Instructional design/Blended Learning Lesson Plans/Designing a Blended Lesson

Designing Blended Lessons
Now that you know what blended instruction is and some of the most common types of blended instruction, it's time to begin designing blended instructional lessons for your own classroom. To help you design your own lessons, you can download a lesson plan template in PDF format by clicking the image on the right side of this page. To use template to design a blended instruction lesson plan, follow the procedure below.
 * 1) Give the lesson a descriptive title.
 * 2) Create a list of the learning objectives that students should master by the end of the lesson.
 * 3) Describe the computer-based component(s) of the lesson in which students will learn from instructional media.  This could be done following in the any of the three instructional models.
 * 4) Describe the face-to-face component of the lesson in which students will learn from the teacher and / or each other.  In order for a lesson to be truly blended, both the computer-based and face-to-face sections of the template should contain instructional content.
 * 5) Combine the computer-based and face-to-face components of the lesson into an instructional sequence, describing when and how each component should be used.

Let's look at an example of how this template can be used to design instructional lessons. If you'll recall from the quiz on the previous page, Mr. Skinner sometimes begins his 3rd grade Spanish lessons by showing a funny YouTube video in Spanish and asking his students to collaboratively translate the video. After students have shared their translations, he shows the video again in English. Mr. Skinner uses lessons like this to increase student engagement and to introduce new vocabulary for the day. His students can often figure out what a word means using the context of the video. In one particular lesson, Mr. Skinner wanted to teach his class the Spanish words for "dog", and "cat". He begins his class by showing a video in Spanish about a dog arguing with a cat. The students work together to translate the video, then share their ideas with the class. The video is then replayed in English, and Mr. Skinner pauses at certain moments to highlight the Spanish words for dog and cat. He then prompts the students to pair up and write their own story about a dog and a cat in Spanish. After the student pairs have had some time to work, he asks the students to act out their stories. Here is an example of what Mr. Skinner's lesson plan may look like.



Check Your Understanding
You will now have the opportunity to practice filling out the lesson plan template yourself based on one of Mr. Wiggum's Civics lessons. In this lesson, Mr. Wiggum wants to teach his students about the structure of the judicial system. He finds an online instructional video explaining the judicial system, which he assigns for homework. When students come to class, he starts be giving the students five warm-up questions about the video. After discussing the answers to the questions, the class begins working in teams on case studies in which they act as lawyers providing advice about the judicial system to potential clients.

To practice filling out the template:
 * 1) Open the lesson plan template by clicking the image on the right side of the page.
 * 2) Fill out the template for Mr. Wiggum's Civics lesson describe above.
 * 3) When you are satisfied with your lesson plan, you can click here to compare your lesson plan to the lesson plan Mr. Wiggum might have created.

Click the "Next" link below to move on to the next section.