Blended Learning

Hi you all! The last topic we are going to study is blended learning, but…. What is it? As I wanted to give you a clear and useful definition I searched in the web and this is what I found on http://www.christenseninstitute.org/blended-learning-definitions-and-models/ :

“The definition of blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns:

  1) at least in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace;

2) at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home;

 3) and the modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience. “

Once I read this I realized that in most subjects during my own training programme this is how I have been learning. I think that it not only provides students with support when studying at home but also helps to take fully advantage of the academic year, even to go faster through the syllabus and teach a lot more than in the traditional way. There are some different models that you could consider if you are interested in applying this to you practice that you can see in the link I left above.

However, I couldn’t avoid thinking that it would be quite difficult to use it in some secondary public schools in the place where I live, the Santa Fe province. The main reason for this is that students are simply not used to consider technology as a tool for learning, for them is all about leisure and fun, so the first obstacle would be to show them how this system works and that would take quite a lot of time.  The second difficulty we may encounter is that depending on the school we are teaching in, pupils might not count with the necessary gadgets for doing blended learning.

All in all, it is my opinion that it is a very interesting possibility that could make our teaching richer, providing many opportunities for students to learn at their own pace. It is a quite flexible system that could be adapted to a wide variety of classrooms, but we need to be aware that it maybe won’t work immediately in some contexts, nothing that couldn’t be solved!

A didactic sequence including Web 2.0 resources

Hello everybody! Lately, a couple of peers and me have been working on the last PW of the year that is about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. What we had to do was to create a didactic sequence, that is to say a complete class, around a topic and a grammatical item, employing one of them and then asking our students to create something also using this kind of tools.

As our job was to introduce countable and uncountable nouns used with food we decided to create a video using a very simple programme called Windows Movie Maker. It is about an apple pie recipe and in that way we began our lesson.

Then, we planned to do a brainstorming asking our students other foods or ingredients they know, and while we wrote them on the blackboard under two headlines: countable and uncountable. Another very interesting resource we included in the lesson was wordles. They are word clouds that you can make on this page http://www.wordle.net/. If you are a creative teacher you can find a thousand ways of using them. In our case, we would ask pupils to divide into groups and to create a recipe with the ingredients they could find in the word cloud, no matter how crazy it is!

After a couple of quite traditional listening activities for introducing there is /are and some quantifiers, we would ask our students to create their own recipe in the format of a video of any  food they like and then share it on Youtube in order for them to experiment with Web 2.0 tools.  This is just one example of what you can do with these technologies in the classroom as they are very versatile. Hope this sequence inspires many more and better lesson plans!