Blended Interactions

The second week in BlendKit14 focuses "Blended Interactions" and essentially addresses two different things: student-student interaction and student-instructor interaction. These are two of the three components in Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's (2000) Community of Inquiry Model. It makes sense to leave the third one--student-content interaction--out for now, as this week seems to be more about Social Presence and Instructor Presence. The people. 

Anyone who knows me knows that this conversation is at the core of my pedagogy and, increasingly, my research. To me, Blended Learning makes it possible to facilitate the most effective and engaging interactions between students and between student and teacher. This is critical for writing courses. Plenty of research suggests that it's critical for any discipline, but I'll only speak to what I know. As a writing instructor, my first job is to facilitate a healthy, safe, supportive learning environment. Only then will students be able to share their work, accept and give constructive feedback, and feel compelled to revise and revise some more. Writing is a process. Learning is a process. Both writing and learning are social acts.

Since I started teaching blended courses two years ago, I have taken advantage of the discussion forums much more than I could in the past. In a 100% face-to-face class, discussion boards are always homework in a class that already has an obscene amount of homework. In a blended class, discussion boards can be both classwork and homework. It's taken me a couple of semesters, but I've finally arrived at a model that makes discussion boards 20% of the course grade. We have one every week, and most of them have structured responses, e.g., go back and find two people to respond to. 150-200 word responses (on top of their 250-300 word posts). That's 2-3 pages of informal writing every week on topics that range from personal expression (like the introductions in Week 1) to reflections to analysis. They work, when designed well. 

As for my face-to-face classes: I do very little lecturing. I could, in fact, do more (I'll come back to this later. I'm realizing now at the end of the semester how much I haven't adequately addressed, content-wise, which I need to figure out over the summer). What I do instead is a lot of group work in response to maybe a ten-minute presentation. In order to create a close community of writers in a format that only has 75 minutes of face-to-face contact, the group work is critical. I also set up the desks in a horseshoe (at least, I usually do) so that we're all looking at each other. When possible, I sit down, too, so that I'm part of the circle like everybody else.

Going forward, I know that I want to have more hands-on time with student writing before they submit their formal assignments for a grade. I think that I can do more of this in the f2f classes, though it's tough; we have so much to do in all three classroom environments (f2f, AdobeConnect, and asynchronous OL days) that it's hard for me to see how exactly I could provide direct feedback live. But I know I need to get my hands on students' drafts earlier. I can, too--their drafts are uploaded electronically for peer review, so my TAs and I have access to them. We need to do more than skim these--we need to provide more written feedback on them. It's time-consuming, but vital. 

That's my takeaway from Spring 14. I feel good about the sense of community in my classes, but I need to provide more direct instruction and direct feedback. More instructor presence, both in the classroom and one on one with students. 

Classwork v Homework in BL Courses

Week 1 in the #BlendKit14 MOOC has been devoted to defining blended learning and determining the learning outcomes for our courses. Here are my learning outcomes for 101:

I missed this week's discussion board, as I joined the course a week late, but I read through the very active discussion on defining blended learning. It was interesting to watch people work through some confusion between flipped classrooms, blended learning, and hybrid learning. The distinctions between flipped and blended has always been clear to me, but I've also always emphasized the difference between classwork and homework, something that I think has helped me conceptualize my course and, I hope, has helped students understand it, too. In a flipped classroom, traditional homework activities are done in class, and "content delivery" happens through video lectures, etc., at home. The seat time is the same, however. In blended, on the other hand, a certain percentage of face-to-face seat time is replaced by online learning--and that learning is "class," not homework. I spend a whole page on this in my syllabus, which I may add here at some point to demonstrate how clear I need to make this for students (and me, for that matter). It's structured exactly like a f2f class, really:

MW class schedule: two 75 minute classes per week. In between the two classes is homework, so:

Monday class

HW for W

Wed class

HW for M

The only thing that's different is that the Wednesday class is online. The thing that makes it work is that all classwork must be in by midnight on Wednesday. That's critical to maintain the distinction between "homework" and "classwork." Critical!

If there's one thing I can pass on to anyone about to take on blended learning, this is it: define your online classwork as classwork and make sure students know that it's due on the same day. That way, the online classwork will feel different than homework. Seriously: I cannot emphasize this enough. It's too easy for blended classes to feel like "so much work." It's not so much work if you make sure that you're only asking students to do seventy-five mintute's worth of work during the online class (e.g., one ten-minute video lecture, an activity, and an ungraded quiz). Bonus: try to have the stuff that students do for the online classes different than what you normally assign for homework. This isn't always possible, but it's helpful. For example, I never assign readings during class--readings are homework activities. Videos, however, are usually class activities, not homework activities. Make sense?

Here's the other artifact we created this week, which is related to this distinction (somewhat): 

The glue between OL and f2f classes is the discussion boards. This is something I need to work a lot on; the discussions that my students have on those boards are fantastic, yet I don't bring them into the f2f classes nearly as

much as I want to.

I'm working on this (right along with incorporating the readings more explicitly in class, too). I'm getting there... and little artifacts like these help me keep my eye on what "there" looks like.

​

BlendKit2014

That's right, folks! In my spare time, I've enrolled in a five-week, ill-timed MOOC that stretches over the end of the semester, which of course means that I'm doing this in addition to grading the Classical Argument Paper and facilitating my first-ever Digital Project assignment.

I'm nothing if not optimistically ambitious.

So: this short chapter asks some good foundational questions about BL, basically: how should we define it, what can we do differently in a BL environment, and how will we design it. The opening relies heavily on the excellent McGee and Reis (2012) article that I drew from for the BL Faculty retreat back in January. Most importantly, it ends with their call for a complete redesign--a transformation. Here's the quote I particularly like from that article: 

"Transforming blends are blends that allow for a radical transformation of the pedagogy, a change from a model where learners are just receivers of information to a model where learners actively construct knowledge through dynamic interactions. These types of blends enable intellectual activity that was not practically possible without the technology" (McGee and Reis, 8).

The key is that this radical transformation is not just about active learning; it's about active learning through activties not possible without the technology. 

As I've been maintaining for some time now, BL is not about convenience or saving on resources. It assuredly does not save on resources--not human resources, anyway. Instead, BL is about good pedagogy. I can do things in my classes that I can't do in a 100% f2f classroom. As I wrote in a recent proposal, some things are simply more efficient asynchronously--detailed, sentence-level peer review or critical analysis. Some things are more efficient in a face-to-face classroom: draft workshops, freewriting, problem-based group work. And some things, like information literacy lessons or concision presentations paired with guided revision practice, are more efficient online through Adobe Connect and Google Drive. 

The flexibility and affordances that technology provides is picked up later in this chapter, in the Kaminski and Currie section: "a course enhanced with online resources and communication tools will add educational value to any face-to-face course by making resources available to learners and by providing opportunities to deepen learning through dialogue and sharing" ("Can you make," para. 2). 

I am curious about this BlendKit, especially at this early stage, because I think that to an extent, it's extraordinarily difficult to grasp what a blended course might look like without a model to analyze. These two case studies at the end aren't particularly helpful in this regard. The first one doesn't have enough detail. The second one does, but the table that compares OL, Facilitated OL, BL, and Studio-based instruction is, I'm afraid, distracting. It would be more effective if she just focused on how she formatted her class without pausing to compare it to other models. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who went through a two-day crash course in BL Course Design at my institution, which was unfortunately not that helpful because most of the research and recommendations for BL course design is for medium and large lecture classes. In that sense, this second case study appears like it might be like mine (small), but she never tells us how many students she's dealing with, which is needed to understand how the disucssion forums and the f2f workshops are run. That said, the fact that she refers to one model as the "studio-based model" implies that she's dealing with less than 20 students, like I am in my writing courses.

Ultimately, both courses need more detail so that others can truly see how these courses work. This is what was missing for me three years ago in my crash course, and this is what is available in some of the literature. I understand that this is a MOOC, however, and it appears as though this has been designed for those with limited time to read scholarly articles. However, if anyone does, here are a couple I highly recommend:

Ginns, P. and Ellis, R. (2007). Quality in blended learning: exploring the relationships between online and face-to-face teaching and learning. Internet and Higher Education (10) 53–64.

Schaber, P. et al (2010). Designing learning environments to foster affective learning: comparison of classroom to blended learning. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 4(2), 1–19.  

​I'll add these to the Diigo site, if they're not already there, as well as anything else from my own Diigo Library. 

​I'm looking forward to the next few weeks!

Designer Blends

I have spent two years designing, redesigning, and improving my blend. I have spent an inordinate amount of time making and editing lecture videos, rewriting lessons for asynchronous online days, modifying them for synchronous AdobeConnect days, and scrapping both lessons at the last minute to teach the lesson face-to-face. I have surveyed my students extensively, exhausted my TAs, and pushed myself to the breaking point in getting this blend right--all while simultaneously rewriting my syllabus each semester to incorporate more lessons on information and digital literacy and transform many traditional assignments into digital ones.

From day one, my mission has been not just to maintain but to strengthen the productive, interactive community of learners that is paramount to my teaching. I believe that deep learning is rooted in Dewey's collaborative constructivism: we learn through doing, with each other. Critical inquiry and deep learning is predicated on a safe, supportive learning environment. As such, "going blended" has meant taking advantage of synchronous activities to foster exploration and experimentation in Googledocs and face-to-face classes and asynchronous activities to foster reflection in discussion boards and Voicethreads. My students are free writing, experimenting, drafting, revising, editing, and polishing work that is significantly better at the end of the semester than it is at the beginning. They are collaborating with each other more comfortably. They are writing more on the discussion boards than they ever could speak in class. We know each other better than we did even in my highly participatory, horseshoed-desked, discussion-based traditional classrooms.

The rewards can be seen through my students' writing and self-awareness. If writing is thinking on the page, and my job is to help students think critically about themselves as learners and writers, then my students need to be writing more. They are: My students produce an average of 70 pages of writing every semester, 30 of which are revised and polished. Even in my early semesters teaching blended, my students were making greater improvements in their writing than my students had in my traditional classes. They are reflecting on their digital literacy and media addictions, their research skills, and how well (or not) their high school teachers prepared them for college writing and research. They are providing more and better feedback to each other because they have more time to write careful feedback online. Plus, the online feedback is written, so students can't forget what their peers have said. They just need to go back and look.

If blended learning is seen as a method to save time and resources and increase convenience, then it's never going to gain acceptance among educators, especially compositionists. This does not bode well, for more and more college courses are being offered as blended/ hybrid every year. Resistance from compositionists is warranted if the format is pedagogically unsound, but done well, the format is not simply pedagogically sound: it's pedagogically obvious. Students are writing more, interacting more, and reflecting more. They are doing this by writing more. The net result is that my blended students are making incredible progress in fifteen short weeks, progress that I never would have thought possible three years ago. As a writing teacher, I will take nearly any risk if there's a possibility that it will help my students become better writers. The risks are high. The rewards are real.

Blended and Digital Innovations in the Academic Writing Program

Yesterday, I met with a few of my fellow blended instructors to see what everyone's been up to this semester, report on the OWI Committee and other highlights from the 4Cs, and look forward to the upcoming academic year. Even with just four of us, our discussion was so lively that we didn't get to the last item at all. Here are some highlights:

New this Semester:

DB started us off by explaining how he's incorporated the digital project into the syllabus. He's having his students create websites on Weebly and "got their feet wet" with the Rhetorical Analysis. This is a good move: his students have at least two months to play with their websites instead of having to build them in just a few weeks, as mine will this semester. DB is using the digital project as the Revision assignment; students will revise their EoE and Position Paper and add them to their websites. His students will also add their annotated bibliographies and have a separate section for "other voices." His students have responded enthusiastically to this addition, which gives me confidence about introducing this in a couple of weeks.

JE was impressed but wondered if building websites was a little advanced for English 101. DB replied that it was easy for students--they know how to do this. Even if they hadn't built a website before, they know what one looks like and what makes a good one. He's going to collaborate with his students on how these should be assessed, which is a recommended strategy that many have written about, including our new hire, Chanon Adsanatham. A link to his 2012 Computers and Composition article, “Integrating Assessment and Instruction: Using Student-Generated Grading Criteria to Evaluate Multimodal Digital Projects,” is on his website.

On this note, I offered that students possess an internal grammar for visual rhetoric. They may not have the terminology, but they have the grammar, a point that DK picked up on. He's been doing a lot of work recently on students' right to their own language and opened this semester with Vershawn A. Young's 2010 Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies article, "Should Writers Use They Own English," which immediately gets students talking about writing from Day One. I think DK needs to give a workshop or a presentation on this for the AWP, as I don't think that this principle, as old as it is (1974), is familiar to most people in the program. Here's a link to the CCCC Position on Students' Right to Their Own Language, with a link to an annotated bibliography.

JE talked about her experience working with a TA this semester and couldn't be happier! Her TA is phenomenal, and her only regret is that she only has a TA for one of her sections instead of two. DK and I were both thrilled, of course, and we all looked at DB: when is he going to start working with TAs? DB replied that he already had one in mind, and we pointed him to the application for 388V on the AWP website: 388V Internship Application

I then talked about how I've redesigned my course to focus on students' digital literacy, much of which can be found elsewhere on this blog. The two texts I highly recommend are the ones I discussed at length with several people I met at the 4Cs: Eli Pariser's 2011 Ted Talk on Internet Filter Bubbles and Fogleman, Niedbala, and Bedell's 2013 Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian article, "Writing and Publishing in a Blended Learning Environment to Develop Students' Scholarly Digital Ethos." That link is to ERIC, which can be accessed for free through our library.

I also touched briefly on my class Twitter @LyraBL101 and how my students are using Twitter to enter the "public" conversation. My students have made a new Twitter for class (some of them have kept their own, which is fine), tweeted their research question with #Lyra101, and followed at least ten people or organizations who are tweeting about their topic. I emphasized that they need to be following at least three people who they disagree with, which I hope will help at least a few of them with the upcoming Rogerian Letter. I held conferences this week, and several students mentioned that they had found useful articles and links for their projects on Twitter, which is exactly what I'd been hoping for.

Neither JE, DK, or DB are on Twitter, so it was a little hard to explain all of this in the short amount of time that we had. I showed them my hootsuite and my TweetDeck to show them all of the conversations I follow: #fycchat, #4C14, #ncte, #engchat, #digcit, #digped, #blendchat, #blendedlearning, #highered, etc. Many key people and organizations can be found through our BL Twitter account, @BLWritingUMD, currently being managed by the impeccable @Courtney_Guth.

Sharing our Work

With only ten minutes left in our meeting, I quickly showed everyone the CCCC page for the Committee on Effective Practices for OWI and explained the new Open Resource (OR) site that the Committee has just launched. I want all of us to contribute our work--the BL and OWI community will benefit from a robust set of resources to draw from. This works both ways: these will be peer-reviewed publications, which will help individuals. On a broader note, I'd like to see a strong UMD presence on this site, which will help all of us here. So please, submit your work! The Call for Submissions can be found on this page.

I also mentioned that I'll be presenting on Voicethread at the ITL Conference at the end of April. This is a great, one-day conference; some of my recent work has come directly from presentations at this conference. Registration is quick and free: Innovations in Teaching and Learning 2014

As always, I'm inspired by everyone's work in and out of the classroom, and look forward to catching up again towards the end of the semester!

Thanks for reading, everyone!

Teaching Writing Online

I'm not surprised to see that so many of my colleagues here at CCCC resist digital innovations, teaching with technology, and teaching online. Yet I'm frustrated. How are we going to shape 21st century learning if we resist e-learning? How are we going to be part of the broader conversations about teaching writing and higher ed if we ignore the rising numbers of students who need the flexibility and convenience of online learning? Our students need instructors who understand both their needs and their preferences. They need instructors who carefully examine principles and practices of online writing instruction and distance education. They need instructors who have done the research, who have an open mind about digital pedagogy, and who aren't sticking their heads in the sand. I'm not saying online writing is right for everyone, but I think that too many educators don't understand it and don't want to, and I think that's dangerous. We're doing our future students a severe disservice if we refuse to even look at what quality online writing instruction looks like. I don't want everyone to figure is out the hard way, on their own, when faced with external pressure to start teaching online. I want my colleagues to be prepared. And from what I can see, far too many of them aren't.

7 Highly Effective Habits of Teachers Who Hold Classes on Snow Days

I just held synchronous classes in AdobeConnect on a snow day.

To explain this, I'm going to use this nice infographic I found from dailyedventures.com:



1. They Always Start with the Why
Why did I do this? Simple: it was peer review day. It's the only day they had to go over their drafts with each other before submitting the final in a week. Peer review is far too important to skip, and making margin comments on drafts--even thorough comments--is only part of the process. Being able to actually talk to each other is critical. So I did it.

2. They are malleable and can easily adapt

I had seen this coming by about 48 hours. I knew I wanted to go online--I had to. There's no room in the syllabus to lose a day. I scoured university policies and legal notices, making sure I wasn't doing anything illegal. I wasn't--there isn't a policy that explicitly addresses online classes at all, let alone one about holding one when the campus is closed.

Even so, holding peer review online is tricky. AdobeConnect is okay, but TAs can't move themselves in and out of breakout rooms. That's a big problem. In the past, I've plucked a TA out of a group--mid-sentence--and dropped her into a new group. It's a mess.

So how did I adapt this time? By somehow convincing six former TAs to come in and help. I have no idea how I did this--I didn't beg or sound desperate; I just asked--but somehow they all popped in for one of the classes. I had enough TAs for one to be in each group for all three sections. It was brilliant.

3. They embrace change 

Thanks to our class Twitter that I launched this week (@LyraBL101), I was able to tweet about this possibility, and then decision, all weekend. With the right tools and attitude, anything is possible!

4. They share, share, and then share some more

See #3. And this blog. Follow me @lyrahilliard. Add comments on this post. Ask me anything!

5. They think win-win-win

I wanted today to be fun--as fun as it could be, anyway. Had we been in class, I would have brought cookies in; I always do that for the first review. I obviously couldn't do that today, but I brought in special guests! Courtney gave a great Writing Center overview by sharing her screen with us and showing us the website. And then students had 40 minutes with a TA (or me) and their peers. I think students appreciated it. I hope so. I know that some had connectivity problems, and my own connection cut out in my first class. In my last class, I accidentally rearranged all of the groups, which was an epic disaster. But we survived (see #2).

6. They are extremely thorough and think two steps ahead

I had already called this on Saturday. I knew campus would be closed. If I hadn't had yesterday to plan, I wouldn't have thought to ask former TAs to help, and then none of this could have happened. We held a brief Google Hangout last night, TAs sent out an announcement, I got into AdobeConnect early this morning to test settings...it all worked. It all totally worked.

7. They actively care

Believe me, I wouldn't have minded a day off! But there was no way. This wasn't a "theory" class; it was a "practice" class: hands on, working with the writing class. Students can't lose this class--that's not fair. Or right. I asked my TAs what they thought--and what they thought students would think. "You should mention that it's optional," one said. "No--you shouldn't mention that it's optional--then no one will come." "I don't think anyone will come, anyway." "Yeah but it's peer review. They should understand that it's important." "Yeah but will they?"

Apparently, they did. About 75% of each class showed up. Not bad for a snow day.

After the last class, I asked D if he thought it worked. "You made the right call," he said.

What would you have done? Would you hold class online on a snow day?

Redemption: Voicethread to the Rescue

Opening up Voicethread the morning after an asynchronous day and finding scores of new comments is like running downstairs on Christmas morning and finding a pile of presents.

Here's my view of all of my Voicethreads:

The yellow comment boxes alert me that there are new comments on those three Voicethreads. Yesterday's classwork. Unlike the Voicethread from three weeks ago, yesterday's was simple and straightforward: comment on the quote sandwich in two of the following paragraphs.

Reason #1 that Voicethread rocks: students can see me as I'm going over the prompt. I've listened to myself on Voicethreads in which I've only given audio prompts; those are fine, but I believe that being able to see me, as dorky as I may look, helps to humanize this activity. It boosts instructor presence, obviously, but it also makes it so that adding an audio comment is less intimidating. If I can add a video comment, students can an audio comment.

Reason #2 that Voicethread rocks: We can hear each other! We're only in a brick and mortar classroom once a week. While many of my online days are synchronous, students can only hear me and my TA, not each other. They type in the chat box or in Googledocs, but it's not the same. Hearing each other's voices helps build "social presence." I ask them to introduce themselves when they start to speak so that subsequent students can reference them by name.

Reason #3 that Voicethread rocks: when recording, we can draw on the slide. 

I'm asking students to point out specific things in paragraphs, so being able to point to the area they're talking about is super helpful. The drawings fade after seven seconds, so the slide doesn't get too cluttered.

Reason #4 that Voicethread rocks: I know immediately if they've understood the lesson. This lesson focuses on the "quote sandwich": how to integrate sources properly in a text. Full rhetorical context, including the main aim of the overall text, the quote (or paraphrase), restate the quote in your own words, analyze the quote, and "forward" it, to use Joseph Harris's term. This lesson was presented in a video lecture I made with Camtasia. I don't use the bells and whistles in Camtasia--the quizzes or polls--so until I started using Voicethread, there was no way for me to know if they truly "got it" (let alone watched it) until I looked over their drafts.

Okay, this could happen through a discussion board, but that wouldn't be nearly as good. They just watched me, in the video, go over several paragraphs, pointing out what is or is not working in the samples. Then, they do the same exact thing in this Voicethread. They didn't read the lesson--they watched me. Practicing in a Voicethread is the most logical way to reinforce what they just learned.

Reason #5 that Voicethread rocks: Students can see the text, listen to each other, and add their audio comments all in the same place. You can't do this with a discussion board.

 Here is a Voicethread from last semester. I've gone back to this one because it doesn't include student work (visually)--they are commenting on political cartoons from October, 2013.

The thumbnails on the left and right of the slide represent seven different students. I'm playing this slide now; you can see that I'm listening to the first student's comment.

How cool is this? I mean, seriously? I'm about to write a proposal for this semester's ITL Conference. I want the entire campus to know about this and to adopt this--I think this is an extraordinarily powerful tool for writing teachers like me, for art/ art history teachers, for architecture, media studies, math--the applications are endless.

Thank you, Voicethread, and thank you, students, for bringing me back to my properly enthusiastic state!

Instructor Presence

I love teaching synchronous classes online.

Yes, AdobeConnect isn't perfect. Yes, my wireless can go on the fritz. Yes, a student or two may have a hard time getting into Googledocs.

But I love it all the same. I wouldn't have predicted this two years ago, when I started teaching blended courses, but I really can do things in my synchronous online days that I cannot do face-to-face.

I always give my students ten minutes to get settled on synchronous online days. Most students come in by 9:30, but I don't start the live class until 9:40. This gives students time to run to the library, if they have class just before mine, or time to ask pre-class questions in the chat box. Meanwhile, everyone completes an opening activity:

At 9:40, I start my webcam and come on line. I'm not showing the full screen because doing so will reveal my students' names, which I will not do. But here's me, in my home office, smiling as students type in their warrants to these enthymemes.

I call on three or four students to write their answer in; this prevents students from dozing (or walking away from the computer entirely). "Adam, Beatrice, Connie, David: what's the warrant for the Starbucks enthymeme?...Good...Ernest, Frank, Gertrude, Henrietta, you're on deck for Fox News..." and so forth.

All three classes nailed this, so we quickly moved on to the next piece: finding "Viable" sources. This part was new. The day before, one of my TAs, K, and I were were trying to figure out how to come back to stasis theory in a way that would be most useful to students.

"Maybe..." I suddenly thought, "maybe I should make some sort of presentation that walks students through the research process, like Narrowing Topic --> Finding better sources --> evaluating sources --> choosing the most useful sources, as in the ones with actual arguments--> adding those sources to your stasis grid. Maybe?"

"YES!" K responded. "Students will definitely find that useful, 'cause most of them are like "what is this stasis thing and why am I doing it. This will totally be helpful."

"Okay. I'm on it."

I made a rough map, popped it into Google Presentations, and asked my TAs to help by finding images and making the presentation pretty. K added a lot, and I worked on it until 1 am (of course). It worked out. After walking through the presentation and taking a sudden detour into Academic Search Premier, I explained exactly what to do with their "top" sources: enter them on the grid, like this:

After students identified the two categories with the most claims and questions, they went into their group Googledocs from a couple of weeks ago to find a two-source stasis grid for them to fill out with two of their sources:

2/19 - Stasis Grid

	author/publication/date	categorical	definitional	causal	value	action	jurisdiction
Source 1
Source 2

They had about twelve minutes to do this (my second two classes did, anyway; we were short on time in the first class), and my TAs and I watched them in their Googledocs while I kept an eye on the AdobeConnect chat box in case students had questions. I put myself on mute for this activity, unmuting myself halfway through for "You guys are all doing great! About five more minutes" and then "okay, we're about two minutes away..."

And then, when everyone came back into AdobeConnect, I explained that they would copy this activity into their own stasis grids that was part of their homework this weekend. Six sources in the stasis grid by Monday.

And voila. Toulmin + Finding and Evaluating Viable Sources + Stasis Grid Lesson Accomplished.

Why do I love days like this? Because it was a research-focused day. Student had to be on their laptops to search in Google and Academic Search Premier and then work on their stasis grids. Why would I do that in a face-to-face class? I want students to be talking with each other when we're face to face, not staring at their laptops. This is a perfect synchronous online day lesson plan. They need me, a live instructor with a face and a voice, to walk them through Google and especially Academic Search Premier, to show them Diigo and Storify and Pocket, to reinforce why stasis theory is useful. If this had been an asynchronous day, many students would have either been confused, completely lost, or wouldn't have done it at all.

This is what blended learning and teaching looks like with Team Lyra. I love it.