Educators today are faced with a never-ending struggle to improve the academic achievement of the students they serve. Gains in student achievement made during one school year must be eclipsed during the following year. Educators consistently look to data and research in hope of finding another program, instructional methodology, or tool to improve academic success.

While students still attend "brick-and-mortar" schools with a teacher present, face-to-face classroom practices are combined with computer-mediated activities regarding content and delivery.

Now you might be thinking of how to adopt this for your students, we will tell you how-to. For now, let’s break down the concept of blended learning.

What is Blended Learning?

Blended learning is a form of education that combines the benefits of online instruction with the advantages of face-to-face and traditional place-based classroom methods. It is some mix of traditional classroom instruction (which in itself varies considerably) and mediated by technology. The latter can be one student with a tablet or laptop, or small groups of kids working together on devices.



The Impact of Blended Learning in Classrooms

Most classrooms and schools are outmoded ‘answer factories,’ and regurgitation is not a skill that is marketable. Kids today are growing up in a sea of information, 24/7, and schools must be helping them formulate questions, encouraging them to dig deep, to prepare them for a world which values the ability to formulate questions and then find answers to those questions. Who is going to hire young people skilled at regurgitation?

In 2010, when Allen and Lopez (teachers at St. Genevieve Elementary school) helped to pioneer the implementation of 1-to-1 iPads at St. Genevieve Elementary, they found that students outperformed instructors when it came to using the device, and that this role reversal required the two of them, and their colleagues, to change the way they orchestrated lessons and viewed their students.

St. Genevieve school had the unique situation of being what Lopez, then a seventh and eighth-grade literature teacher, calls a "double school," meaning it has two classrooms of each grade. For the iPad pilot, they divided the classrooms into what Lopez deemed an "experiment" and a "control group," with one class using iPads and the other receiving traditional teaching. At the end of the year, they noticed some big results, including gains in test scores for the iPad group.

The benefits of blended learning and its impact on students are immense as it propels improvement which is impossible to achieve using only face-to-face meetings or only online resources. Like Allen, the school teacher at Geneviewve opined, “Technology is too powerful not to use, Using computers revolutionizes the way you think about things in the classroom. The learning is on the students."


Read more on How to adopt blended learning in your classroom here https://edubridge.com.ng/blog/entry/how-to-transform-to-a-blended-learning-classroom-in-your-school-email-version