The fifteenth session (and another one that wasn’t tagged as a Virtual Schooling SIG session, so it went under the radar), which will bring an end to my day two blogging, at the 2015 annual conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education related to K-12 online learning that I am blogging is:
Bridge to Blended<Presentation: Paper #45420>
Amazon Q Wednesday, Mar 04 2015 04:15PM-05:15PM
Lucy Green: Amazon Q, 2015-03-04 16:15:00-2015-03-04 17:15:00
Traditional brick-and-mortar schools are increasingly considering “blended” models for their classrooms. With that come many challenges such as finding the right learning platform, whether to buy or build content, and if existing content can be leveraged. Using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard it is possible to take content and literally put it anywhere. By leveraging LTI, content is created, combined, or consumed in virtually any learning system or potentially no system at all; furthermore, LTI is agnostic to both content vendor and platforms, and is entirely open source.
Blaine’s session was not a research session. It reminded me of one of those practitioner-focused sessions that SITE experimented with a few years ago.
Anyway, Blaine’s main thesis was that education has always been blended – we just didn’t call it that back then. He began by using the example of how we used to use calculators (and I guess in some instances still do) in the classroom and this was an example of blended learning – using a technology-enhanced tool in a face-to-face environment. The challenge today is how we can use virtual learning content in the face-to-face classroom. In Blaine’s opinion, Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) was the answer.
Blaine then provided an example of how LTI in embedded into most content management system (or learning platform), and then demonstrated an example of a lesson that used FLVS and Khan Academy content housed in Canvas. And then show how that same lesson was replicated using LTI in Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and three or four other platforms.
Blaine indicated on his title slide that you could download his presentation at:
Blaine tweets from @blainehelmick.