The CIA of Blended Learning

The CIA of Blended Learning

Every quality classroom is built upon three components – curriculum, instruction, and assessment, or CIA for short. In a digital learning world the CIA is the same, just with qualifiers: Digital Curriculum Guided Instruction Authentic Assessment See the CIA of Blended Learning infographic below. Digital Curriculum Digital curriculum typically comes in the form of software or open education resources (OER). It is a rare situation when a teacher can actually create their own digital curriculum that has all the components of an effective lesson from an opening hook, review of previous knowledge, delivery of new content, real-world application, a summative close and tasks for students to demonstrate understanding (e.g. assignments and assessments). Typically a teacher gathers pre-made resources from others such as publishers to ‘deliver’ lesson, rarely are they actually ‘developing’ lessons from scratch. Teacher are good at curating OER materials, but this takes time. Teachers that have ‘flipped’ their classroom by creating video lessons will tell you that digital content development is time consuming, and most schools only provide a very small preparation period for teacher planning (not developing). Thus the need for high quality software or applications that can aid in the delivery of digital content is needed.   Digital curriculum can be thought of as a teacher’s aide with significant advantages:   Engages student attention and delivers content Provides data with insight to student strengths and weaknesses Has no limits as to when or where it can be accessed Is ideal for presenting and assessing student understanding and practicing skills   Guided Instruction One thing a digital curriculum can not do is establish a relationship with students. That’s...