Blended Learning
The teacher-at-the-front, test-centered classroom fails to prepare students for life in the twenty-first century. We need optimized education that matches the real world and prepares students for the future—the future we’re already living in.
Kids no longer need to become catalogs of information. They already have instant access to more than school could possibly cram into their brains anyway. Their education should center on how to make sense of information, share it, and apply it intelligently. It's about problem-solving through critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication.
Blended learning is about effective, student-centered learning where individuals have choices of when, where, what, and how they learn. Combining technological delivery of content with face-to-face instruction simply facilitates the critical part: personalized, competency-based learning. Blended learning techniques shift the focus of instruction from the teacher to the students, building skills and practices that inspire and enable lifelong learning.
In blended learning, technology is only rarely used to replace traditional teacher-led instruction and conventional teaching materials. Such replacement doesn’t meet the criteria of student-centered. Tech should support that relationship, not undermine it.
Technology must enable personalized learning by providing real-time data that gives teachers insight into each student’s progress. Teachers can then guide students to appropriate material, on a customized path to standardized competency and mastery levels.
Blended learning, naturally, involves plenty of online learning along with face-to-face instruction. Depending on the learning objective, the online activity can be synchronous, in which attendance is required and everyone learns the same material, or asynchronous, in which students work through the material at their own pace.
Blended learning implementation involves a wide variety of concepts, ideas, practices, and tools. Start anywhere: upload a PDF to your LMS, if that’s where you’re comfortable. Mastering blended learning is perhaps a lifelong journey; wherever you are right now is the right place to begin.
I-EDUTECH believes in designing flexible, long-term solutions for anywhere learning. As classrooms are disrupted and learning meets a new set of demands, the right technology can support a continuum of learning—igniting connections between students, teachers, and lesson content whether in a classroom, at home, or anywhere.
If you'd like to find out more about how SMART could transform your classroom, contact us today.