C4T #1 Post

I was assigned to comment on the Blend My Learning Blog. One of the post's that I commented on was about "Lessons Learned from a Blended Learning Pilot." This blog was on a study on how blended learning really works in the real world. In this blog, he discusses the change in the teacher's role in the classroom, perspectives from students, classroom space, results, and several feedbacks from different sources. In the study, the students who learned in a Blended Classroom scored higher than those who were in the traditional classroom setting. However; the results are hard to depict success on just the implication of technology because of how skilled the teacher was and the motivation that the students seemed to have. Also, in the studied students are changing their forms of questions from "What is the answer?" to "How do I do this;" which is making students learn something new besides trying to just finish the work assigned. Some takeaways for me on this post were embedding learning, students seem to pay more attention to technology, and student's who seem to be disengaged with learning suddenly become intrigued with the technological educational games.
In the second post that I commented on, was the results on Blended Learning. The results stated that the "treated" classroom, that I mentioned above were successful on more correct answers. The Blended Learning used the Khan Academy out of California to study the students. The study was covered over a 5 week time span and the "treatment" teacher was extremely skilled. Also, the Khan Academy did not include the pre-algebra scores in the testing; which could effect the results of the study of improvement. Some questions that are still present in this research are would the pre-algebra scoring change the results dramatically, would the results continue with a less skilled teacher, and would the improvements in learning continue throughout through the entire school year. 




Since that was the first time I have heard of the Khan Academy. I would like to research it further so I can form a better opinion. However, what I have read so far, the Khan Academy’s way of teaching/learning gives students the ability to learn at their own speed. The benefits are extremely helpful for students who are still unsure of material that was covered in class. Sometimes students who listen closely and take adequate notes still need further assistance in grasping the information. As a student, I have experienced that problem first hand. Most of the time, that one lecture I seem to struggle on always seems to be the lecture that is covered mostly on the exam. A system like this will give students the opportunity to review until they get it. I am curious to see what the results of the year round test will show. I really wish that there was a program like this for some of my college courses, but as a future educator knowing that this is an issue, maybe I can conquer it before it becomes a problem.