Insights and Inspiration from Our Second Virtual Conversation

Last week the Alliance convened its second virtual conversation with Linked Learning educators and administrators to better understand how schools are moving from planning to implementation in delivering integrated, high-quality college and career experiences remotely. Call participants discussed best practices for ensuring students stay connected to schools and how to use tools such as Blackboard Connect, Schoolology, Remind, Google Classroom, Nepris, and FlipGrid to re-engage and re-energize young people around work-based learning opportunities as schools remain closed.

But technology alone will not be enough to keep students on a path to college and career success. Educators from across districts discussed behind-the-scenes efforts taking place to translate work-based learning opportunities and portfolio defenses for online settings. Envision Learning Partners walked call participants through their toolkit for implementing portfolio defenses online while educators on the line highlighted portfolio defense rubrics, which can be used virtually to gauge not only what students can do, but also what they know.

To encourage much needed peer-to-peer connection at this time, some schools in Los Angeles USD are even taking student engagement offline by mailing home prizes to students who support other students to participate in online classes and creating “zoom-assemblies” for students with embedded contests to encourage engagement.

We hope the conversation sparked some additional thinking and ideas as the Linked Learning field works tirelessly to ensure all students graduate ready for the full range of postsecondary options, even during this unprecedented time.

• Listen to the full conversation.
• View the conversation transcript.
• Review resources shared through the chat function.

up next: work-based learning webinar

The Alliance will continue the conversation on Wednesday, April 29 at 1 pm as we bring educators from Antelope Valley UHSD, Long Beach USD, and Oakland USD together to discuss innovative and promising practices for continuing to engaged students through meaningful work-based learning opportunities. It will be a highly interactive discussion, which we hope will boost your efforts to make education real and relevant from students, even from home. You can register for the webinar here.