What does this section give Me?

1. The reasons that student choice is important 
2. A process for student choice
3. Some tools that actually work on the High School level
4. Some examples of the way student choice were delivered

Why is It Important?

     Let's face it, not all students are going to be naturally interested in the content we teach. It's our job to find a way to make that content interesting. We can't just say you're going to learn it, and you're going to learn it this way. That's where student choice comes in. If you use creation assignments and you have them at the unit level, choice is a natural next step in the process. You can have several scenarios and choices for students to choose from, and if that does not work you can always craft one around student interest!

The Tools

Symbaloo and Symbaloo Lesson Plans: symbaloo.com lessonplans.symbaloo.com
     Symbaloo at its core is digital bookmarking, but it can also be a fantastic way to present choice to students. You can organize things in a very visually pleasing format, and you can embed Google tools in where they pop up directly. This means you can put your Google Drive Doc directions in it, and easily organize. It also has HTML embed which allows you to increase your screen real estate as needed.

     Symbaloo also released a new platform within the last year to take the need for choice to the next level. It's called Lesson Plans and it allows you to input things like questions, videos, and others on the tiles that are more tied to the learning experience. You can also create paths from the tiles.
Blendspace: blendspace.com
     Blendspace allows you to create a lesson where students follow a path of tiles that you can embed almost anything into. You can put questions, images, videos, docs, and a host of other things into the platform. Your Google Drive choices would embed easily!

     You can share Blendspaces easily through a multitude of methods including QR codes and links. It also is easy to embed the Blendspaces on to your own blended learning platform!
Wikispaces: wikispaces.com
Wikispaces can be a positive way to present simple choices. Wikispaces is a website that you can set up that anyone can edit. It can be a great way to present choice because you can embed almost anything on it and you can create separate pages for different students. On idea would be to create a choice checklist that corresponds with categories on your blended learning platform. Really, Wikispaces is a multi-use tool that can adapt to whatever need you might have.

A Process

    If you follow the other steps in the process to a blended classroom, giving students choice is a natural progression. This also becomes a point where technology is vastly important. It helps organize that choice in a pleasing way. While all of these steps could be done without some blended learning platform, it is highly recommended that you start with that. You can find more information on that here.
The Steps in the Process
1. Kick start your blended learning platform and finish your scenarios
  • To provide choice in the classroom in the best way possible it's suggested that you have your platform kind of setup and organized before you start adding assignments. It also is great to have all the assignment choices and scenarios at least thought out before you start laying out choice.
2. Put your scenarios in Google Docs, and make sure they have a process
  • When students create, most of the learning comes from the process they take. You can craft your assignment choices to follow the same planning process whether that be the STEM design process or something else. Putting them in Google makes them easier to move onto whatever platform you have chosen
3. Choice a choice tool. 
  • There are several ways you can go about presenting choices, but really they all come down to the key point of organization. If students do not know where to find something, the whole thing can be a bust. There are several platforms out there, and they all have something different to them. Some of them would be better on a unit scale, others on a lesson scale, and others work in conjunction with some sort of presentation on your blended learning platform.
4. Load your choices and organize
  • The nice thing about Google Docs is it works with everything! Some of the choice platforms actually let you embed Google Drive into them, and then you can organize from there. You can also just drop them in as links. The nice thing about teaching high school is that almost everyone has some sort of Google account, so why not use them?
5. Embed or Link It
  • The nice thing about some of the choice tools to the right is that they embed on other platforms using HTML code fairly easily. This can be a great way to expand your use of them, and maybe use more than 1 in conjunction with the other

The Examples

This section focuses in on examples of choice presentation that teachers have used. Hopefully, by seeing it, you will be able to do it!
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