If you’ve ever spent a day in a classroom, you know how hard it is for teachers to deliver quality instruction without the proper supplies. That’s why year after year, parents purchase long lists of school supplies, and yet they still receive pleading emails from teachers asking for donations on a regular basis.
Let’s face it, schools have a tough job when it comes to educating our kids properly. Students have ever-increasing needs that have to be met, and districts often face budget cuts that never seem to end.
Fortunately, teachers are incredibly resilient. Somehow they always manage to work things out in the end, regardless of the resources they do or don’t have at their disposal. And they’ve all become experts at sharing teaching resources among their colleagues to make each of them stretch even further.
As more districts move towards blended learning models, teachers are creating impressive videos, project-based activities, and assessments that are delivered digitally to their students through virtual classrooms. They are then sharing teaching resources with their colleagues and reaching an even greater audience of students at the same time.
Plus, while their own students are learning virtually, teachers are able to work one on one with individuals who need additional help or facilitate small group discussions and projects. After all, teachers are a district’s most important resource when it comes to learning. And virtual classrooms allow them to oversee all of their students at any given time, many of whom are working at their own pace or on differentiated lessons.
And this sharing of teaching resources doesn’t just end in the classroom. With a blended learning model, districts can utilize the teachers they have on staff to reach students in all of their other buildings at once.
For example, instead of traveling from one building to the next and only working with a finite number of students, language teachers can potentially reach all of the students in their district through the use of a virtual classroom. Thus, they can provide language instruction to all district students from one location.
Another example is a STEM teacher who creates mini-lesson videos and project-based assignments by grade-level to be used by all of the elementary, middle school, and high school teachers throughout the district.
With a blended learning model, the classroom teacher can then expand on what the students already learned from the language and STEM classes online to create additional activities that supplement this new information. These additional activities can span across multiple subject areas such as writing an essay, building a model, or giving a presentation on what they’ve learned.
Virtual classrooms make the sharing of teaching resources easier than it’s ever been before. It provides the opportunity for schools to offer those courses that only a couple students from each school want, and that in the past, the school could not afford the teaching resource for just a couple students.
Districts that adopt the blended learning model and require all teachers to run a virtual classroom, will see many benefits when it comes to sharing teaching resources.
Jigsaw Interactive is a virtual classroom that many brick and mortar schools use to share their resources and offer unique language, STEM and writing programs. Check out Jigsaw at www.jigsawinteractive.com to learn more.
