The DSD Professional Development Team, is proud to announce the Jena Cooper will join our team officially on September 6th, 2016. Jena has been working as a Blended learning Coach for META for the last couple of years and is excited to share that experience and love for coaching with the DSD Professional Development schools.  

Jena Cooper began her career as a Music Educator in Columbus City Schools and the Olentangy School District.  She has her undergraduate degree from Ashland University in Music Education and has completed her masters classes in Music Education and Kodaly Certification at Capital University.  


Jena then entered the business world, working as marketing consultant, website designer and attained her Google Sempo Certification.  In her spare time, she helped her husband to develop his Music Technology curriculum, and assisted other teachers in his school with learning and implementing educational technology programs.  


Finding her way back to education full time, Jena became an instructional coach and professional development specialist at META solutions.  There she helped to develop a week long program that hosted Superintendents and Principals and allowed them to develop a school vision for implementing Personalized Learning in their districts.  She coached with five different districts in grades ranging from Kindergarten through 12th grade, on implementing Blended Learning, Personalized Learning and Project Based Learning Units.  She also created customized professional development activities for districts on many subjects, including Blended Learning, Personalized Learning, Google Apps for Education, Formative Assessment Tools, Creating Data Notebooks, PBL, and more.  Jena is a certified as a Lego Educator Trainer, PMI (Project Management Institute), VEX IQ Robotics, and has worked with over 80 Educational Technology programs.  

On August 3rd, 2016, the DSD Professional Development team flew down to Atlanta, Georgia to work with Haynes Bridge Middle School teachers.  Haynes Bridge is part the Fulton County School district.  DSD Professional Development started working with the lead teachers from Haynes Bridge in October of 2015, provided an all day workshop in January of 2016 to kick off the blended learning program, and then in May of 2016, we visited the classrooms during the school day.  

DSD Professional Development believes in customizing every workshop to meet the needs of the client.  For this six hour workshop day, we used time very creatively to make sure that all teachers felt that they had the workshop personalized to their needs.  

This workshop was built to help customize the learning process for groups of teachers.  By keeping the subject areas together we were still able to provide professional development in a Phase 1 Blended Learning environment.  The teachers all walked away with key technology tools to use for each group along with how to plan for Phase 1 in their content area.  

Haynes Bridge teachers should be able to deploy Phase 1 of blended learning into the classroom one day a week starting late August.  The teachers will then work up to two, three, and four days a week in a Phase 1 blended learning environment.  

Next visit to Haynes Bridge will be September 20 and 21. 

I received an email link to a blog post today.  The blog post was written by a teacher who participated in "Wild" Side of Blended learning Conference on June 15, 2016.  I wanted to share out the post here on this blog.  Here is the link to the actual blog post.  

Guest Post:  Blended Learning Takes TimePosted on July 24, 2016BY KRISTA HYME
On June 15, 2016, I had the pleasure of attending the “Wild” Side of Blended Learning Conference with Marcia Kish. Marcia consults with teachers and districts in Ohio, as well as surrounding states, a they begin to transition into utilizing blended learning.  Her company is called DSD Professional Development (www.dsdprofessionaldevelopment.com). Her knowledge was impressive and her enthusiasm was infectious! 
This was my first blended learning conference of my career! I very much enjoyed that Marcia organized the conference in the same manner that a skilled blended learning teacher might organize their room.  Prior to attending this conference, I had no idea that there were even levels of progression as you work to organize and develop a blended learning experience in your classroom. I had developed the misconception of blended learning as something you just jumped into and did. Hearing Marcia describe the 3 phases of blended learning made this teaching shift seem more clear and much less daunting. 
I teach kindergarten, so I have less contact time with my students and they tend to be much less independent than other grades. Seeing that the 3 phases of Blended Learning allows teachers to go slowly and gradually release responsibility to the students makes perfect sense for my young learners. I was also happy to hear that she suggests a minimum of a year in phase one learning , in one subject area, before progressing to greater differentiation in phase two and eventually total student self- paced learning in phase three. 
I was also amazed at the plethora of free web-based programs that were shared with us during this workshop. I really thought I was going to hear about things my district was using, but that was far from the case. I plan to focus on phase one of blended learning in math during the coming school year. I will be using Dreambox next year with my class. However, I am also very interested in seeing how the free web applications Frontrow, Sumdog, Prodigy, Kahoot and Pear Deck might be used to compliment and add to the Dreambox program.  I  am thinking that one program might be exclusively used at school while others might be used at school as well as for practice at home. I think I will be able to figure this out as the year evolves and I get to know my students. 
Other than the phases of learning and free web resources, the organization and use of student data binders seemed to be another major topic that was covered. It is clear that one of the major benefits of using web-based programs with students is that teachers are able to gather a great deal of data about what children know and don’t know. However, if you don’t come up with a plan for organizing the student data all this benefit will be lost. The goal of the data binders is to move away from the information only being utilized by teachers and to put it into a format that will also allow  teachers, students and parents to self-monitor progress toward  grade-level expected learning goals.  I was not able to see an example of a grade K data binder at the conference so I will continue to try to find examples on my own. 
As I left the conference, I found myself excited and with lots of information to share with peers. I also found that I had a new list of questions to ponder and research. I have always been a risk-taker in the way I organize my language arts instruction with young learners. Math takes me out of my comfort zone, so I have never been much of a risk-taker in this area. I believe that the blended learning model will allow me to differentiate my instruction in math like I do in language arts. I look forward to improving my math instruction through utilizing the early phases of the blended learning model during the 2016/17 school year.
Krista Hyme is a kindergarten teacher in the Olentangy School District located just outside of Columbus, Ohio. Krista is new to blended learning and is an advocate for using high-quality, personalized, technology-rich instruction with primary age children.