Wait… why do we need a blender in the classroom again?

Last lessons at ECO II, we’ve been talking about something called ‘blended learning’… and despite having been working in this way for most of my training as a teacher, 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 come in several different forms. Although students still attend lessons at university or school, face-to-face classroom methods are combined with computer-mediated activities.

This kind of learning has got many advantages. Among them are the fact that it doesn’t prescribe which activities must be online, there isn’t a particular percentage of teaching and learning that has to happen in the classroom or not, and it can be tailored and personalized according to students and teachers’ needs and the technological resources available.

Here’s a short video explaining what blended learning is…

Particularly at the teacher training programme in ISP Almirante Brown, we use Moodle platform and Edmodo in order to complement what we do in class. Using these sites saves a lot of time and trouble because teachers can post some lead-in ideas to any topic before we go to class, post extra activities or homework, communication is more effective than via e-mails, and it is not necessary to go to the institution to hand in a practical work or look for material… we can do it all from the comfort of our homes!

So, although our institution does not have the most technological computers, the newest beamers or those cutting-edge interactive whiteboards, we are making the most of the technological resources we have got… and that is blended learning! :)

Check out these articles on How To ImplementBlended Learning and 10 Blended Learning Trends.

5 inspiring ‘photography’ sites

As I have mentioned a couple of times in my previous posts, I am very into photography. Also, I’m always looking for projects that can combine my hobby with teaching English (for example, Mathilde Verillaud’sselfies project).

Photography can be defined as ‘drawing with light’… but it’s not just any drawing. Pictures transmit feelings, ideas, concepts… a single photograph contains loads of information not only about what they show but also about the photographer himself.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much a photograph represents and the huge amount of pictures around us… in magazines, webpages, leaflets, newspapers, advertisements… and of course, coursebooks and flashcards in the English classroom! In the classroom, we use pictures so as to elicit vocabulary, to play games, to encourage speaking and writing, to create visual associations with vocabulary or ideas, to avoid translating, to decorate the classroom, among many other things. Showing our students a picture is much more useful than giving them a bunch of long definitions our students are not likely to remember or understand.

When I took a photography course last year, one of my teachers told me that one tip to become a better photographer is to look at other photographers’ pictures. Well, that is how I came up with these sites, which contain thousands of free pictures we can use in our lessons.

1) Tumblr.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website that allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.

2) Pinterest.

Pinterest is a company that provides an Internet service that they describe as a ‘visual discovery tool’. People use Pinterest to collect ideas for projects and interests and users create and share collections (called “boards”) of visual bookmarks (called “Pins”) that they use to do things like plan trips, develop projects, organize events or save articles and recipes.

3) Weheartit.

Similar to Pinterest, We Heart It is an image-based social network for inspiring images. It allows users to upload and share pictures, and also save (heart) their favourites into a private canvas. 

4) Flickr.

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website. It is very popular among professional and amateur photographers, who upload their pieces of work, and it also is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

5) Instagram.

Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. It confines photos to a square shape and users can also apply digital filters to their images.

If you are looking for inspiring pictures for whatever activity you are planning, any of these sites will do. And yes, I've signed up in all of them ;)

One of my favourite quotes to close…

‘You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved’ ― Ansel Adams.

Want to know what to do with the pictures you find? Here's an article with 7 Pinterest ideas for high school writing and another one with 10 ways to use Instagram in your classroom.

Assessing websites

Nowadays, we depend on the internet when searching for information. We generally look for data, images, ideas, etc. online; we google everything we’ve got doubts about; we don’t usually have books as our main source of information. However, not all websites are reliable. Our first practical work at ECO II was about evaluating and selecting websites.

We dealt with a list of criteria that, according to the British Council, we need to take into account so as to know whether a website is reliable or not. Some of the criteria were:

• Accuracy: It makes reference to whether the information seems accurate, whether it is based on opinion or facts, whether it contains external references and whether it is updated.
• Authority and coverage: It refers to the author, the sources of the information, its objectivity and the presence of advertising.
• Audience and relevance: It talks about the audience the website aims at.
• Educational focus: It refers specifically to whether the website has educational purposes and caters for all learning styles.
• Ease of use: It makes reference to whether the page is easy to access, its format, menu and design in general.

Although I generally take most of these factors into account when looking for information, I personally pay attention to the last criterion, the design of the website. I generally decide whether a page is trust-worthy by having a look at its colours, its pictures, its fonts, its organisation. It works for me! J

A little bit of humour to close…

References: 
British Council (2008). Evaluating and selecting websites. UK.
Evaluating websites: criteria for the classroom. Retrived from this link.
Learning the language of internet. Picture retrived from this link.