As the use of internet and technology becomes more and more popular, incorporating digital and online materials in education is apparently inevitable. Therefore, we have the idea of blended learning. It is a formal education program in which e-learning is combined with traditional classroom teaching and self-learning to create a more flexible learning environment for students to learn in their own pace.
Why blended learning?
less expensive to deliver, affordable and saves time
flexible - students can access to the materials from anywhere at any time
students can access to global resources that suit their needs and levels
students cam learn at their own pace so it can reduce stress and increase sense of satisfaction
without face-to-face interaction, students may be more willing to interact with other learners and their instructors through email, discussion boards and chat room.
can track the progress
help students to develop knowledge of the latest technologies and the Net
To achieve all the greatness of blended learning, I will introduce the website, Blendspacefor my fellow teachers to use to create their own digital lessons. Blendspace is an online tool for teachers to personalize free interactive lessons for learners to learn at their own time and space. It is particularly good for project-based learning as teachers can include a wide range of collection of teaching materials that suit the level of their target learners. The following is a video introducing what Blendspace is.
Fancy of starting your own blended lesson with Blendspace? Here is a step-by-step guide to help you out!
After creating your account in Blendspace (you can use your Google account to create one easily!!!), click on the green "New Lesson" button on the left upper corner. Then you will see this screen popping up.
What you write here will be the temporary title of your lesson.The title is editable.
Base on your title, there will be a list of related TES resources (those that people have uploaded to this website previously) which you may find useful.
You can change the keywords in the search bar and move the cursor to the right hand corner of each resources to preview them one by one.Base on the panel on the right most, you can apparently find useful resources on YouTube, Google, Flickr and Gooru, or you can type your own website link or iframe embed code,or even upload your own resources from your local computer or Dropbox or Gdrive.
After finding suitable resources, what you need to do is just to simply drag the box from the right panel to a grid on the left hand side.You can change the order of each material by simply dragging and dropping.
You can add tags, change the theme and template of the lesson on the bar above the chosen materials of your lesson. I like to give a colourful theme for my lesson because it can categorize the file type by different colour.
You can share the link or QR Code of your lesson to your students through Twitter, Email and Facebook. Another option is to embed the code of the lesson on your blog like me! :D
Ta-da! So this is my lesson about how to write a short story. Hope you all find it useful! xx
Sources
(n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_learning
Wonderful tool!! I believe the most significant thing is that you can track student's progress outside the EFL classroom. In fact I believe this is revolutionary.
Wonderful tool!! I believe the most significant thing is that you can track student's progress outside the EFL classroom. In fact I believe this is revolutionary.
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