Building Blendspaces

Students will:

• Be able to use teacher-shared blendspaces and also  build their own personal blendspaces. 

• Understand how to use the blendspaces to reinforce concepts learned in any content area.

• Be able to practice the skill of summarizing information in order to build their spaces.

Vocabulary Words:

1. Blendspaces: Blendspaces is the name given to a free online program created by TES where students can blend and summarize information in many different ways.

2. Summarizing: Summarizing is taking chunks of information and demonstrating your understanding and main idea.

To prepare for this lesson:

• The teacher should familiarize themselves with the Blendspace website. 
• The teacher can easily sign up for a free class account and have all students sign up with a class code (same as a Google Classroom account, NearPod, etc.).
• The teacher decides on the topic area, goal, & objective for the Blendspace.
• Review the short video for initial set-up steps.

See Accommodations Page and Charts on the 21things4students.net site in the Teacher Resources. 

Directions for this activity:

1. The teacher projects a computer screen to model for students how to use any shared Blendspaces to begin familiarity with this tech tool.
2. The teacher assigns a topic area and the amount of space required for the student to build their own spaces.
3. Discuss and model how to share each type of space from Google images, videos, text, etc.
4. Give the students the code to get into Blendspace. 
5. Students can add their own quiz which allows them to practice the challenging skill of formulating their own questions.
6. Students thoroughly enjoy sharing their Blendspaces as other students take their quizzes!
7. Blendspace allows for a very personalized learning, sharing, and authentic style of student engagement & learning.
8. Blendspace can be built individually, with partners, or in small groups.

Different options for assessing the students:

• Observations
• Check for understanding
• This tool can be used an assessment piece for many subject areas.
  • Student-created blendspaces offer a creative, individualized type of both formative & summative assessments.  
  • This area is so broad that teacher discretion would be best suited as far as how to use it for a particular assessment tool.  
  • It always serves as a great student showplace and additionally as a study guide for all to benefit from.