Promoting Access with Blended Learning

Despite growing up in a world that is heavily and increasingly reliant on technology, our learners need support in order to develop and practice the skills necessary to be successful in their academic and later professional lives. Acquiring and attaining mastery in these skills is not a natural process but one that must be intentionally instilled and cultivated. In this course, we will examine executive function skills and clarify the role that they play in our success across the many facets of our lives. We will then explore the connection between the executive function skills that are integral to thriving with technology. Participants will evaluate a series of strategies for establishing and practicing executive function skills when using technology and assumable a flexible toolkit that can be used to support the learners in their context.

Accessibility in any classroom is critical to meeting the learning needs of all students. However, how can educators provide access to support the social-emotional needs of students in a blended classroom? You will learn to cultivate and improve relationships with students, so that you can design accessible social-emotional learning opportunities in both the digital and physical classroom environment. Leave this session with a better understanding of what accessibility looks like in a blended classroom setting. Also, become empowered to create safe and equitable learning experiences that support social and emotional development for all students.

Throughout a unit or lesson, you may notice some students have achieved the learning objectives, while others may need additional practice and review. Here is where remediation comes into play, how we support our students' growth by reteaching skills and content. If we reteach the skill or concept in the same manner, it may not result in the mastery of content we intended. A challenge commonly faced when exploring remediation strategies is time. Often reteaching can be seen as a barrier to covering required content. This course will examine how online instruction can be designed and leveraged to reteach learning outcomes in ways that promote creativity, authenticity, and accessibility in order to effectively support remediation and address implementation barriers.

Students can have a wide variety of needs ranging from physical impairments to cognitive disorders. In today’s blended learning environment, meeting the needs of these diverse learners can be a challenge. This course will examine the assistive technology that can be used to provide access for all learners, ranging from no-tech tools to high-tech devices. You will learn to match the needs of your students to the type of assistive technology that will provide them greater access to learning and identify methods to implement these tools in your classroom.