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.

Reflection on the use of Web 2.0 in Santafesinian schools

Our last practical work for ECO – Materials Design was to plan a didactic sequence using at least one Web 2.0 tool. A couple of classmates and I had to teach present continuous and clothes, so we developed our sequence using Voki, which allows users to create customized talking characters. Our idea 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 can say that we didn’t make as much use of Web 2.0 tools as we could have done. In most of our activities we used flashcards to elicit vocabulary and play games, and printed worksheets to learn and practise the present progressive. The only technological tools we used were an old fashion video on Youtube and Voki so, in this sense, the work left a bit to be desired . Looking back, I think we could have made the lesson a lot more modern and technological.

However, thinking about the reality of the few Santafesinian schools I know, I wonder whether we would be able to carry out even this simple task with Voki. Public and most of private schools in my city haven’t got internet connection (in fact, I downloaded the Youtube video and made a screenshot of my Voki sample to show our classmates the lesson plan), many of the netbooks the National Government gave students (Conectar Igualdad programme) do not work, and lessons this year have been incredibly fragmented thanks to holidays, strikes and teacher training. So, if we were to teach this didactic sequence in a real school to real students… would be able to?

A little bit of humour? to close. This cartoon represents a little bit what I mention in the last paragraph. 

References:

Picture retrieved from this page.

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.

Being creative with your Google search

Lately, I’ve been thinking that people are not very creative when they google stuff. Most of people don’t realise the potential an internet searcher such as Google has got. I mean, you can find literally anything just by googling it. And by anything, I really mean it! There are tutorials, facts, books, videos, jokes, people asking and answering the same things I want to know, recipes, maps and many others, no matter how silly, strange or badly-spelled the search is. If Google doesn’t find it… it probably doesn’t exist.

Thanks to this searcher I found many of the tools I used when doing my teaching practices recently. I just typed ‘how to…’ and hundreds of entries appeared. Among the tools I found, there were an IPhoneconversation generator and a video that taught me to design a leaflet in Microsoft Word. I didn’t even know the latter had so many templates ready to use! I also downloaded two free books on the task-based approach and found a list of tongue twisters to practice food items’ pronunciation, which my students loved.

Apart from being an internet searcher, Google also offers many other different services and apps, which could be very useful for the ELT teacher. Among them, there are Google books (which allows people to search and preview thousands of books freely), Scholar Google (which shows university articles on hundreds of different topics), Google Drive (a cloud storage site) and Google for Education (which offers tools and materials for both students and teachers).

To conclude, there are an infinite number of useful tools to use in the ELT classroom and they are all just a Google search away! 

Picture retrieved from this link.

Working with selfies in the ELT classroom

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk called ‘Selfies: a fast track to boost students’ motivation’ delivered by Mathilde Verillaud. The talk was, as the title says, using ‘selfies’ in the ELT classroom, which is something I couldn’t imagine until I went to listen to Mathilde.

Personally, I am very into photography. However, I’d never thought of using these kind of self-portraits in the classroom… mainly because I didn’t consider them to be real photography. I changed my mind a bit after the talk, though.

Mathilde talked about her work with Chinese students and her project with selfies. First, she taught them some basic rules of photography such as the rule of thirds, perspectives, taking into account the background, among others. Then, the students took their own selfies, and finally they used those pictures to carry out many different activities like writing poetry and stories, creating a gallery, eliciting ideas and many more.

Selfies are a way of showing your life and presenting yourself to the world. A project with selfies is not only fun, but also opens up the opportunity for an infinite number of subsequent activities.

The selfies, so fashionable nowadays, are a way of engaging our students. By using them, we can show them that they can mix English with things they do every day – taking pictures of themselves and their lives. We can also help them realise all the things a picture tells about someone and, of course, make the English lesson a lot more enjoyable and updated with practically no more materials than a smartphone. 

A famous selfie to close! This selfie was taken by Ellen Degeneres at the 2014 Academy Awards Ceremony and it was one of the most retweeted photos ever.

And also, the most perfectly-timed selfie I've ever seen. This one was taken during a Chelsea match.

There is an example of Mathilde's project in this link.

SAMR and TPACK models in the classroom

SAMR and TPACK are two models that reflect on the integration of technology in the classroom.

The former presents four different levels according to how much technology influences a specific task in the classroom. The levels go from ‘Substitution’, in which we just replace old tools with new ones, to ‘Redefinition’, in which it is technology the one who enables students to carry out the task.

The latter, on the other hand, combines three knowledge areas: content knowledge, technological knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. The three of them work together to increase students’ motivation and make the content more accessible.  The content is the subject we are working with; the pedagogy makes reference to how we are going to work; and the technology refers to which tool we are going to use to make the content more accessible to our students while supporting the pedagogical choices we’ve made.

In our second practical work in ECO II, we worked in groups and developed a didactic sequence in which we took into account these models to integrate some technological tools. There, we reflected on the use of technology in the classroom and thought about how sometimes we use it just for the sake of being ‘modern’ and ‘up-to-date’ but without any real purpose, advantage or even coherence with the rest of the work.

So, from now onwards, when I plan on using technology for a specific task, I am going to ask myself: Do I really need this tool? Why? Could we carry out this task without it? Is it going to make the task easier? Has it got any disadvantage? Have we got the necessary resources in this institution so as to use this tool? 

References:
SAMR in 120 seconds. Video available here.
SAMR picture retrieved from this link.
TPACK in 2 minutes. Video available here.
TPACK picture retrieved from this link.

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.