Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Tag: acds

Using Blended Learning to Support Student Research

How are your teachers using blended learning tools to support their students in doing research? How about a practical example of one teacher using Noodle Tools, Haiku (LMS) and Google Docs?

All Middle School of Alexandria Country Day students do a mid-year research project on topics of their choice. They dress up for an evening get-together of students and their parents, where students give speeches from their research. The evening is called “Speeches & Sweets.”

For a full review of one teacher’s efforts to use blended learning to support students doing research, please look at a detailed post on our school blog.

Summer Reading and Writing with a Twist

Many schools offer summer reading programs to continue the learning through the summer months. The reading resources usually are provided in the form of a listing of books for each grade level.

A couple of problems with this approach are that our students read, listen to, and watch many other sources of information than just books. They also need to move beyond just consuming and move towards analyzing their reading and communicating their understanding.

For these reasons, our librarian, Elizabeth Lockwood, and English teacher, Todd Gilbert, decided to revamp the summer reading program at Alexandria Country Day School. They offer students a rich variety of reading, listening to, and viewing resources, including TED Talks, podcasts, blog posts, etc.

They also include a journaling component and prompts to get the students to write about what they read. While most students will be using paper journals, this program invites students to either start blogs or use their current ones to record their thoughts from the reading.

A community aspect of the program is that our teachers will also be participating. This opens the door to having our teachers read more blogs, especially those dealing with teachers who are writing about using Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) learning and assessment activities in their teaching.

Here is a link to the ACDS Summer Reading program.

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