Your school wants to move to a blended or personalized learning environment but you have no idea where to start. Don't worry, we've got you covered. The DSD Professional Development Team has developed six different progression levels that will transform a traditional classroom into a personalized learning classroom in two years or less. By using the six levels of Blended and Personalized Learning strategies a classroom, school, or district can revolutionize the pedagogy to where the learner is empowered to learn through his/her own choice, voice and ownership. Learn more about the Six Levels of Blended and Personalized Learning by clicking on this link.

One of our favorite and most recommend language arts technology tools is Newsela. Newsela takes a current event article and transposes it into four different Lexile levels. Which means that a student can read the article at his/her own reading level and still be able to talk about the article with the whole classroom.

What the blended learning coaches have noticed in the classroom is that the teacher assigns the article, the students read the article and then the teacher looks at the data from the online assessments. The teacher can then use the data to teach a mini lesson on the concepts that the students might not understand. For example, main idea, sequence of events, vocabulary words...

After hearing that the teachers are having a hard time engaging conversation with the students about the Newsela articles, the DSD Professional Development Team has developed a Newsela Scavenger Hunt that will go along with an article. Our example is used with the article about Bao Bao a US Panda Bear Bond for China