When I first started teaching in 2009, I was at a Title I public high school where most students did not have their own laptops, and reserving the computer lab was complicated. My students completed their work in notebooks that I bought with my own money. Each week I loaded 60 or more notebooks into my car to take home to grade. I did this for years until moving to China in 2016.
When I started teaching at a private international school where every student had a laptop, I wanted to include 21st century skills into the curriculum and go “paperless.” It was environmentally friendly and easier for the students and me to keep organized. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I had just gotten comfortable using Microsoft OneNote as a digital binder for student work, which made it easy to assign and grade student work anywhere. Because of this, my transition to online learning during the pandemic was easy. I made sure to include pdfs of books and textbooks in my resource folder and students were able to access materials no matter their physical location, which was all over the globe during the first year of COVID.
Even after we returned to the classroom for in-person learning, digital instruction persisted. Students no longer lost their work or could not find a handout. And if a student got sick or missed school because of sports, they could easily keep up. Then ChatGPT came out and my comfortable digital classroom became untenable. I still wanted students to use their 21st century skills, but I needed to be strategic about it. ChatGPT was just one of the problems to contend with. There was also Quillbot, Poe, and Grammarly, to name a few. I suddenly realized how many online platforms had been helping my students write, which explained why their handwritten work was so unpolished compared to their typed assignments.
In reaction to this discovery and without realizing it, I started using a Blended Learning format in my classroom. In the Cult of Pedagogy’s article Blended Learning: 4 Models that Work, Caitlin Tucker explains that “blended learning is the combination of active, engaged learning online combined with active, engaged learning offline to provide students with more control over the time, place, pace, and path of their learning.”
The models that Tucker and others suggest mainly focus on student choice and differentiation, which are fundamental in any classroom. The difference with blended learning is that students might have a variety of options such as watching videos or completing online tasks at their own pace, rather than only one task that has been scaffolded for different learners.
While the planning of these types of lessons can be overwhelming for the teacher, they offer endless possibilities for the students. But there are two aspects of cognition that need to be considered as we continue to add advanced technology into the classroom.
First, technology is just as distracting as it is helpful. In the article On or Off task: The Negative Influence of Laptops on Neighboring Students’ Learning Depends on How They are Used, Hall et al. explain that laptops negatively affect student recall of lectures, but also impact the recall of their peers. The main issues Hall et al. highlight are the constant distractions that students face. Students and their neighbors are less likely to stay on task and retain information when using a laptop due to the number of distractions one device can offer – notifications, applications, websites, messages, etc. The amount of features can be overwhelming. And while students need to learn how to use their devices successfully, they also need some time away from them.
At my current school we have a policy that middle school students are not allowed to use their phones on campus, but that does not stop them from walking up and down stairs with open laptops or trying to play video games on those same laptops at lunch time.
Secondly, handwriting enhances the cognitive process. In the article Handwriting Versus Keyboard Writing: Effect on Word Recall, Mangen et al. conclude that people have significantly better word recall when handwriting versus typing. Based on the observation of my students and confirmed by multiple studies, my blended learning classroom includes physical binders and notebooks as well as digital ones. For the purpose of recall and the intention of focus it is imperative that our classrooms include specific times where electronic devices are put away and clear guidelines for when they are being used.
As an International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IBDP) English Language and Literature teacher, it is evident that regular hand-written assessments on the books we are studying helps students to recall basic and more nuanced information about the texts we are studying. When I give them digital reading questions or a study guide that they can complete online, their recall of the text is much more superficial.
In my classroom, blended learning starts with a scaffolded writing task for which I ask students to handwrite a paragraph or essay. I will then provide whole class and individual feedback for students to consider for the revision process. The revision process will begin with students going back to the text to revise by hand. After that revision, I may give them prompts and guidelines for asking artificial intelligence (AI) to revise their work.
In a recent DP1 course students wrote a full Paper 2 (the second written examination paper in a subject), comparing two literary texts they have studied in the course so far. They wrote the essay in testing conditions. I gave them whole class and individual feedback, and I asked them to focus on one paragraph where they had clearly neglected to analyze authorial choices. I gave them step by step instructions to revise their work in class, on paper, with access to their texts. After this, I gave them an assignment from the IB English Guys, which walks them through revising their thesis statements, topic sentences, and one paragraph using an AI platform of their choosing.
When the students were writing their paragraphs by hand, I asked them to close their laptops and only use their handwritten notes or hard copies of the text; they were focused and on task, and many of them completed within the assigned time given (20 minutes). When the students were asked to then consult AI for revision, many of them started on task, but ultimately did not finish the basic step by step instructions, even though they were given choice and a chance to play around with AI. Many of them worked on the assignment for homework, but not all of them submitted it to the learning management system (LMS).
Key Takeaways:
While blended learning is an asset for a 21st century classroom, the “blended” part needs to include some traditional elements that help students focus and retain the information they are learning. A challenge with online learning is that students can be passively participating and barely remember parts of the lesson. But if we ask students to take pen to paper and show us what they know, based on the videos and platforms they are engaging with, we will see their authentic knowledge and selves.
References
Hall, Amanda CG, et al. "On or off task: The negative influence of laptops on neighboring students’ learning depends on how they are used." Computers & Education 153 (2020): 103901.
Mangen, A., Anda, L. G., Oxborough, G. H., & Brrnnick, K. (2015). Handwriting versus keyboard writing: Effect on word recall. Journal of writing research, 7(2), 227-247.
Tucker, Caitlin. “Blended Learning: 4 Models that Work.” Cult of Pedagogy, 05 Sept. 2022. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/blended-learning-4-models/
IB English Guys. “Artificial Intelligence and Personalized Learning”. Youtube, 14 Nov 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIHKI0JxflI
Darcie Flansburg is an international secondary English language and literature teacher at the American International School of Guangzhou. She has a Master of Arts in English rhetoric, composition, and digital media studies, and a master's degree in educational, instructional, and curriculum supervision. She has experience teaching at public schools in California and private schools in China where she fosters a love of reading and creates a culturally responsive learning environment for students to explore their values and beliefs through literary analysis.
