Catch Up Time

Organizing labs that span over a number of classes requires a substantial amount of pre-planning. The benefits of proper Lab Documentation are potentially enormous for students. Lab Documentation ensures that I can follow students through every step of the lab process even when groups are completing different segments within varying timeframes. Students develop lab procedures on Google Docs, create charts/tables/graphs on Google Sheets, and compile lab portfolios on wikispaces. By hosting their work on Google Apps for Education, my students can easily collaborate with group mates and me on a lab activity over the course of a week or more. During this time, I can ask probing questions, offer insight on effective lab methods and tactics, work directly on their documents, and help students record their labs with media-capture tools. Being able to analyze video of the lab procedure next to the results it produced provides my students a great means to produce high-quality lab reports, which they can publish to the web and their group wikispace pages.

Correctional Assignments provide another layer of practice for my students who fail a quiz before re-attempting to master the topic. The process is simple - my students complete the Correctional Assignment and then re-take the mastery quiz. My students can follow this process as many times as needed until they pass the quiz and achieve mastery. For this reason, I use IXL.com and Kuta Software for Correctional Assignments, which both generate infinite sets of practice problems. 

Because each of my students is at a different point in the curriculum, it is very important that I make myself available when students need support and feedback. Fortunately, my blended learning model creates many opportunities for my co-teacher and me to work one-on-one with students and with small groups of students every day. On the Spot Feedback is my strategy for connecting with each student in my class every day and offering immediate feedback on their Mastery Quizzes and Level Tests. This strategy allows me and the student I'm working with to understand, in a very personal and precise way, where sources of confusion exist so we can discuss and address these issues before the student moves on to the next lesson.