the more you ask open-ended and thought-provoking questions, the more students will seek out answers.

20. Challenge Students To Learn & Grow With Authentic, Relevant Tasks

Nothing’s worse than busy work, and even a fifth grader has an antenna finely attuned to it. Give students real, curriculum-based, challenging assignments, and they’ll complete and compete to finish them.

21. Review Classroom & Online Content Regularly

Online content supplements other teaching tools. As such, you should go over both pieces of content to ensure students’ basic comprehension and deeper understanding.

22. Measure Individual & Classroom Progress

Blended learning leads to real impact when it’s measured. The work should be fairly easy to do since you already decided on goals, objectives, and outcomes. The Legends of Learning edgame platform simplifies the work further, providing real-time performance reports via an easy-to-use dashboard. Combine its information with your grade book to track and assess progress.

23. Analyze Classroom Impact To Balance Traditional Teaching Time & Student Game Play

Every classroom is different, so take some time to find the right balance of traditional teaching methods and digital media. Many Legends of Learning teachers start with a 50/50 blend and work from there.

24. Identify New Goals & Objectives And Repeat

Once you measure progress and impact, you may discover that learning goals need to change. That’s a good thing. Goals should change over time. However, that change means you’ll need to continually adjust teaching methods and digital content to see continued success with blended learning.

25. Communicate With Everyone

A blended learning classroom requires communication with everyone—students, professional peers, administrators, and parents. Blending learning works best when everybody shares a belief in the vision for it.

26. Remember The Parents

On a related note, not all of your parents will get technology or edgames. They may work multiple jobs to make ends meet, so they don’t have time to learn how the internet works. Help them out with an evening class or individual meetings. By interacting with them on a personal level, you’ll see interest, buy-in, and participation grow at home and in the classroom.

27. Be Patient

Finally, remember that it takes time to succeed with blended learning. Don’t give up if you don’t see the results you want within the next two weeks. Blended learning works if you’ll just be patient with it a little while longer.

Try Blended Learning With Our Online Educational Games!

Ready to start your heroic journey into blended learning? Try these 27 tips, then check out what you can do in the classroom with the Legends of Learning platform! Have any tips to add? Please add them in the comments section.

View Our Science & Math Games

Learn More About Remote Learning

This is a copy of a news release issued today.

Legends of Learning getting ready to launch our online platform of several hundred curriculum-based science games for middle school earth and space science, life sciences, and physical science curricula later this month. The company was founded after the results from a forthcoming research study, “Substantial Integration of Typical Educational Games into Extended Curricula,” from Vanderbilt University revealed that short, simple education games aligned to curriculum standards improve student engagement and academic performance.

Founded by former research scientist Vadim Polikov, Legends of Learning stands for the principle that rigorous academic research needs to form the foundation of strategies that take blended learning techniques such as game-based learning to the next level. The wide-ranging study — more than 1,000 students in seven states and in schools with differing student bodies, socioeconomic factors and geographical locations — demonstrated statistically significant success.

One year later, Legends of Learning’s content platform and games are being tested and vetted by hundreds of teachers across the country in preparation for the official launch later this month. The company will demonstrate its platform and games at the National Science Teachers Association’s National Conference in Los Angeles, March 30-April 2, 2017.

More than 100 middle schools will use Legends of Learning in their classrooms when it launches. Scores of teachers using the platform will participate in a second study to demonstrate efficacy and best practices for blended learning with curricula endgames. The second study will be conducted by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Vanderbilt University.

“Original research is critical to our education system’s overall success,” said Vadim Polikov. “I firmly believe that proving — or disproving — hypotheses with strong rigorous research is the best way to move education forward. One of the most crucial aspects for the education sector to adapt new methods is efficacy. Educators’ time is at a premium now, so providing them with something that is demonstrably effective and easy to use has a far greater chance of being implemented.”

Some unique aspects of Legends of Learning’s approach to education include:

• Building games off existing middle school science curriculum standards to ensure content not only engages students but also helps them succeed in their studies;
• Using an intuitive platform similar to Netflix and Amazon to make it easy and natural for teachers to use the games in their classrooms; and
• Releasing a dashboard that allows teachers to observe student comprehension in real time.

Teachers interested in being part of the Legends of Learning Ambassador program can visit legendsoflearning.com/teachers. Legends of Learning will take 100 teacher ambassadors to the ISTE 2017 Conference & Expo in San Antonio, June 25-28. For more information about Legends of Learning visit legendsoflearning.com.

Jon Ridgeway is CEO and Creative Director of Rebourne Studios. Rebourne is one of the Legends of Learning developers building science games for grades 6-8 in the United States. We took time to sit down with Jon, and learn more about his ethos on developing great games for the education space.

Our conversations spanned what makes a great game, why they work in education environments, and some of Rebourne’s approach to building games. Give our latest podcast a listen, and meet Jon!

Considering joining the Legends of Learning community of teachers and developers? We need help from middle school science teachers who are willing to comment on our games. Ambassadors who sign up by March 1, and provide feedback to our developers get free access to games. The most qualified Ambassadors earn an opportunity to attend ISTE this June 26-29 in San Antonio.

This is your opportunity to shape the Legends of Learning platform and games from the ground floor. When you sign up for our community, you let your voice be heard and make a difference not only in your classroom, but for educators across America!

Your input on individual learning objectives is used by the Legends of Learning team and our game developers to improve our collective offering. You can directly impact how kids learn thru games, join forces with like-minded heroes to review and strengthen the Legends of Learning platform and the individual games.

We want to reward teachers who are active in our network, and provide you free games for your classroom. Just for signing up for a community you get 3000 credits to use the games in your classroom!

Further participation in our community garners you more credits to continue playing and some crazy rewards, too. The 50-100 teachers who are most active in the community and agree to participate in our next major research study will attend ISTE — the premier education professional development conference — on our dollar (an up to $2,000 value that includes registration, travel, and lodging)!

Here’s how it works:

1) Adopt a Learning Objective as your very own: 100 credits
2) Adopt a second (third, fourth…?) Learning Objective as your very own: 200 credits
3) Answer questions in the community: 20 points for answers, badges given at 1, 5, 25, and 50 answers for 10, 100, 500, 1000 credits respectively.
4) Provide feedback and comment: 10 points for commenting, badges given at 1, 10, 50, and 100 comments for 10, 100, 500, 1000 credits respectively.

You can also receive points for adding an avatar, connecting and sharing on Twitter and Facebook, referencing others in conversations, and receiving positive feedback from your peers. Finally, agreeing to participate in research and attend ISTE will both garner you an additional 1000 points.

The fastest way to get ahead in the community is to adopt a Learning Objective (part of our community application), and work with our developers to improve games within that series of lessons. By taking ownership of specific lessons taught in classes, you will answer questions, comment and interact by default. You will also help make Legends of Learning a better platform for all educators. Now that is truly heroic.

Not that a hero needs more motivation, but those whose exploits are truly legendary will receive t-shirts, Pez heads, or other Legends of Learning swag. We might even write your avatar into a game as your very own super hero character!

So what are you waiting for, Legend? Sign up today, and help make game based learning even better in our community today!

Game based learning (GBL) offers proven benefits for student engagement and academic performance. But convincing some educators to include GBL resources in their curriculum can sometimes feel like a clash of the titans—the teen kind, not the ones who dared to defy the Olympian gods.

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Who doesn’t like a good movie or novel, especially when it features a super hero?!? But even though we love our heroes at Legends of Learning, sometimes we begrudgingly tip our hat to a story that carries incredible weight, particularly if it is in our sector. Ender’s Game is such a book (see Common Sense Media’s review), in spite of the author Orson Scott Card’s rather odd personal politics.

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