This is the 4th post in the Personalized Learning Series.
A couple of years ago, I was listening to the podcast Cult of Pedagogy and Jennifer Gonzalez was sharing about Playlists. Remember back in the day when you used to make a mix tape for someone? It’s kind of like that, but with academic content.
The idea is to define the learning outcome, goal, or essential question and then provide a hyperlinked list of resources or ways for students to meet that outcome, goal or question. In essence, it is a hyperlinked Academic Choice.
I remember the first playlist that I created after listening to this podcast. It was about the concept of sound. It had the essential questions, and under each a list of ways to answer it. I think one essential question was ‘What makes sound?‘ Each question included 3 categories to answer the question: experiment, read, watch videos. Each category had 1-3 resources to answer that question.
I carried this same idea over to Library Media. It took time, though. I was struggling with the time constraints that come with being an Essentialist or Special Area Teacher. I was struggling with how to provide students with all of the unit’s content upfront. For the time being, I pushed that aside and focused on creating brief playlist that gave students choice in Library Media that could be completed in 1-3 class periods.
Below is an example of a playlist that I recently used with my second graders to kick off a research unit that will end with them creating a Public Service Announcement.
Playlists are great, because they allow students to make choices based on learning preferences and/or interests. The playlist above is strictly interest based. One of the things that is pretty cool about providing students with playlists is that they end up doing more than you’d expect in a given amount of time.
For this activity, they had ten minutes to work. In our library media space, when you finish your work you can go ahead and begin circulation and the accompanying choices that go with it. They all focused on the PSAs for the entire 10 minutes. These PSAs are short; 3 minutes or less. They were either rewatching a PSA, or watched multiple PSAs. They were also taking to each other about the PSAs before we wrapped up the activity.
Have you experimented with playlists or hyper docs? How has it gone? Share below; I would love to hear about it!
Next in the series, I’ll share about game based learning as part of personalized learning.
