31. Short Film: "Reflections"
Ready to Blend
This podcast includes the audio from Patience Nyanway's short film: "Student and Parent Reflections from this School Year." You'll hear Patience interviewing several families. Patience's production gives voice to her community and reminds us of the real children affected by school closures. To see the video version of the film, subscribe to our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/readytoblend01.
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30. Online and Blended Learning Fundamentals: Learning from the Pioneers
Ready to Blend
In this class, you’ll look backward at how online and blended learning emerged over the past 20 years in K-12 education. With that context, you’ll look forward to imagine the online and blended solutions for the future. You’ll consider your personal openness to trying new strategies. You’ll analyze your learning design to check for the quality of engagement. And you’ll prioritize how to optimize the teacher’s use of time.
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29. Helping Children Feel Safe to Share
Ready to Blend
In this class, Heather teaches three ways to build bridges that help learners connect across any divide they might be experiencing so that they feel safe enough to speak up and express themselves, whether at school or home.
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28. Using Games to Support Children Socially and Emotionally
Ready to Blend
I've restructured this podcast as a class, so that each episode going forward will teach a skill to help you blend online learning into school and home.
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27. Where Do We Go from Here? with Atomi's Simon Hennessy
Ready to Blend
We are alive right at the moment when there's an opening of opportunity to retool the classroom for the end user. We have the will plus the disruptive innovations to do it.
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26. Developing Student-centered Teachers
Ready to Blend
What's the best way for school leaders to equip teachers with the skills they need to transform their instructional model? In this show, Heather Clayton Staker shares her latest research from the Christensen Institute that proposes a way forward for the PD solution that schools urgently need.
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25. Hacks for Solving Esteem Gaps
Ready to Blend
Inequities grow worse for each day that children lack “flex” environments that are blended (online and face-to-face) and that help them make progress, whether they are in in-person or remote setups.
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24. Hacks for Solving Social Belonging Gaps
Ready to Blend
Feeling lonely, depressed? Small wonder . . . the world is locked in social distancing, and humans brains are wired to suffer as a result. We can’t fully solve for social isolation right now. But we can avoid pitfalls that make loneliness worse.
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23. Hacks for Solving Safety Gaps
Ready to Blend
The shifting pandemic and school closures are opening safety gaps for many families and children, including personal, financial, and emotional insecurities.
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22. Hacks for Solving Physiological Gaps
Ready to Blend
School closures and lockdowns are causing major physiological gaps for some children in the form of food, exercise, and sleep shortages, while other children are benefiting physiologically. Caregivers and educators want to help solve for physiological gaps, but it's not obvious how to do that.
info_outlineIt might take a village to raise a child, but with school closures from coronavirus, parents/caregivers shoulder 99 percent of the work. It's on them for meals, schooling, recreation, church, and socializing—often while trying to work, deal with sickness, or solve for unemployment.
Given these challenges, this show focuses on how to support parents. Until we're through with the virus, children's well-being is dependent almost exclusively on the strength of their immediate family units.
You'll hear from three people who represent solutions for how we will #MindTheGap, meaning the space between where millions of children find themselves today and the entrance to the online-learning, distance education train. Children face five gaps, represented by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Speaking to #gap1—the Physiological Gap—Ruth Iaela-Pukahi tells us what it's like to walk to the local elementary school to pick up breakfast and lunch for the seven children, including two foster children, she is parenting as a single mother.
Speaking to #gap3—the Social Belonging Gap—Matt Clayton shares how his guides at Slope School connect one-one-one with their students three times a week using Zoom videoconferencing. They've also organized squads of four students who check in on each other through a structured process of peer support.
Speaking to #gap5—the Self-actualization Gap—Thomas Collette shares how his company Agilix has organized a coalition of content companies to deliver a catalog of online courses for free until June 2020 so that students can work toward their goals while schools are closed. The courses load easily onto all major learning management systems.
What other solutions have you found to #MindTheGap? Share them on Twitter and tag them with #gap1, #gap2, #gap3, etc.
Then visit www.readytoblend.com/mindthegap to see what others have shared.
To support Ruth Iaela-Pukahi, consider purchasing your next Amare wellness and mental health supplements from her beautiful collection at www.amareglobal.com/11150.
Explore Matt Clayton's Slope School at www.slope.school. It's part of the Acton Academy network: www.actonacademy.org
To partake in Thomas Collette's offer for free online courses, go to https://agilix.com/freecontent/