The fantastic thing about the Learning Counsel’s Lunch and Learn presentations is they give us the opportunity to share hand-selected products and services that your school or district needs to know about. Often, even well-known brands have new products or features that can be a game-changer for your learners. In the case of Blackboard, school districts are still finding amazing value, particularly as we made the jump to virtual learning.
According to Chris O'Neal, Solutions Engineer at Blackboard, “One of the first things I think that is super critical is envisioning learners outside the classroom. And even though I haven't taught for a long time, I can tell you exactly how my fourth-grade classroom was set up. I remember why I put posters in the location I did. I remember why I put the trashcan in the location I did. It's really easy for me to describe my physical classroom in vivid detail, even though I haven't been in it in years. But if you ask us as teachers, how do you picture a home learning environment? All 25 home learning environments are drastically different. The way we set up our teaching end of it too, is drastically different.
“You never know what the teaching environment might look like, but then also the home learner environment and thinking through how do I visualize that remotely? What does it look like if I can't move my personal classroom whiteboard into the perfect spot? I also think what has really shown through last year was teacher voice. I'm a big watcher of Twitter. I don't Tweet that often but have a lot of good hashtags and built or set up so I can see what's being discussed. And it was phenomenal. The rallying that we all did, the whole education community - teachers really just rose up like superstars and said, you know what, by the way, I didn't think anybody would care about this before, but I decided to post it. And then all of a sudden, teachers were all saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I never saw a rubric like this.’ The same thing for resources, Learning Counsel, ongoing resources, EduJedi, and the webinars and these virtual meetings prior to face-to-face ones, as well as some of my personal favorites. Obviously Edutopia is a really good one, as is Blackboard. We do a ton of webinars and a lot of these are from requests. We have a ton of requests in our Blackboard community that are things like, authentic assessment in a virtual classroom.”
Take a few minutes and investigate the often surprising “New” Blackboard. It is the Blackboard you always loved, but now with so many new resources to help you and your staff find your highest level of excellence. This presentation will be the fastest 30 minutes you’ve ever loved, and your staff will thank you for all the wonderful new information.
