Wiki+Articles

[|http://thejournal.com/wikis-pulling-it-all-together-online]

**Wikis: Pulling It All Together Online** Elementary teachers are using wikis in and out of the classroom. The collaborative, teacher-moderated technology allows educators to set up sites quickly and at little or no cost, creating instant learning resources for students. But wikis aren't without their challenges. By Bridget McCrea 10/20/10

David Lindsay discovered wikis in 2005, several years before collaborative Web 2.0 innovations would officially infiltrate the educational space. Armed with Web site design experience, this elementary school teacher started tooling around with the idea of wikis after seeking out a better way to manage an annual competition that paired students with a local business alliance. "I was looking for an easier, free way to manage the competition," said Lindsay, a fourth grade teacher and technology coordinator at __ Rosedell Elementary __ in Saugus, CA. Through the event, students work closely with the business alliance to develop their own online businesses. Lindsay coaches students through the process, which finds children using the Web to experience hands-on entrepreneurship at a young age. "At the time, there was software available for what I wanted to do, but it was cost-prohibitive," said Lindsay, who was also challenged by the fact that Web site design five years ago still required the developers (in this case, the students themselves) to write code. "Programming and HTML were still pretty complicated for a fourth grader to learn and use," said Lindsay. "While I was looking around for better options, I stumbled upon wikis." By definition, a wiki is a Web site that allows for simple creation and editing of multiple, interlinked Web pages. Using simplified markup language WYSIWYG text editor and a browser, teachers can get set up online and start interacting with their online communities quickly. Powered by wiki software, these sites are used frequently in educational settings, where teachers can exercise editorial rights by removing inappropriate or off-topic material. For the last five years Lindsay has used wikis both in and out of the classroom. One wiki Web site, for example, serves as a "window" into his fourth-grade classroom and a portal to curriculum resources. Using the free __ PBworks __ online collaboration service, Lindsay not only posts his own data, but also stores his students' portfolios and other pertinent information. The student who creates a podcast, for example, will likely have her work showcased on Lindsay's wiki, which uses embedding technology to make such uploads simple and fast. "You can take the code from the podcast and embed a player right into your wiki," said Lindsay. "Then, parents can log on, click 'play' and listen to their students' work at their own convenience, online." Lindsay also uses the wiki to display more traditional projects, such as works of art. A student's masterpiece can be scanned into a computer, and then uploaded to the wiki without much more than a few minutes of effort. The process not only helps preserve the original work of art, he said, but also allows a much larger audience to view it online. The same process works for collaborative, group projects, which are often difficult to manage and share. A team of four students who are working on a volcano project, for example, can log onto the wiki and use it as a place to post and/or answer research questions among each other. Both teacher and parents can monitor the project's progress, see each student's contribution, and offer feedback and help where needed. "The wiki makes it easy for everyone to see what's going on in the classroom," said Lindsay, "and helps me follow the progress on specific projects; even those that are taking place off campus." Lindsay said he's run into a couple of challenges while using wikis, with the most prevalent being the fact that users can post "pretty much whatever they want to" in the online forums. Once the "submit" button is pressed, the content is viewable by the rest of the world. "One time, a student posted the wiki passwords online, just for fun," said Lindsay. "Luckily, I have the site set up to send me push notifications of any changes to the content, so I was able to take them down within five minutes." Lorna Larson, an ESL teacher at __ Forest Lake Elementary __ in Forest Lake, MN, has also dealt with "monitoring" challenges when using wikis and said password distribution and management has been equally as onerous. "We had to print out user names and passwords for all of the students, and then keep all of that information straight," said Larson, referring to the first wiki she set up a few years ago. "We wound up having to redistribute the information every time the students used the wikis, until they had the passwords memorized."




 * A TOOL FOR ITS TIME **

By: Ellis, Michael, T H E Journal, 0192592X, Aug2010, Vol. 37, Issue 7

As they continue to empower teachers with upgraded instructional options, learning management systems have evolved into something whose old name just doesn't cut it anymore. He asked her to make use of the discussion forum when studying at home through the school's learning management system (LMS). She did as Ross said, using the discussion tool to seek out other students who could help her understand the areas in the **math** curriculum that were giving her trouble. The girl, a freshman at Forest Charter School in Nevada City, CA, about 90 minutes from Sacramento, began coming to class with new confidence and taking part in class discussions. "It really showed me the value of having a new mode for students to communicate," Ross says. "More students can be reached and more can be supported." Ross, like many educators, is taking full advantage of the new features that LMS vendors are regularly adding to their platforms. Although the formative years of learning management systems trace back further than the 1990s, the development of the web was a crossing point, as was the growth of the participatory environment of web 2.0. The web's second generation expanded the way teachers could operate their classrooms, giving them access to all the emerging browser-based tools, such as blogs and **wikis**; slide shows, videos, and photos; and programs that plan lessons, link to curriculum standards, deliver content, and monitor student performance. The new functionality has so transformed learning management systems that their manufacturers prefer the term digital learning platform, to better reflect their products' capacity to do a great deal more than manage a classroom. "At one time it was an ancillary thing," Ross says. "Now it's affecting the process."
 * WHEN MATH TEACHER ** Steve Ross saw that one of his students was struggling with algebra and was too embarrassed to speak up in class, he gave the young girl a suggestion."

[|On Better Terms] Jon Bower, former president of It's Learning, a Bergen, Norway-based provider whose product is in use at Forest Charter School, explains that the terminology has advanced in step with the push toward a more student-centered education. "Course management means the system is being used to manage a course," says Bower, who just left It's Learning in July. "Learning management means the system is being used to manage learning, which implies the school or the institution is in control. A digital learning platform is, in effect, neutral. It says the school can control the learning through a centralized curriculum, or the student can control the learning by using the tools in the platform to guide themselves. The old terms didn't really account for that option." He breaks down the distinction further. "The core content of an LMS is content delivery and assignment interaction. The teacher gives an assignment, the student submits an assignment, the teacher corrects it. The core processes supported by a digital learning platform are far more oriented toward communications. The way I see it, a digital learning platform is the meeting of a series of tools and the demand from educators to move beyond simply delivering a syllabus of content to a student to the point where students gain some control over their own learning pathways." Those tools Bower speaks of include collaborative elements such as multimedia enabled discussion threads and online videoconferences. "All built into the system," Bower says. "No extra component needed." A new feature released by It's Learning this spring is the parent dashboard. It allows parents to log in to the system and see an overview of their child's academic life--behavior, grades, upcoming assignments, etc. Bower calls it "an important innovation." It has also scored big points with Ross. "I don't like surprises at the end of the semester," he says. A careful attention to terms is also observed by Agilix Labs, the Orem, UT-based maker of the BrainHoney solution. The company has settled on individualized learning system. "There's been a distinct push to not call it a learning management system, because that's the old style of doing things," says Mark Luetzelschwab, Agilix Labs' senior vice president of product and marketing. "Some people just call it the next generation of LMS." As Luetzelschwab describes, BrainHoney's developers wanted a tool that would support a range of learning processes--from a single student working remotely at his own pace, to a teacher instructing a group of students with just one laptop and no other technology in the classroom--in its ultimate aim to produce better learning outcomes. The focus on pedagogy was a decisive step. "When we did that," Luetzelschwab says, "we were no longer a traditional learning system," BrainHoney's curriculum mapping function follows what Luetzelschwab says any instructional design manual advises: It provides space for users to set Objectives first before bringing in assessments and activities that align with those targets. "We provide access to all the state standards; that piece is 100 percent baked in," he says. "Teachers can then build their content." Once the lessons are done and grades are entered, the system reports on students' progress in relation to the objectives. "The data that an administrator would get on a yearly basis--we bring that data forward to the teacher on a daily basis." Luetzelschwab says interoperability is another of BrainHoney's important features. "We've really stressed that. We try to make it as easy as possible for our users to integrate with all the other systems so they're not left in a silo. We understand we're part of a larger cloud of curriculum and technology that really needs to work together to align to the ultimate goal, which is the student outcomes." Jeremy Walker, a Latin teacher at Crown Point High School in northwest Indiana, about 45 minutes from Chicago, relies heavily on BrainHoney's assessment piece, which he says has made the administration of bubble tests vastly easier. Walker wants to know more than test scores. He wants to know how many students missed each question and which answers students chose most often. The old method required him to fend with multiple data sheets that he had to run through a Scantron machine to get the complementary sets of information. "You'd have to run two different data sheets to get the same information that you can get in one nice, nifty place in BrainHoney," Walker says. "Instead of doing all that and spending extra money on these sheets to get the data, as soon as the students are done taking the test the data is available at my desk." The BrainHoney platform breaks down the data and shows the test questions and answers. "It's all integrated into one screen, one piece--there it is."

[|Deeper Integration] One leading player in the learning platform arena that still identifies its product as a learning management system is Washington, DC-based Blackboard. "They're synonymous with LMS and they dominate the market," Luetzelschwab says, "so why would they be into a new term?" But that doesn't mean the company isn't continually augmenting its suite of tools to meet 21st century education demands. Its latest version, Blackboard Learn 9.1, rolled out this past spring, offers new support for social learning. "Wikis and blogs are the headline features," says Ray Henderson, president of Blackboard's teaching and learning division. The company made an even bigger push in that direction with its purchase of Elluminate and Wimba, two online platforms that enable users to interact live online from separate locations. Henderson says the integration has special appeal to students, who, having grown accustomed to social media, have expectations for 24/7 availability. "That collaboration is what increases their enagement, which leads to better learning outcomes," he explains. "We're trying to add fuel to that in our system." The upgrades have been well received by Rob Leo, whose task it is to train teachers in the use of Blackboard in the 23 districts served by the Onondaga-Cortland-Madison Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in Syracuse, NY. One important advance Leo describes is a "mashup" function that lets teachers insert content from web-based applications directly into Blackboard, which integrates with YouTube, Flickr, and SlideShare. Leo says that in previous versions if users wanted to embed online content they had to copy and paste the HTML code. That process has been simplified considerably. "With the click of a button you can search YouTube, find a video you're looking for, click another button, and it's embedded in your Blackboard site," he says. Teachers can direct their students to view any video or images they have dropped into their page and have them discuss the content in a separate area dedicated to a discussion board or wiki. Blogging, in particular, Leo believes, has real pedagogical value. He explains that when students are assigned to follow up their reading by writing a blog about it, their work improves. "The important thing about blogs is that students aren't publishing just for the teacher," he says. "They're writing for a wider audience, so the writing becomes interactive in a sense." Leo is most fond of the access to live virtual classroom tools. A former social studies teacher, he used to meet with students after hours on Blackboard to answer questions and help them prepare for the following day's exam. But the the exchange was all done through text, which Leo thinks is a general flaw of online communication. "There is no sense of tone or inflection," he says. Elluminate and Wimba include voice capabilities (and video as well) that create a more personal level of contact. "You can push a button to talk and reach all the students who are enrolled in that session, and they push a button and talk back as long as they have a microphone." Having taught for 14 years before entering his administrative post last summer, Leo understands the impact that having access to this technology has had on the way teachers do their jobs. "I taught an AP class--my class sessions were only 42 minutes. There really wasn't enough time, especially with a college-level course. I would rely on Blackboard. I would put up stuff up on a discussion board, or I'd ask the students to do stuff on a wiki, and they would do it outside class because they liked doing it. It made things engaging for them, and it made things efficient for me."

[|Next Steps] Believing it has taken the digital learning platform yet another stride forward, Time to Know is calling its product a digital teaching platform. The company, headquartered in Jaffa, Israel, has integrated into that platform an interactive core curriculum whose purpose is to serve the classroom teacher in the classroom, as opposed to providing tools for learning that can take place remotely. "As you start working with digital curriculum, you have to think about what the role of the teacher is, and how the teacher literally choreographs what's happening in the classroom," says John Richards, a Time to Know advisory board member and president of Consulting Services for Education in Newton, MA. Richards says that the system's curriculum "provides a scaffolding or support for teachers in what they're doing." By her own account, that's precisely what it's done for Kathryn Wiggs, a teacher at Whitt Elementary School in Grand Prairie, TX, nestled between Dallas and Fort Worth, where Time to Know is currently the centerpiece of a two-year pilot program. The program allows Wiggs to pick and choose from a suggested sequence of lesson plans that the company has translated from Hebrew and aligned to both the Grand Prairie Public Schools curriculum and Texas' state academic standards. Each lesson is introduced with a short, animated film that poses a dilemma. As an example, when Wiggs' students learned about Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures, they first watched a film that followed an imaginary trip of two travelers who brought winter and summer clothes on vacation. Their dilemma was to decide which one packed correctly. Next, students open their laptops to work on the first of several lessons that pick up where the clip left off. (The program requires a 1-to-1 distribution of classroom computers; Wiggs' students' laptops are on loan from one of Time to Know's partners.) Wiggs is able to track in real time their performance. Last February, Time to Know introduced a monitoring tool that provides her with two progress bars on her computer screen, one that indicates how well the class is performing on the lesson and another that shows how well each student is doing. She can intervene if she sees someone struggling. "I can go over to that child and do a quick reteach or whatever needs to be done to make sure they're understanding what they're doing," she says. "It allows me to individualize my teaching more while students are discovering and learning." To move on to the next phase of the lesson, Wiggs clicks a button marked "Eyes on the Screen," which turns students' laptops black and lets her introduce the discussion piece, reviewing with the class what it had been working on, introducing something new, and then returning students to their laptops for the next lesson. "I absolutely love it," Wiggs says. "There's not really any planning for me to do. Everything is in the lesson, and I know it meets the standards." She notes that Time to Know has curriculum writers based in Austin, TX, busy writing up fresh lesson plans in order to hit any standards in the state's fourth-grade curriculum that may have been missed initially. Grand Prairie implemented the program in two of Whitt Elementary's fourth-grade classrooms last fall--Wiggs' **math** class and a language arts class. The outcomes on the spring Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) were sparkling. Wiggs says that 100 percent of the students in the language arts classroom passed the reading portion of the state exam, while her students' pass rate on the **math** section was 92 percent, which she says was a much better showing than the results from her three classes that were not involved in the pilot. These successes have led the district to expand the program into each of the school's fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms. So what is likely to be the next progression in learning systems? Richards believes Time to Know has already landed on it. "This really is the next evolution," he says. "The part that's really unique about the digital teaching platform allows you on the one hand to have individualizatiOn, personalization, on the part of the program. But the teacher can also modify all of this for the class. I see this combination of personalization and classroom teaching as being a very, very big step forward." Bower and Luetzelschwab both foresee improvements being made to allow for more and more collaboration, particularly among teachers. Bower says It's Learning recently upgraded a mechanism within its interface--a "library" tab--where teachers can share content they've developed, seek out content they need for their courses, and provide help to each other. Luetzelschwab says the hope is to create opportunities for "meaningful collaboration" among educators. "Not posting something on a blog and hoping that somebody else finds it," he says. Luetzelschwab, however, again emphasizes interoperability as the most significant next step. "We're all part of a larger ecosystem and we have to start making our technology work together to ensure that our students get what they're looking for."



By Liz Pape, Education Digest Liz Pape (lpape@govhs.org) is president and CEO of the Virtual High School Global Consortium in Maynard, MA.
 * Blended Teaching and Learning **

A few months ago, I walked into the computer lab at EBC High School for Public Service in Brooklyn, NY, and watched as students, working in teams, created blogs and **wikis** to share information about human rights violations. I was there for an ABC News taping on the use of technology in classrooms. The network news report looked at New York City Opportunities for Online Learning, or NYCOOL, and the reporter interviewed the students and their teacher, Kimberly Cahill. A social studies teacher, she has been using a blended teaching model with her students for the past three semesters. Cahill's students in the Participation in Government and Global History course are using Web 2.0 tools — **wikis**, blogs, podcasting, digital storybooks, and discussion forums as well as cell phones and home and school computers — to share information on human rights violations, where they occur, and what is being done to correct them. Students previously uninterested in the coursework became more engaged once Cahill introduced Web 2.0 tools into her classroom, giving students the opportunity to create work on the Internet that could be shared with others.

[|Online Tool Use] What Kimberly and her students are doing is commonly called blended learning, using online tools to communicate, collaborate, and publish, to extend the school day or year and to develop the 21st-century skills students need. With blended learning, teachers can use online tools and resources as part of their daily classroom instruction. Using many of the online tools and resources students already are using for social networking, blended teaching helps teachers find an approach that is more engaging for this generation of students. The benefits of blended learning include giving students a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge while appealing to diverse learning styles and fostering independent learning and self-directed learning skills in students, a critical capacity for lifelong learners. Blended learning incorporates online tools into students' toolkits, which in the past have consisted of notebooks, paper assignments, and "stand and deliver" classroom presentations. This expanded toolkit helps students better develop their higher education and workforce skills. Blended learning extends teaching and learning beyond the classroom walls, developing critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, and global awareness.

[|Continuity of Learning] School leaders have recently focused on the impact of a pandemic on schools and student learning. How do schools continue student learning over several weeks when a school building is closed down, either because of high levels of illness within the building, or worse, because the building needs to be used for another purpose due to a national or regional emergency? Blended learning can keep teaching and learning going even when schools are closed. More important are the opportunities that blended learning offers to extend teaching beyond classroom walls during more frequent mundane events such as sick days, student athletic events, and snow days. John Wilson Jr., an AP English teacher in Wareham, MA, uses several online tools, including blogs, **wikis**, podcasts, and learning management platforms, to reach students not in class and as a means of offering online options to extend the classroom learning experience. "I use the blogs as a way of helping my AP students to develop a unique writing voice that should help them do better on the AP test. I use **wikis** for some of the group projects I assign so that students can continue to work on the projects after our computer lab time has expired," Wilson says. "I am trying to give my students some experience with online learning practices so that when they get to college, where online course offerings are becoming more commonplace, they won't feel so out of touch. I began using these tools because I kept hearing from students how they were out the day I gave quiz notes or were out the day I gave the quiz and were not able to stay after school to make it up." For students with extended absences, from long-term illness or participation in national or international extracurricular commitments, he has created alternative online quizzes so he can continue to assess them outside of his classroom.

[|Personalized Connections] Jefferson County, KY, Public Schools is connecting with its community through a blended learning model. Using JCPS Online, the district's learning management system, practicing engineers from the local General Electric plant serve as virtual mentors with pre-engineering students at the high schools through discussion boards and blogs. Blended learning is not just for high school or middle school students. At the elementary school level in Jefferson County, social studies students create blog journals assuming the role of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. One homework assignment requires students to react to the convening of the Constitutional Congress by contributing to a wiki in character. Students no longer study historical events; they have become participants in the unfolding of history. In the Millis, MA, Public Schools, technology director Grace Magley uses blended learning to make online resources available in a one-to-one learning environment. She says it is a more effective means of delivering instruction and managing the learning environment. The 1,400-student Millis district, which is located 19 miles southwest of Boston, experienced early success through a pilot project offering course electives in art, technology, and video production in grades 5-12. This led to the adoption by all high school teachers of a project-based, blended learning model. Over the last three years, Millis teachers have used blended learning to cover more content with students and at a higher level than in a traditional classroom. They are better able to differentiate their lessons for different kinds of learners with Web 2.0 tools, freeing up class time for more applied learning through projects." This year, freshmen and sophomores are working on theme-based projects in all core subjects. As part of their project, students will use Web 2.0 tools and will participate in online discussion forums. They will complete an individual electronic portfolio that reflects on what they have learned through their projects.  "The plan is to expand these projects to all four years of high school and to have them be more significant each year so that by senior year, their senior project will be a major contribution to their local or extended community," Magley says.  In New York City, the school district is partnering with the Virtual High School Global Consortium to bring blended learning to high school students in Brooklyn. New York City Opportunities for Online Learning teaches students how to use Web 2.0 tools in project-based learning through the VHS-designed online course Digital Literacy for a Digital Age. In this six-week online course, classroom teachers assign a project to the students, to be completed by course's end. Students research their content-specific assignment while learning how and why to use various online tools. The result is a Web 2.0-based student project in which students share what they have learned about the classroom assignment, such as the human rights project in social studies. In other projects, students used Del.icio.us to bookmark resources in a world religions class and for **math** topics, including prime numbers and the Babylonian number system. Other students created blogs on the effects of global trade and the connection between the Mongol Empire and modern acts of terrorism. Others created a **math** wiki, which became a shared resource of key vocabulary words and concepts in algebra.

[|Student Engagement] Through blended learning, students are given the power to choose the means of communication most suitable to them — storybook, PowerPoint, drawing, web pages, podcasts, etc. This plays to students' different learning and communication styles, ultimately engaging them more in their learning. Initially, not all students may feel comfortable working in this new environment or with their newfound power to make decisions about their learning. Students may push back against their teachers, asking for face-to-face assistance on learning resources available in their online environment. They may be hesitant to take a more active role in their learning, preferring the teacher hand-feed them what they need to learn, rather than using their information literacy skills to find the information for themselves. However, as students realize that using online resources helps build deeper content knowledge through the ability to review materials online, have more frequent peer reviews through online discussions or blogs, and participate in online self-assessments designed to help them measure their mastery of the content, their expectations about the teacher-student relationship change. Once students realize they no longer are passively waiting for the teacher to provide them with their learning objectives and resources, they take a more active role and become impatient when the teacher has not posted what they need to begin their learning. "We have had students go to teachers and ask why they have never posted a podcast or video to explain a certain concept. The students begin to become vocal about what they need to become successful learners," Magley says.

[|Teacher Development] Teachers need time, resources, and professional development to use blended teaching well. The problem is that most teachers have not been prepared during pre-service training to use these tools nor have they learned to instruct students in how and why to use such tools in their learning. Little research exists on effective models of professional development for blended learning. However, research on effective models of K-12 online course design, online teacher preparation, and online teaching standards can offer guidance for developing an effective blended teaching and learning model for all schools. The Washington, DC-based International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or iNACOL ( [|www.iNACOL.org] ), has published standards for online courses, online teaching, and online programs based on the available research. In a study of high school online teachers who also teach in face-to-face classrooms, Susan Lowes, director of research and evaluation at the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College, Columbia University, identified higher-level learning activities that teachers were incorporating into their face-to-face classroom instruction as a result of their online teaching experience. Online courses in which cohorts of students are required to engage in online discussions, online group activities, and online presentations can serve as a model for blended learning, whose goal is to develop similar online skills during classroom instruction. However, classroom teachers need not become online teachers to develop their blended teaching skills. What is important is that teachers become familiar with Web 2.0 tools and learn and practice their application in their classes. That knowledge and experience can be gained in various ways, including combining online professional development with collaborative face-to-face workshops, combining online training with an online teaching apprenticeship and creating a series of courses as scaffolding for the levels of Web 2.0 skills training needed for the final course product. During the pilot project in Millis, teachers took a three-credit online course to learn about blended learning and how to apply it to their classes. However, teachers reported this was not enough to prepare them for making changes to their face-to-face courses. Face-to-face study groups began meeting regularly to get things off the ground during the curriculum development phase. The support of the study group in learning to make the most of the blended learning environment and to share the results of what they were discovering about blended learning in their classes was a critical factor in the successful implementation of blended teaching at Millis. Based on that success, Millis developed a teacher professional development model that incorporated both online training courses and face-to-face workshops as part of its professional learning community. The face-to-face workshops were important for helping teachers with the specific how-tos they needed for building a blended course as blended learning was expanded throughout the high school. NYCOOL's Brooklyn classroom teachers developed their Web 2.0 skills by taking an online course and then apprenticing with master online teachers. The professional development course, Using Web 2.0 for Teaching and Learning, was developed by VHS based on experience in developing and delivering online courses. Because the grant duration was not sufficient to give the NYCOOL teachers enough time to build their blended courses, an apprenticeship program was developed to supplement the online professional development. VHS created Digital Literacy for a Digital Age, an online course for students that was taught by VHS teachers and required 1-2 hours of student course work per week. The NYCOOL teachers worked with the VHS master teachers in the online course as students learned how to use Web 2.0 tools to create their classroom projects. The course provided students with the instructions on how to use online tools and resources, and the VHS online teachers provided guidance to students as they created their classroom projects.

[|Participatory Training] VHS has taken a third approach to developing blended-teaching skills in classroom teachers with a series of online courses that address blended teaching skills and require that teachers create end-of-course projects they will use in their own blended classrooms. The 21st Century Teaching Best Practices model ( [|www.govhs.org/Pages/ProjDev-Home] ) blends teaching and learning for teachers by having teachers participate in online activities they can then put into practice in their blended classrooms. For teachers to learn how to use blogs, teachers are blogging about the hows and whys of blogs and creating lesson plans for their students within their blogs. Each course focuses on why teachers would want to use blended learning and then provides the how-tos for incorporating these tools into instruction. The courses include opportunities for teachers to build a lesson for their specific classroom use, ensuring a model of professional development that includes training, time, and resources for a successful transition. Condensed, with permission, from The School Administrator, 67 (April 2010), 16-21. Published by the American Association of School Administrators, [|www.aasa.org].