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!