Angela Mellott

The Digital Backpack: Your Resource for Online Learning

This episode was originally published on February 10, 2015, when the podcast was called "MyBlend Stories."

Since 2007 Angela Mellott has been a teacher at Brandywine Community Schools. Brandywine Junior/Senior High School serves grades 7-12 and staff is shared between the middle and high school grade levels.

Identifying opportunities to differentiate learning for her students, Angela began to explore blended learning in April 2014. She chose to work with Michigan Virtual to support her growth in applying blended learning strategies to her course design.

The course that she chose to blend, her Advanced Business course, consists of 13 Juniors and Seniors who have completed the basic business course that Angela also teaches. Angela mentioned that many of these students maintain jobs. With this in mind the school decided to implement a three-day onsite, two-day remote, weekly schedule in order to provide greater flexibility to their school/work balancing act.

Our partnership has been unique, due in large part to the full access she has given me to her curriculum and the open dialog we’ve been able to have in regards to pedagogical choices to meet learning targets.

Our conversation focused on her continued growth as a blended teacher, but I was happy to also capture some of the brainstorming conversation that we regularly have when discussing her students’ learning. My hope is that by having these conversations in the open, you can better understand the nature of our work together.

This is her story.