Blendspace for blended learning

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

WebQuest - A new way of self-learning

In this Internet era, all students can get access to all sorts of information easily. It leads teachers to think about how to make use of this channel to help students learn. That's how all sorts of self-learning research and projects that students have to do begin. Yet for most of the time, students will just directly copy what they found on the Internet. So at the end of the day, they cannot learn anything and have no awareness about the importance of intellectual property. WebQuest can solve this problem yet serving the purpose of having students to think critically and synthesis their own arguments.

So what is WebQuest?

WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most of or all of the information that learners work with come from the web. Rather than simply presenting establish facts, a WebQuest starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios, in which students have to identify and research issues and questions to develop their knowledge or solutions. Most of the time, teachers will provide some useful links in a WebQuest to assist students with their research.