So... what is our Hardie Fellowship all about?

Over a period of nine weeks we will be undertaking a series of courses at American Universities as well as making site visits to schools and consulting with a number of internationally renowned academics in the fields of blended learning, instructional design and formative assessment.


We will be starting off in Illinois where we will be based for seven weeks. We will be working with Professor William Cope from the University of Illinois in areas of instructional design, blended learning and formative assessment using the Scholar application while undertaking a New Learning Course at the Urbana-Champaign campus.


University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign


In that time we will also be undertaking online study in Project Based Learning in the Flipped Classroom and E-Learning for Educators at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. By doing so we hope to experience a range of blended learning experiences from the learner's perspective (synchronous, asynchronous, fully online, blended) while simultaneously learning more about current best practice from leading institutions.


At the end of July we will be heading to Florida where we will spend several days working with Florida Virtual School on a variety of topics including:


- Preparing Online and Blended Teachers
- Exploring Online and Blended Teaching Strategies
- Gamifying Live Lessons and Collaborations
- Digital Leadership
- Performance Management in a Digital Environment
- Lead Teacher Programs for Administrators and Lead Teachers


We will also spend time in Florida consulting with Assessment expert Dylan Wiliam on a variety of topics including raising student outcomes through embedding formative assessment in the Tasmanian context.


We also hope to make a number of site visits to leading US schools who are successfully engaged in a range of blended learning delivery models.


We are both looking forward to the challenge of study, learning and reflection on how our experiences and skills and knowledge gained may best be used on our return to Tasmania in August!


Mark

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