Blended Learning

In our last lesson we discussed about Blended Learning and despite having been working in this way for most of my career, I did not know what the expression meant until recently. Blended learning is a combination of online and in-person delivery of lessons that can be presented in different forms. Using blended learning as a teaching and learning approach does not mean that technology is the center of your teaching, but rather an alternative educational program for your teaching. I reckon that blended learning is a good way of offering new possibilities to those students who for different personal reasons may not attend their ordinary lessons at school. In our case, we use Moodle platform and Edmodo as a complement of what we do in our lessons. These sites are used to give extra-homework, reading,and some other ideas that help students to clarify doubts or have a better and a deeper understanding of a topic in question. What is more, both provide feedback between the teacher and the students. Another positive aspect is that we do not need to go to the institution to hand in a practical work or look for material since we can do it all from our homes! For these reasons, I believe that “blended learning” would be a good tool to be incorporated or at least to bear in mind for your future teaching.
Here is a short video in which a teacher explains the importance of implementing Blended Learning in the classroom.

How to plan using a Web 2.0 resource

Hi everyone! It has been a long time and I am here to let you know what our last practical work was about. In one of our last lessons, we were asked to plan a “didactic sequence” using at least one WEB 2.0 tool. To begin with, I would like to define what a web 2.0 resource is and according to dictionary.com it is “a second generation in the development of the World Wide Web, conceived as a combination of concepts, trends, and technologies that focus on user collaboration, sharing of user-generated content, and social networking”.

My group was supposed to teach present continuous and clothes, so we planned our lesson using Voki, which allows users to create customized talking characters. The purpose was to ask our students to imagine their Vokis were celebrities walking down a red carpet and make their virtual characters say what they were wearing. Then, we would share our Vokis on Edmodo or Facebook.

Reflecting upon this practical work, I may say that we did not make as much use of Web 2.0 tools as we could have done. In fact, in most of our activities we used flashcards to elicit vocabulary and play games. To learn and practise the present progressive, we printed worksheets. The only technological tools we used were an old fashion video on YouTube and Voki. We concluded that we could have made the lesson a lot more modern and technological. Nevertheless, if we have into consideration the reality of our Santafesinian schools, we wonder if we would be able to carry out even a simple activity since most of our public schools do not provide with a computer lab or if they do, they do not have internet connection. Therefore, it is advisable to know if the school where you work in count with the appropriate tools before making your lesson plans.