How to Become A Man (or Woman) With a Plan

     I know what many of you are thinking... All this theory and explanation is great, but seriously just give me a lesson plan template to fill in and I'll be on my way.  It's okay, you can admit it.  I'm a realist.  This is what we kept hearing from teachers, so Charles and I both researched different templates for blended learning, but let me just tell you, the results were not good.  They looked like a regular lesson plan and included things such as objectives, digital tools used, in-person components, etc.  The problem is that it was just a list of items going down the page.  Blended learning is not a linear list.  It's fluid and sometimes circular, sometimes not.  Sometimes it heads in a million different directions and sometimes it all converges into one.
     In our quest to make all of our teachers happy, we continued looking for the perfect way to lesson plan.  One day Charles came upon the image to the right that can be found at this link.  We shared this image with one of our administrator groups about a year ago and got good feedback.  We realized that showing these icons helped them to understand what blended learning could look like and also to make the connection that it still uses pieces that we have always used such as assessment, small groups and independent work.
     We decided to take this idea to the next level and create icons that our teachers could use as hands-on pieces to see how their lessons transform from traditional at the beginning of the academy to blended by the end.  We created our own cards and added a few more icons so that teachers had some manipulatives to use.  You can access our cards, here.  These cards are used to plan different iterations of blended learning lessons as well as lessons done using different models.  Once you lay the cards out in the way that you want your blended learning lessons to look, then you can simply fill in the details that go along with each of the cards.  Let's look at a couple examples of lessons that teachers have mapped out using the cards in our academy. (More examples are included in the icon card file)

     As you can see in the images above, blended learning does not fit in linear boxes down a page.  So, if you want to be a man (or woman) with a plan for blended learning, then I suggest that you print out a set of our blended learning icon cards and start laying out your blended learning lesson.  If you want to try to create these blended learning maps digitally, try using this template that I created.

     Have fun planning and please be sure to tweet out a picture of your blended learning map to us! @MrsShawGTT and @Thrasymacus