Teachers are always trying reach their students with new techniques in order to make the learning experience more enjoyable. This is where a blended approach might come in helpful. A blended approach compared to a traditional, face to face class might mean that the class meets once per week for a lecture with the other sessions resulting in a more hands-on lab experience or a field trip. Learning activities that normally would have taken place during classroom time can be moved online.
The goal of a blended approach is to join the best aspects of both face to face and online instruction. Classroom time can be used to engage students in interactive experiences. Meanwhile, the online portion of the course can provide students with multimedia-rich content at any time of day, anywhere the student has internet access. Just keep in mind that the blend of face to face and online materials will vary depending on the content, the needs of the students, and the preferences of the instructor.
There are various models out there that a teacher can follow to help implement a blended learning technique. The two most common are:
The Supplemental Model
The supplemental model retains the basic structure of the traditional course and uses technology resources to supplement traditional lectures and textbooks.
The supplemental model for blended learning incorporates technology into the instructional approach of the course, but does not reduce “in class” time. Students may be required to complete online readings or activities, or participate in lab sessions.
The Replacement Model
The replacement model reduces the number of in-class meetings, and allows for more hands-on activities to engage your students. It replaces some in-class time with online, interactive learning activities.
Under a replacement model, there are fundamental changes to the course. Unlike the supplemental model, the online resources in a replacement model are fully integrated into the overall instructional effort. The online content acts as a replacement for time that would have been spent in a lecture hall. Consequently, the nature of the in-class activities is changed as well. Instead of traditional lectures, in-class time is freed for more interactive, collaborative learning experiences. This model is almost like "flipping" your use of class time.
Ok so maybe it's not "new" but Aterium is upgrading their state-of-the-art Tier 1 facility web hosting. We want to provide your District/School and even Classroom with an even better secure, reliable web hosting service.
What is setting us apart? We offer the following:
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99.9% uptime and 24/7/365 monitoring of critical systems and applications.
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35 GBs of storage space for teacher created videos, audio, documents, images and text content per webisite. (Upgrades available).
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Fast load times and adequate access speeds available with unthrottled bandwidth for all users.
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Our hosting enviroment provides best-in-class Tier III security protection measures that cover both physical threat and data-intrusion.
With this web hosting comes even more custimized features for your sites. We furnish numerous templates for you to choose from and custimize these to your school using your colors, pictures, layout, etc...
We make it easy for you to update content, calendars, announcements and pictures. Classroom pages even have a drop box for student homework.
Above all we are striving to help schools take advantage of new learning techniques Districts are implementing all over. Teachers can upload their own video, tutorials, test reviews, etc.. and combine this with the new "flipped" or "inverted" and "blended" learning techniques to engage student interaction.
According to USA Today "Flipped" classrooms are becoming more popular in the classroom. ATERIUM hosting solutions encourages the use of the new learning technique.
Teachers are now recorded their lessons ahead of time and allowing the students to watch these recordings at home, at their own pace. The following morning they any questions pertaining to the previous nights content, do lab work and overall get to engage with the teacher and their peers.
It's a great way to make sure the students are really grasping the educational content. If it's something they don't understand fully, they have the teacher right by their side to help them through instead of fumbling through the work at home, alone.
Download full article here.
After successful first years using Aterium, both the Carroll County and Clinton Public School Districts have seen an improvement on their MS Report Card.
Both schools will be adding more classrooms to their Aterium roster for this year as well. Carroll County, a school that had been at risk of failing last year is now on academic watch for this school year. They will add 4 more classrooms to their arsenal in both the middle and high school.
Clinton Public Schools was a high preforming district before Aterium and is now one of the few Star districts in the state. They also added more classrooms equip with Aterium in hopes to maintain that status for years to come.
We would like to congratulate both these schools and all the teachers efforts and wish them continued success this year.
Richard West, an AP Chemistry teacher at Clinton High School in Mississippi, discusses the Aterium Education System. We were very excited to see this video and wanted to share it.
Apparently we're not the only ones who are excited about Aterium being installed at Clinton High School in Clinton, Mississippi. Here is an article discussing Aterium and how it has benefited Clinton High School:
http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=201011210366
Only correction we'd like to make is that we're actually based in Boston, Massachusetts and not in Mississippi. We love Mississippi though and we have a sales team down there!
If you wish you talk to our sales team in Mississippi (or anywhere else) email sales@aterium.com.
One of recent customers in Mississippi, Clinton High School, was featured on their local news broadcast. The reporter was pretty excited about the idea of using cameras in a high school for education instead of security so she put together this report. It's great to see how excited our users are and how excited people in the community are when they here about our product. This reaction is exactly what we hoped for when we designed Aterium and we see it time and time again from our users. The only downside is that we're mentioned only as "the company that installed the cameras" but that's fine with us-this is more about the potential for helping students than it is promoting us. The best part is that more parents know about it and can encourage their kids to use it. For instance today over eighty students at Clinton logged into their Aterium installation to view previously recorded classes. It's very exciting!
Have a look!
We've been pretty busy around here lately. We usually have at least two releases worth of features in the pipeline so it's easy to forget to let everyone know what we've been working on. We just released version 1.1 which was updated on our customer's installations over the last few weeks.
Here are the highlights:
- Viewing Catalog for videos with attachments only. This is part of a larger plan to encourage the usage of attachments associated with recordings. Students can easily find recordings with attachments so they can go back and find handouts and homework assignments from any point in the school year.
- Customizable Interface. As much as we love our logo and color scheme we realize that schools like their logos and colors too. Version 1.1 contains a simple interface to allow the colors and the logo on your Aterium interface to be updated.
- Remote Synchronization. This allows schools to automatically synchronize content to other Aterium servers. Larger districts with multiple installations will find this useful as well as school districts with separate alternative schools that would like to save the bandwidth costs of students viewing multiple recordings at the same time.
- Camera Permissions. This allows administrators to assign teachers a camera so that they do not see a list of cameras for the entire school. This keeps things simpler for the teachers because it removes that option automatically when scheduling a recording. It's optional but highly recommended for teachers who make a lot of special recordings.
We have some very exciting features planned for version 1.2 which should be released in the next week or so. The focus for 1.2 has been to improve our existing reports and add three new reports. We also have some nice user interface improvements that we can't wait to get out to customers.
About ten years ago I was working on a video conferencing product at a startup. I don't think I'll ever forget the first release that I worked on there. I remember sitting around a big table with around ten people (only three or four of whom were actually going to be working on the release) discussing how we were going to design what was going to be our first big release of this product. It was the first time I heard anyone use the phrase "We're going to do this the right way". I'm not sure if anyone had a definition in mind for this but I think it just involved a lot of meetings and probably involved some QA. I seem to recall neither actually happening. Instead I think we talked about talking about the product which we all found lacking for obvious reasons. I think if I heard it again I'd run away screaming but back then it sounded like a pretty good idea.
So after this meeting someone mentioned to me that about 30% of the work of this project was going to involve me. I didn't really know what to think but I panicked and spent a lot of time working. I remember going to work on weekends and eating my Chipotle burritos at my desk working away on this project. I'm not sure why I worked so much but I think it had to do with me wanting to earn my place there. So far all I had done was fix some bugs and make some suggestions which turned to be not entirely bad. There was another guy who was always working there with me. He spent a lot of time working for the same reason I was; he wanted to prove himself and make a spot for himself on the team. His feature ended up working really well and he set a good example for the other members of the team. What was interesting about all this is that none of the more experienced members of the team seemed motivated to do much of anything at all. I didn't see one of the leads on the project around the office for weeks and I really needed him to do some things to keep the project moving forward. We weren't required to show up at the office at this company so a month could pass sometimes before having an actual conversation with other programmers working on your project. Most of the programmers didn’t abuse this policy but a few did and it made it hard on the rest of us.
So rather than ask them why they weren’t working I jumped to a bunch of conclusions and got myself all worked up about it. I think I assumed that they were just lazy, awful people who needed to get their act together. Maybe they were all those things but it’s never a good idea to go into a confrontation with someone thinking that you are 100% right and they’re 100% wrong. A few weeks went by and then I confronted them with a pretty angry attitude that was way over the top. The response I got was that they thought what we were doing didn't matter because they heard we were running out of funding any day now and even if we weren't that the product wasn't going to sell anyway. This wasn't true and the company is actually still operating largely on the basis of what would eventually come out of what we were developing. They believed that failure was imminent so why bother fighting it? I made some argument that they were getting paid, that they owed those of us they were working something which is all true but didn't really address their concerns at all.
The big takeaway for me from all this was that it's important for the leaders of the company to take the time to sell the product to the developers working on it. If developers are convinced that no one is going to use what they work on or that corporate failure is imminent they're going to put in an effort that reflects that. Sometimes the most important people to sell are the people who you are paying to build it in the first place. The product we were building filled a fairly big hole in the video conferencing market and leveraged our technology very nicely. Our sales people were feeling good about selling the product as it appeared on paper at least.
Unfortunately that release was a total failure. There were major bugs in it and we had to rewrite several components for the next release just to make sure the product was stable. I think someone left a branding placeholder message that was somewhat unprofessional. I remember when the new VP of sales came by the office and set us straight on the product's potential and its importance to the company as a whole. This product was going to be our bread and butter and it needed to be good he explained and we believed in what he was saying despite our being more jaded than any group of people in their mid twenties should ever be. After that a few of us got together informally and just started fixing bugs and testing like crazy. We rewrote the bad code and made a pretty reasonable product out of what we had. We made the decision that if this was going to be what decides the company’s fate that we were going to take it upon ourselves to make it the best product we possibly could.
That's why the focus here at Aterium is on building a product that people use every day. I'm betting that we won't have a problem keeping people motivated when we setup our product in such a way that to purchase it is to use it every day. For my part I just can't get excited about something unless I know that our customers are going to love what I'm doing. I work to make an impact in the world around me and if I'm making no impact at all it's just not really possible for me to get excited about it. I don't want to make a product that sells well but just gets forgotten about later. I don’t think I’m unique in this way at all.
That's why our new hires get sold on the product before they get started doing anything. We have a presentation on why our approach to our market is unique and why I think our product is great. It's not a list of features or selling points but rather just a guiding set of principles writing in plain English. It says that we're here to make a big impact in the world of education and here's how that's happening. The reaction we’ve had has been very encouraging. We get tons of very positive and enthusiastic feedback from everyone who goes through our training.
The suggestion I’m making might be obvious to but I seem to have been around a lot of companies where this isn’t done. Spend the time to explain to your employees not just what your product does but why it matters. This can’t be done with vision and mission statements but it can be done with honest communication about why the work matters to the company and to the wider world.