Learning Paths for the First Time

A few weeks ago, my team was presented with the challenge to shift our instruction to personalized learning and flexible grouping to hit the big rocks our kids are having trouble with.  We got great help from our ELA lead and an initial example of how the new process should look like.  Immediately my mind went straight to Itslearning.  Over the years I've realized that I am not the most gifted person when it comes to filing and organizing paper, very often I find myself swamped in towers of never-ending ungraded assignments, I feel overwhelmed and quit.  So when this challenge came to us, it was easy for me to think that the best way to manage their learning paths and the different options for each of my kids was ItsLearning.  I was very excited and ready to start. In my mind, I had a vision of what it should look like and I started to draft and jot ideas for their assignments.  We collected materials, made sure they were in digital form, we created graphic organizers in Google, and then here we go.  The next step was creating the pathways, they needed to be a combination of online and offline resources. We were responding to our students needs to still have a book or a reading selection on paper.  I sat down for a couple of hours with a sketch of the pathways beside my computer, went to Itslearning, created the new plan and started adding resources, soon I noticed that my paths had some resources that needed to be duplicated.  I went the long route and created copies for each of those resources. I was ready for the pathways! That was the part that was exciting me the most, I knew I needed three and so I did.  About 30 minutes later my paths were ready and the troubleshooting began: How do we copy them into my teammate's courses? After a few trials, we realized that we were ignoring one of the best resources Itslearning has: The library.  I copied the path into our library and five minutes later everyone had access. My kids came in, I explained to them what they were about to do and I could see the excitement on their faces. We had a few bumps on the road that first day and we still do, but we keep working through them and little by little they are getting more used to this new way of working... Learning pathways are on their way.