Tool-a-Week Challenge WEEK 3: LessonPaths and Blendspace

One of the finest features of Blendspace is that when you
show a youtube, the long commercial is taken out…but the smaller
floating ad does have to be ‘Xed’ out.

I haven’t had a chance to share it with students yet, but I have shared with other teachers, and I think that Blendspace will be an awesome tool. I have created one lesson on the Flipped Classroom because I am an instructional technology teacher. I plan to create many more lessons because it’s awesome to be able to put all the resources in one place.

I think I will like Blendspace. I created my first lesson with my iPad and it was easy to use. Just drag and drop. it is also compatible to other websites that I manage. Thanks!

I am using Lesson Paths to give instruction for the project my students are doing this semester. It’s easy to use and my students love it, too. As a proof, here is the URL of the pages I generated for them: http://www.lessonpaths.com/people/profile/marivic-pabrua-46829
I will try to use BlendSpace next.
By the way, I am teaching 10th grade Biology.
Congratulations for sharing COOL Apps!

Between Blendspace and LessonPaths, definitely Blendspace is my favourite of all tools. It is so easy to use that you can actually create a lesson less than five minutes. Not only that, it is a great platform where you can publish all your students work, assignments, tasks and other learning activities. I have used Blendspace in many of my learning activities. Students were invited to collaborate and developed their own Blendspace. My students have used Blendspace for their reflective journals of the course. I teach Microbiology courses. In one of the topics, Microbial Metabolisms and Nutrition, I gave each students a subtopic, eg. metabolism, catabolism, anabolism, photoautotroph etc. The student was asked to create a one-minute video on that particular subtopic and upload them in Blendspace. At the end of the day, one whole video on Microbial Metabolism and Nutrition was developed. The great thing about using this Blendspace is that Blendspace link of the developed video on Microbial Metabolism and Nutrition was used for another batch of students as their learning materials in the flipped classroom preparation.

In another task, students were given subtopic on Fungi as Parasites and were asked to make a podcast and compile them in Blendspace. I have also used Blendspace in a group exercise. Each group were asked to prepare a learning material for a particular topic together with quizzes at the end of the lesson. The link for the Blendspace were given to the other groups to prepare themselves. Therefore, it’s the students who were preparing the materials for their friends and used them for the flipped classroom. There are many other activities that students have used Blendspace as their self-directed learning tool. It’s like a one-stop learning centre!

I like the idea. It seems easy to do. I was in the parent end when my kids were in middle school. For me it is a bit too late since I have a website and Google classroom set up for student work. This would be something extra to do and, at this point it would be too much for me.

I tried both Lesson Paths and Blend space using the same lesson to see which one my students would like to work in the most. Both were very easy use. Many of the chose Blend space. Great resources and will be sharing these with my colleagues.

I tried Blendspace, and it was so easy to put together resources for a unit. I liked that as soon as I typed the lesson title, I had videos to choose from. I liked the layout (and appreciated that I could choose different grid options). My students liked that all of the resources were in one place.

I will definitely pass this web resource on for our teachers, especially those who don’t have a dedicated website, or for those who are curating materials for a particular project or unit of study. (I asked my students what they thought, and they said they liked the idea, but one student said, “Isn’t this an extra step for you? You’re website is pretty organized and already provides these resources.”)

I tried both and like blendspace better. It allowed me to put a whole lesson together quickly and logically so it is easy for the students to follow. It also allowed for short quizzes to check for understanding. I can see myself coming back to this often.

I am using both LessonPaths and Blendspace as a means to introduce students to specific eras in history. They can use the lessons I have created to get a “crash course” in the specific era, or as a means to review for a test on the material. Each lesson hits the high points of an era, or why the era occurred. I will definitely be using them in the future to introduce material to students. They are both relatively easy to use, but Blendspace’s learning curve is much higher. The ability to search from the lesson you are making is amazing. I was able to find and add material faster than with LessonPaths. I do like having a Google Chrome extension for LessonPaths. It does make it easy to add something I find on the web to a lesson, or start a lesson with it.

I learned of these tools during one Kelley’s online workshops and have found several that I’ve been able to use in my classes with little tweaking. This week I created my own Blendspace lesson for a dual enrollment English class. I like how smoothy I can integrate videos from YouTube and filed from my computer.

Lessonpaths has a more comfortable feel to me, but I came away wondering if branching was a possibility. Blendspace is really quite attractive, but I wasn’t able to locate an index that would allow me to navigate directly to pages within the presentation (important for students returning to the presentation for content review).

Both Blendspace and Learnpaths are versatile tools for teachers. They are time and work saving over other platforms that can store content.
There is no preference between the two for me. I may use one and not the other depending on what my circle of educators use most as it will be easier to share.
One thing I really like on both platforms is that it is very easy to upload content and the first screen of the resources comes up automatically making it easy for users to know which resources they are choosing and using.
One problem that I presume to encounter is that educators do not like to share very much and perhaps they will not use the platforms for that particular reason.

Blendspace: Very easy and user friendly but not fully functional on an iPad.

Blended space was my favorite. Ease of use and navigation. I think students will really enjoy it. I shared this site with another teacher and we will be using for teacher collaboration. Cool stuff!

This were 2 really good tools I did not know about. Of the two Blended space was the best! What a simple solution to delivering concise and structure information to the students or collaboration in projects with colleagues.

I love both of these resources! Such a great way to create a little more interest into a class lesson. The students enjoy interacting with lesson. I enjoy creating the lessons!

Janelle – you can go over 6 panes in Blendspace. I imagine there is a maximum number of panes you can have, but do not know offhand what it is – I believe you can have quite a lot. Here’s an example with 21 panes: https://www.blendspace.com/lessons/tKEHinbxNg-tiQ/alex-longest-s-s-w-o-t-analysis.

My post is a tale of two cities. Aesthetically and for ease of use blend space wins hands down in my opinion. I particularly like the tool bar on the right side of the screen… Extremely user friendly. However, after putting together my lesson to my dismay I found out that the sight is not very iPad user friendly… Plenty of glitches and frustrations were to be had and I was not prepared to ensure the experience.

On the flip side the lesson paths I terface whilst being less aesthetically pleasing and whilst still user friendly did not surpass blend space was nonetheless very iPad user friendly.

In a world where the ability for a app to be user friendly to multiple interfaces, such as Kahoot, I believe that any app really worth its salt needs to be able to cater flexibly for the demands of the hardware different educational institutions have access to.

I created lessons on both sites. I think it would be useful for flipping the classroom. I liked them equally. I spent more time on LessonPaths and I like the browse feature. Since I made my lesson private, I was not provided a URL link but did get an embed code. With Blendspace, the searching bar feature was useful. Can you create a lesson with more that 6 panes or is that the max? I will do a workshop on both of these tools with my staff next month.

I took a tour of both LessonPaths and Blendspace. For me, the winner is Blendspace. There seems to be a lot more functionality. I really like being able to link to my own assets easily – Dropbox, Google, etc. It’s also a bonus that you can easily edit each tile to provide some quick directions.

On the negative side, being a science teacher, I am disappointed that the quiz creator does not provide an easy option for super/subscript, general math equations or embedding images as part of the question.

I love both of these tools! I have recently introduced these sites to the teachers I work with and they are slowly beginning to love them too.

I tried building a lesson in both platforms and have to say that I like Blendspace a LOT! It is very quick and easy to use. I like that you can easily see a library of videos to introduce or build on to your lesson. The text and quiz features are really easy to use as well. I built a quick and easily accessible lesson for my third graders about angles including a video, online game, and quiz in about 5 minutes. I do agree with Maxine Drouet about adding notations to the resources that we add to the lessons.

I’ve tried them both out. I like the look and feel of blendspace more but the functionality of lessonpaths is more useful to me. Being able to add a pop quiz with restricted advancement in lessonpaths is very handy (questions can only be multiple choice or true/false). I like the progress tracking in lessonpaths. I also like having the ability to add questions following videos. Although being very linear, in the end I give lessonpaths a higher score. I also recommend TeEd which is limited to videos but is very slick.

I have tried both tools and I prefer Blendspace to Lessonpaths hands down. I liked the look of Blendspace in that it allowed me to create lessons in a grid. I used Blendspace to create a lesson on Ancient China that aligned with the social studies standards of learning for second grade. I included videos, review games, images of inventions and other major contributions from China. I also included a virtual tour of the Great Wall of China. After students completed each section, I included knowledge checks that were either in quiz format or as review games. I loved the option to search within Blendspace to find additional resources to support my content. I also love the feedback this tool provided because it allowed me to determine whether my learners had mastered the skills or required additional support.

Wow – that was quick Maxime! Thanks! Hopefully the folks at LessonPaths and Blendspace stop by and check out your feedback (and I’ll bet they will, as more comments come in).

I just tried both of the tools. Both are pretty easy to use. I like the fact that in Lessonpaths, you see where you’re at, the steps you still need to accomplished. And I also like the fact that the website open directly, whereas in Blendspace, you have to open it in a new tab.

However, I must admit that my favorite is Blenspace! And the only reason why is that I find it to be nicer! I don’t like Lessonpaths design…

One reproach I could do to both of them is that there a cool feature that is missing: I would love to be able to add some “information” about a video, an image. For exemple, when a kid works on WWI and have videos, images, websites to see on Blendspaces, it would be could to be able to give him tasks to do, information about the document, perhaps event questions about this document.

I will definitively be using those tools in class! Sometime, when I ask my pupils to do a research work, they go into all kind of directions. Or sometimes, they have a lot of websites to go on to, and they waste time trying to write down the right web address. With Blenspace, they will be able to find everything in one space!