Writing a plan for using computers
Schools do better with figuring out the new world of online learning when they have a clear vision for how blending in online elements will improve teaching and learning.
Today I'm sharing three templates to help you think through your own plan and write it down. A template is a pattern that guides your work. The first template is for district leaders to guide the overall vision for technology across the system; the second is for school administrators to plan for a school; and the third is for teachers to plan for an individual classroom.
FREE TEMPLATES
Blended Learning Strategic Plan for District Leaders
Blended Learning Strategic Plan for School Administrators
Blended Learning Strategic Plan for Teachers
Where did these templates come from? After Michael B. Horn and I wrote the book Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, we started doing workshops to help schools implement the strategies in the book. We drafted a basic plan to help educators in these workshops. That basic plan was the first version of these templates.
By 2017, enough educators had drafted and implemented blended-learning plans that we had a rich set of data. We used that data to fine-tune the templates and create exercises to help users work through the templates step-by-step. We also curated examples of how dozens of schools filled out the templates. We published the templates, exercises, and examples in The Blended Workbook: Learning to Design the Schools of our Future (available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon).
I encourage you to make a copy of the template that applies to your role. Then schedule time with your team to walk through each of its sections. Finally, use The Blended Workbook to check your work against national examples and fine-tune it.
That effort takes some diligence. But in this case, slow is fast. By slowing down and figuring out your strategy, you'll in fact speed up your progress toward attaining the results you want in your schools.
It's up to our generation to plan what teaching and learning should look like for children today.