What Is Blendspace?

Blendspace is an easy-to-use platform for creating multimedia lessons that kids can access online. Using a drag-and-drop interface, you can organize videos, text, links, images, and quizzes into cubes, then organize them to create lessons, or "canvases, " for students to complete independently. Content can be pulled from YouTube, Google, Flickr, and other online sources, as well as your own computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive. There's also a bookmarking tool that lets you add websites to your Blendspace collection.

Students can then move through the content in a linear fashion, responding to prompts in a sidebar comment area or taking quizzes along the way. They can also create their own lessons that can be private or shared, or remix a lesson. With a free teacher account, you can create unlimited classes of up to 35 students. Free school accounts allow for unlimited classes with an unlimited number of students. To join a class, students use a join code that you provide. A paid premium account allows students to collaborate with each other on lessons, allows users to record audio, and provides an extra layer of technical support for the school.

 

Why Use Blendspace?

As a front-line teachers in the DOE, we have come to accept the grim truth that resources are extremely limited at the classroom level. In my classroom that means that computers are limited, along with software licenses, and even my teaching time has to be allocated amongst students of widely varying interests, abilities, and motivational levels. Worse, students are often absent or suspended and need a way to "make up" the work. This has always proved a challenge, particularly in a project-based, group collaboration course that teaches technology tools as a first-step or a means toward achieving the standards and, ultimately, the GLO's.

Technology that allows teachers to "flip" their classrooms (blended classrooms) are a godsend because:

1) They free up teachers to help students one to one on more difficult issues

2) Students can review the materials as many times as they need and whenever or wherever is most convenient

3) Teachers never have to "go back" and reteach materials to absent students

4) A tool like Blendspace allows teachers to easily embed formative assessments that students take as they walk through the module, so that the teacher has a gauge on their understanding levels and can adjust instruction accordingly

 

Blendspace Basics:

1. Navigate your browser to www.blendspace.com 

Click on "Join Free."