One of our 5th grade teachers was talking to me the other day about how she had about a week to review before our state standardized test.  We have been talking about and trying to iron out the details to start flipping our math classrooms in 4-5 since we got our devices in September.  To me, this sounded like the perfect opportunity!

A Kindergarten teacher I work with recently told me she has been using a website called Blendspace with her students to better organize her PBL units.  I really liked the visual layout of the program and have been milling around in my head what application it might have for math.

I decided this was definitely one!  I played with a couple of possibilities and ended up deciding on creating a Blendspace lesson per chapter in the Math textbook we use to organize anchor video lessons for students to use for review of concepts they aren’t firm on, but we could also very easily use next year when we start fully implementing flipped classrooms.  

The coolest feature I found was the collaboration button under the share option.  I can enter in the email addresses of all of the teachers that teach that grade-level and they will have instant access to the videos to embed in their own Canvas pages, but will also be able to add videos of their own.

I mentioned to this to my Math Coach colleagues today at coaches meeting and we decided this would be a great way to collaborate on lessons we or our teachers create so we aren’t re-creating the wheel each time we want to flip a lesson.

Each of my teachers share their Canvas page with me, so I created a page that would be very easy to navigate for students and embedded the Blendspace lessons in each page that is linked to the main anchor video page.

I inserted the Anchor Video link on her Math
Workshop page and it was ready to go!

I can now share these pages to the Canvas Commons and import them into other 5th grade classes very easily.  Since the Blendspace lessons are embedded, they will automatically update each time we add a lesson.

Now on to 4th grade!