Blog Post 4 – Digital Curriculums and Naturally Integrating PBL

Over the past 4 years, I have worked to build a digital curriculum. It seemed like a natural progression for my program, as it allows for more time spent working on PBL projects and less time spent lecturing. To be honest, when I first started doing PBL, I did not even know what I was doing was its own thing. It happened organically; a PBL-style class was a natural fit for digital video production program. By the time, I was starting my photography program, the district had adopted an LMS, and I decided to go 100% with a digital curriculum.  

One thing to notice is that I am not calling my class a digital classroom. It is not. The classroom utilizes a digital curriculum, but you could not just take my class online, sans instructor, and get the same thing out of it. In-class time is vital; it allows for practice, discussion, feedback, and inspiration.  

In theory, you could “take” my class entirely online; the materials are set up in that way. However, you would be missing a lot, as many of the projects are collaborative, and because I use the online components to supplement the in-class learning.  

Here are some of the pros and cons I have encountered in my own classroom after switching from a more traditional to digital curriculum.  

Pros 

Less time spent lesson planning 

Easier collection of student work 

Hassle-free makeup work 

Flexible 

Easy opportunities for differentiation  

Modified/updated/etc. easily 

Easily fits into many different best-practices in education 

Authentic audience 

Easy to share and/or use for collaboration 

Lends itself to Project-Based Learning 
 

Cons 

Large amount of front-loading 

Technology-reliant 

Sub-optimal teaching style for less-motivated students 

Requires knowledge of current trends in both technology & education 

Easy to get stuck in a never-ending cycle of polishing/updating/expanding 

I will not cover all of the points above, but I would like to expand on a few of them.  

After you have established your digital classroom, it is simply a matter of updating, modifying, or expanding your resources as needed. I feel that up-front lesson planning streamlines the overall process of lesson planning. When I do lesson planning like this (have it all in one place where I can see everything,  A) not lesson planning several times a week and B) waiting in line for the copier. The con to this is that setting something up like this requires a lot of work on your end.

One piece of advice for this process; have backups of everything. Do not make your online repository the sole location where your resources are hosted. Something simple like an internet outage can ruin your teaching day if you do not have a local copy of your materials to pull up. However, something larger, like your web-hosting service shutting down, could mean the loss of all your data. Regardless, having backups is never a bad idea.  

One annoying thing using an online curriculum eliminates is students saying things like “Well I turned it in to you; you must have lost it.” They can’t argue with the submission status screen (I mean, they can, but it’s pretty pointless). Additionally, your data is now backed up on the cloud, without any work on your end (except for the initial setup). Backing up your data is important, especially if the student’s work does not stop after the initial hand-in (think long-term projects like portfolios).  

Having all of your assignments online has many benefits; one of my favorites is that students can access their entire curriculum without you, from anywhere with an internet connection (and, if they save things ahead of time, even without an Internet connection at all). This eliminates the issues of “I didn’t know what we were working on,” or students not picking up makeup work. The onus is now on the students to be responsible for keeping up with their work, because you have your materials available all semester long, with clear expectations for when things are due. Doing so also gives students a very easy roadmap to follow. A more subtle benefit is that as the semester progresses, students start to understand why your curriculum is arranged the way that it is; they can see the pieces beginning to fit together, thus making things more relevant for them.   

One point I think needs to be stressed is that with this type of classroom setup, the back-end work is, at least initially, much greater than your typical lecture-based classroom setting. I am constantly researching, updating, and expanding my curriculum. It is frustrating because I never feel done with it. I always find areas that need to be streamlined or improved, and I am coming across new, relevant examples that I want to add to inspire the kids. It winds up often being a labor of love. I think that it gets easier as you get used to it. You find you wind up having more and more time to simply help/guide/critique the kids on whatever project it is that y’all are tackling, as opposed to spending large amounts of class time teaching them how to do whatever it is that you need them to do. Often, you are simply filling in the gaps in the learning that they undertook themselves.  

One of the biggest drawbacks of this style of classroom lies in its core structure. At its core, it relies 100% on technology. If the tech isn’t working, the curriculum isn’t working. Therefore, if you have a technology problem, you have a teaching problem as well. Without some type of backup plan in place, you could find yourself in some difficult situations.  

The biggest issue I’ve found overall with this style of curriculum is that it requires a level of responsibility and motivation from students that they are often not used to. Students either do the work or they don’t; you cannot really force them to do it and if you go back and cover everything they were supposed to do in class, you are defeating the entire purpose of the initial setup. It’s great preparation for college. However, parents, guidance counselors, and administrators don’t always understand that by letting them make their own choices in how they choose to approach this style of curriculum, you are doing them a favor. You’re teaching them about personal responsibility, and how things work in the real world. In our current educational culture, if they don’t do the work and therefore their grade suffers accordingly, it must be the teacher’s fault. That’s not true at all, but don’t tell that to critics of education. Before I digress too much, I do believe that putting the information out there for to learn on their own time is the way to go, but it’s definitely going to take a paradigm shift in education for them to truly benefit from this style of teaching.

PBL and the Digital Classroom 

PBL feels like a natural extension of an online curriculum. The flexibility and adaptability of your curriculum allow for easy differentiation. I typically create all of my lessons with a “medium” and “hard” version. I have a baseline version that I expect everyone to be able to do, but I also include an optional extension of each lesson, for those students who get really into the assignments.  

An authentic audience is just a few clicks away with an online curriculum. With digital portfolios or presentations, an outlet to show off their work is just a few clicks away. These deliverables are easy to display to either a broad or targeted audience when everything is digital. With this content stored digitally, it’s easy to show growth over time, both on an individual basis and with a program as a whole.