What is "Blended Learning"? Does it really work?

When we speak of "blended learning", we speak of a combination of digital content and activity, and face-to-face content and activity. Blended learning does not replace any method in particular; it integrates both contents and calls for the need to strike balance in our lessons. 

Blended learning can provide teachers with a variety of ways to address students' needs and different ways of giving instructions. One of the main characteristics of blended learning is the possibility of identifying what is already working well in the classroom, and what might work better as digital content. Teachers need to know that adding digital content doesn't mean leaving behind all classroom instruction. That is to say, teachers must keep what is working well in a face-to-face mode, and add what could be more effective in a digital format.

That is similar to what has happened all through the year with Eco II. Our teacher taught us what kinds of resources we will need and what kind of access students will have to the technology necessary for a blended learning activity or lesson. Human relationships are also important, i.e., we need to keep adding new components to empathize with the students and to be really committed to providing students with what's necessary.

After all, as Sophie Partarrieu (2005) stated that "there is no single recipe for success when combining traditional and digital methods, but it’s clear that human presence – even remotely – still plays an important role in student motivation and progress."

Going Mobile at UNL-ATE

Yesterday, we went to visit The UNL-ATE Hotel to attend Nicky Hockly's talk called "Going Mobile". It was a windy but beautiful evening, the perfect day to be absent from our regular Monday lessons at Brown School. 

We met at the conference room and Nicky started to examine how mobile devices and education can help bridge the gap between school and the outside world, bringing together the local and the global. Such a controversial and interesting topic!

As you can see above even our "eco-teacher" Letizia was very interested in the issue! For Nicky, "mobile learning refers to the use of a range of handheld devices across a range of contexts, both inside and outside the classroom". Along the workshop, she amused us with a number of classroom activities using mobile devices.

We found the workshop very useful, since students nowadays are using their mobile phones all the time. For us, integrating this kind of devices in the lessons helps to keep students in touch with learning as well as with up-to-date technology. In that way, students can bring knowledge and materials to the lesson that they can not only use outside school, but also inside the classroom. 

Finally, before going home, we took a group photograph with the "celebrity".
Thank you for sharing your brilliant ideas Nicky! And thank you for the invitation Leti!

What you need to know about web 2.0 and its benefits for education!

Web 1.0 was the beginning of Internet as we know it. Its name stands for World Wide Web and at the time, people could only look for information, but there wasn't a great variety of types of interaction like nowadays. On the other hand, Web 2.0 has a wide range of resources and activities to do on the net, including teaching tools!

In this day and age, users of the Internet not only look for information but they also share their work, create their own materials, collect different data, etc.

 

The most popular examples of web 2.0 are Twitter and YouTube, among many others.

Twitter is a real-time network that connects millions of people. YouTube is the world's most popular online video sharing website. So, the big question is: how could we use them for our teaching purposes?

In Twitter you can search for information. You can publish and share your own ideas in real time. You retweet and recycle resources that might be interesting not only for yourself, but also for your followers. In other words, Twitter is a great way for educators to share information, ideas and experiences. María Colussa is a great example of an educational use of Twitter. She is constantly sharing her materials and learning experiences. You can see it with your own eyes here: 

https://twitter.com/mariacolussa

In the classroom students can also profit from Twitter. They can post information about future deadlines and homework. They can also write collaboratively in order to create a story or you can create a hashtag (for example: #thinkingabouteco2) for students to talk about a specific topic. Students can take pictures of their everyday life and post them on twitter in order to write a small description and share it with their classmates, and things like that.

YouTube is a different story. It is sorted to show videos from educational institutions like universities and schools. That’s where we found The Khan Academy, created by Salman Khan. He has almost 26 millions of students on line. Khan says that "Khan Academy is on a mission to unlock the world's potential". In a TED conference in 2011 he said that "students prefer him to be on YouTube that in person". Here is the Khan Academy Channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy
 

In the classroom, we can use YouTube for many purposes. Students can listen to and watch different videos in order to describe them, compare or contrast them. They can also use it as a tool to upload their own videos, that is to say their own creations. And last but not least, to look for information and interesting channels related to specific topics or learning purposes.

To sum up, we would like to say that though technology is being used mainly for communication nowadays, learning and teaching also have their place on the net. For us, the main purpose in using this technology would be to keep students as curious and stimulated as possible so that they take every advantage they can of the Web 2.0.  

Designing Materials with the help of Howard and Major

Designing materials may be hard work due to the fact that you need to take into account many factors, like the ones mentioned by Howard and Major in their article "Guidelines Designing Effective Language Teaching Materials" (2005) .
The authors highlight the importance of considering, for example, the curriculum and the context, the resources and facilities available, among others. 

They also provide us with guidelines to consider when designing English language teaching materials. We think that the most important guidelines are:1- "English Language Teaching Materials should be contextualized" and 2- "English language teaching materials should be attractive". The former refers to making the materials appropriate to the curriculum and the learners’ first language and experiences, and to present topics and issues that are relevant to our students. The latter involves the appearance of the materials, whether they could be reused, and whether they are user-friendly.

So, when designing and creating materials to take to the classroom, we can benefit from what technology offers us. However, when using technology in our classrooms, we should also choose topics which involve our students in the learning process because technology per se does not always guarantee a successful lesson. We can find websites to develop materials and be creative to get our students involved in what they are learning.

We should also make our materials -even the ones we will print to take into the classroom- more user- friendly, for example by providing enough space for students to write what they need. We also need to assess the possibility of using the same material again in another opportunity. Another important benefit technology has is that, for example, for many websites you do not even need to pay for the materials. For all these reasons, we, as future teachers, consider it relevant to include technology in  our lessons. It is and it will be increasingly present in our lives and in our students’ lives.  What we have noticed is that not only has technology changed the way learners learn, but also the way teachers teach.

Presentations... ✓

Before leaving behind Practical Work Nº2, we would like to point out how  much we learnt from the class presentations .The great variety of works that our classmates designed presented a lot of tools and resources to use when working with Powerpoint and Prezi. (Thank you girls!)

Another important aspect worth highlighting is how we relate our productions to the TPACK and SAMR models. But first, let us define both models! In SAMR, created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, Ph.D., each letter stands for a level of technology integration (Substitution - Augmentation - Modification - Redefinition). While TPACK, represents the interaction between the Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge in a technology learning environment as explained in the website developed by Dr. Matthew J. Koehler.

On the one hand, reflecting on TPACK we have realized that functions (talking about students future holiday plans/socializing their production), vocabulary (verbs related to the activities) and grammar (be going to) were part of the content knowledge we use for this presentation. Pedagogical knowledge was also included along the lesson plan (creating a Powerpoint presentation, brainstorm ideas, watching a video, using online dictionaries, group discussion).

And finally, technological knowledge was especially used to select the tools that will make the students profit more from the content. In this case, the main aim was that the students created a Powerpoint presentation while using internet connection to choose pictures or use online dictionaries.

On the other hand, we have SAMR model, which is divided into Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. In class, we substituted the typical paper posters for a final presentation with the Powerpoint or Prezi presentation, and by keeping up with technology, we basically motivated students to learn. Internet nowadays helps us to access information around the world, which fosters the students’ intercultural reflection, and it becomes fundamental to the students’ design of the presentations. Technology, then,  is used to recreate part of the task and transform the students’ learning; namely starting a process of creating new tasks, once unimaginable. In our case, students were able to socialize their presentations using the LCD projector, which would not be possible using paper and pen. Plus! Students also had to select images from places around the world, which is another task modified and redefined from that of cutting and pasting pictures from magazines.

To conclude, we can say that both models are very useful indeed when designing and creating tasks and activities. Nevertheless, we found TPACK a bit more interesting. Why? Because using that model you can see more clearly whether the three factors involved are well balanced for a particular teaching topic.

In websites we trust

If there is something that is undeniable nowadays, is the fact that technology surrounds us.
It seems as if teachers have this strong need to innovate in the classroom every day or students will get bored most of the time. Recently, we did our first practical work in groups and started developing our own materials with a little help of some websites.
We chose:  http://esl-kids.com/ /(ESL-kids)
http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en (British Council Learn English)

As teachers-to-be we need to become digitally literate, this refers to our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal. We are not just talking about a checklist of technical skills, but also about the social practices that surround the use of new media (Nicky Hockly, 2013).
There are many websites which provide teachers with interesting activities to take into the classroom and we need to know whether those sites are reliable or not. Some websites offer activities to do online and others give you the chance to create different activities in paper. In order to know if a website is reliable or not, we considered some points to analyze. We had to design two activities using those websites, but what we did first was to analyze them in order to check the domain, find out who the author is, check whether the website contains any bias or not, also taking into account the appropriateness and the relevance, the clarity and accessibility, etc.
In this website: "Kent State University" you can find some criteria for evaluating web resources and it also provides a form designed to be used together with those principles.

Once we had all that clear for both websites, we started planning the activities. Both of them were connected within the same lesson plan. The first was a design of a set of flashcards in order to introduce the topic and practice some vocabulary, and then, we decided to play a game which was already designed in the British Council Website and coincide with the topic.
After doing the practical work, one of the things we realized was the fact that designing materials for teaching English takes time, but on the other hand, even if you are not so acquainted with technology, it is not impossible. On the contrary, if one learns how to use these tools and take advantage of already designed activities , or activities with related topics, it will not be that difficult. 
So, if you are a teacher of English and really want to impress your students, invest some time in analyzing a website, and you will realize that is not impossible at all!

Can Digital Immigrants acquire the accent?

In his article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrant, Mark Prensky states that we can differentiate two kinds of people: you can either be a Digital Native or a Digital Immigrant.
What does that mean? The first group represents the first generations to grow up with new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. And on the other hand, the later refers to the ones who were not born into the digital world but have adopted many or most aspects of the new technology.

We consider ourselves in the middle,we are not immigrants neither natives, since we were born in an era in which technology was starting to develop. But, now we live in the era in which everything is “smart”, even some house devices. So, as teachers to be we need to consider that our students may be a step beyond us as regards technology. That is the reason why we need to improve our ways to teach and to include new technologies in the classrooms in order to involve students in their learning.

We already shared the useful app “Remind” for a teacher to communicate with her/his students. Another way to improve teaching is to have a group in Edmodo, for example. There they can share videos, images and texts that the students and the teacher find interesting. A way to include technology in the lessons is through many engaging  activities provided by different websites, like the British Council.

To conclude, we only want to mention that all these activities, although they are engaging, they all need internet connection to be done. Consequently, you need to make sure that all your students can have access to it , not only some of them.

All in all, we can see that Digital Immigrants can adapt and use technology for their own benefits. Sometimes, this may be more difficult for them than for Digital Natives; but it is possible.