Let's blend learning!

We all know the traditional approach to teaching, the teacher standing in front of the classroom interacting with the students. This method has prevailed over the years; however, in the last decades a new component has been added to the relationship – the internet – and this gave rise to a new approach called blended learning.

In Blended Learning: Creating LearningOpportunities for Language Learner, Debora Marsh (2012) states that as language teachers we have always used a blend of teaching approaches since we have combined different methods and strategies to maximise learning. What is new is that the new technologies have invaded our students’ lives; we can find them inside and outside the classroom, and we should profit from them. ‘The Internet, in particular the emergence of Web 2.0, represents a powerful medium to teach and learn foreign languages’ (Marshal, 2012).

But, what is blended learning? The Universityof Western Sidney (2013) defines it as ‘a strategic and systematic approach to combining times and modes of learning, integrating the best aspects of face-to-face and online interactions for each discipline, using appropriate ICTs’ (p. 5). This short video explains this same thing in a very clear and interactive way (and it is narrated with a cute French accent!). Besides, it has asecond part where the benefits of this approach are dealt with.

Debora Marsh also presents the advantages of this way of teaching. I will include here the 3 strengths I consider more important, but you can read the whole list in her book. Blended learning provides:

·         more personalized learning support.

·         flexible study, anytime or anywhere, to meet learners’ needs.

·         a place to practice the target language beyond the classroom.

I consider the last one particularly important in a foreign language context as the one we have in Argentina given the fact that, before, the classroom was the only place where the student could practice the language receiving feedback from a teacher. Now, learners can practice at home whenever and wherever they want and teachers can use their results to plan the subsequent lessons.

I earnestly believe that, despite the lack of resources in many Argentinian schools, we should capitalize from the ones we have and start trying to create a balance between face-to-face and online learning. Students will appreciate our efforts to include new and engaging ways of teaching and learning and will be motivated to participate and actively respond to the proposed tasks and activities. Let’s give it a chance and blend learning! 

Web 2.0 projects in Santafesinian schools.

As its title indicates, this blog was created as a learning journal in one of the subjects in my teacher training programme – ECO: Materials design. It was in this same area that my classmates and I were asked to plan a didactic sequence for a specific imaginary course including one or more Web 2.0 resource(s) and present a model of the final outcome we would get from our students. My group and I were assigned to teach irregular verbs in the past simple. We had total freedom as regards which 2.0 programme to use, and after having fun trying different options we decided to work with Storybird.

Storybird is a visual storytelling community where you can read other authors’ stories and create your own using a wide variety of artworks from different artists. What’s more, you can choose between a picture book, with short texts and big pictures, poetry, or longform, which is more similar to a whole book. We found this page a really interesting resource for students to use their creativity and let their imagination run wild, and we planned a lesson around the topic ‘the ancient world’. You can see a model of the final outcome here; in this case it is an Egyptian legend.

The benefits of web 2.0 have been widely discussed in this blog. Now, when it comes to Santafesinian schools, to what extent can we profit from them? Even though most of the schools have a computer lab, the machines are insufficient for the number of students. Learners from other institutions have netbooks provided by ‘Conectar Igualdad’ but the building doesn’t have internet connection. This shows that most of the proposed projects or didactic sequences couldn’t be carried out at most of the schools in this province.

However, the majority of the students do have internet connection and computers at home, and if they don’t, they have smartphones with access to the Internet. What we can do is to use our lessons to teach them how to use certain resources and how to select appropriate and reliable information as well as teaching the linguistic contents. Once the students are in their houses they can advance in the project and share the outcomes in social networks or other means. In that way we will be combining face to face with online teaching, i.e., blending learning. This will be the main topic of my next post.

Word clouds and virtual talking characters.

Last Monday we worked with two interesting tools that we can introduce to our classrooms; word clouds and Voki:

A word cloud is ‘an image composed of words used in a particular text or subject, in which the size of each word indicates its frequency or importance’ (Oxford dictionary). In the lesson, our teacher asked us to create a word cloud with a definition/description of a concept related to web 2.0 and post it on Edmodo. The rest of our classmates had to guess what expression we were referring to. This is just an example of how we can work with word clouds with our students, but we could also use them for brainstorming, or to make learners visualize the most important words/ideas in a text. In this post in Edudemic you will find 5 ways to work with word clouds and in this slideshare there are other practical examples. 

Our teacher suggested us to use tagxedo, wordle or tagul, and I’ve been trying other word cloud generators and I would also like to recommend image chef. It is very easer-friendly, it has really nice fonts and you can create a word mosaic with different standard shapes or you can draw your own. I’ve created one with words related to this subject, ECO II.

Voki is an educational tool that allows users to create their very own talking character. Given the fact that we can choose different accents for the characters, it can be useful to prepare presentations since it may catch students’ attention. It might be also beneficial for those students who are rather shy as they can record themselves and speak through a character. Blabberize is a similar tool where you can upload any picture and record yourself to make it say whatever you want. Placing your character’s mouth is a bit complicated but you can always place it, try it, come back and modify it how many times you need. Give it a chance!

I highly recommend you to go and check these two useful tools; there are multiple ways of working with them and your students will definitely enjoy them.

The new Web.

Web 2.0 is a term introduced by O'Reilly Media in 2003 and refers to the second generation of the World Wide Web. It provides a level user interaction that was not available before. Thanks to Web 2.0 the Internet has evolved from a collection of static pages into a much more dynamic and interconnected network, with "online communities" and software services that make it even easier to share information and foster self-publishing, participation and collaboration.

Some examples of features considered to be part of Web 2.0 are blogs, YouTube and wikis. In this article by Peter Duffy you will find a description of each of them, its characteristics and educational benefits, and strategies for using them in teaching and learning. Social networks are also an important part of this Web evolution.

Introducing Web 2.0 advances into our classrooms can be helpful to our students – members of the Y or Z generations (See post 6) –, who benefit from the effective inclusion of technology. This kind of sites improve knowledge construction since, in a Web 2.0 environment, learning is not only to acquire but also to create; we can learn and comprehend knowledge through constructing it. Wikis are an example a new feature that emphasizes the process of knowledge co-construction.

Web 2.0 also enhances learners’ learning motivation. Traditional teaching does not satisfy the needs of Digital natives anymore. Even when using a computer, students will get bored if they are not motivated. By using Web 2.0 we can combine learning with games, enhance interaction and communication with others and create more opportunities for social contact.

What is more, by using blogs or social networks students can demonstrate critical thinking, take creative risks and design elements. In doing so, the students acquire creative, critical, communicative, and collaborative skills that may be useful to them in both scholarly and professional contexts.

As it can be seen, Web 2.0 technology is here to make our Internet experience easier, better and more social. As teachers, we should not overlook its features but rather try to make use of them to enhance knowledge co-construction, collaborative learning and our student’s critical and creative thinking. 

Generation Y.

Not long ago, I wrote about technology and Digital Natives (See post 2). This last concept can easily be associated with Generation Y and even more with Generation Z. What am I talking about?

Comparison among different generations from Baby Boomers to Generation Alpha
(link to article with full size picture)

Even though there is no agreement on the exact dates, Generation Y – also called Millennials –  is said to encompass those who were born between 1981 and 2000, and generation Z to those born after the beginning of the XXI century. Both generations share a lot of characteristics and bring some challenges to the classroom. As part of the Gen Y – I was born in 1993 –, I find its features very familiar, but in case you don’t, I will briefly state those traits that may be important for teachers and how can we profit from them.

• Multi-tasking: one of Millennials’ most striking characteristics is their ability to simultaneously talk, listen to music, text, browse the Internet and do homework, among others. This gives us the possibility to introduce technology into the classroom, but we should always try to enhance AND transform teaching without forgetting the pedagogical and content knowledge. (See post 5) Remember that technology is just a tool not the tool.

• Tech-savy: they are comfortable with technology and even see it as an integral part of their lives. They seek immediate information and understanding from the web and videos, not by looking through a textbook. As EFL educators, we should teach them how to critically evaluate online information since not everything we find on the Internet can be considered reliable. (See post 3)
• Flexibility: they value comfort and informality over rules and deadlines. Instead of neglecting this aspect, we should adopt teaching strategies that work with them; otherwise, students will feel bored and learning will be minimized.

• Kinaesthetic and visual learning styles: they are visual and learn by doing. The traditional old way of schooling will not work with Millennials. Our effectiveness will depend on our ability to adapt instruction to our learners’ needs.
• Feedback-dependent: Generation Y craves attention in the forms of feedback and guidance and seek frequent praise and reassurance. We should act as facilitators guiding them and always providing -gentle- error correction.

All this leads us to think –again – about the importance of becoming acquainted with our learners’ characteristics, capitalize from them and try to include such a beneficial tool as technology in our classrooms in order to transform our teaching practices and enhance our students’ learning.

For more information on Generation Y, I suggest you to read this PDF file by PeterReilly which describes Millennials characteristics and provides teaching strategies to profit from them.

T³ - Transforming Teaching through Technology.

In my previous post I wrote about digital literacies, how they are changing communication and the importance of teaching them to our students if we want them to be fully functional citizens. Some teachers try to do this – and their effort is valuable – by using computers or new technologies in the classroom. But this alone is not enough. The idea is that technology not only enhances our teaching but rather transforms it. Likewise, we must take into account other primitive forms of knowledge besides the technological – pedagogical and content knowledge. Those ideas are described in two models for understanding technology integration: SAMR and TPACK.

The SAMR model, developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, provides a framework to answer the question of what types of technology use would have greater or lesser effects upon student learning through four levels:

Substitution: Technology is used as a direct substitute for what you might do already, with no functional change.

• Augmentation: Technology is a direct substitute, but there is functional improvement over what you did without the technology.
• Modification: Technology allows you to significantly redesign the task.
• Redefinition: Technology allows you to do what was previously not possible.
• Substitution and Augmentation enhance our teaching; Modification and Redefinition transform it.

In this video you will find a useful analogy between this model and Starbucks, which may help to understand SAMR better.

The TPACK model looks at the collaboration between technology, pedagogy, and content and emphasizes the new kinds of knowledge that lie at the intersections between them, especially at the intersection of all three circles: the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). Again, this short video may be helpful to grasp the idea of the model.

I consider these two models highly valuable; they make us realize that using videos, a computer or other technological devices or software is not enough. We should not forget that we are teaching a language, the way in which we should teach it, and how technology can help us transform our tasks to benefit learning.

If you are interested in the topic, I suggest you to read this PDF file that showcases some of the ways the SAMR model can be applied in different curricular areas. 

Digital literacies – a revolution in communication.

Nicky Hockly published a very interesting article on digital literacies where she explains what they are, why it is so important to include them in our classrooms and the different sub-skills that we can find. In this post, I will concentrate on the definition and how they have revolutionized communication. 

In the article, Hockly asserts that ‘digital literacies refer to our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal.’ That is to say, it is not limited to how to use technology but it includes the social practices that surround the use of new media.  As we all know, communication nowadays is increasingly digitally mediated so, if we want our learners to be communicatively competent, they need to learn digital skills.

In ‘Digital Literacies’, Julia Gillen and David Barton explain how a revolution in communication is taking place since reading and writing are being affected by digital literacies: texts are becoming intensely multimodal, that is, image is ever-increasingly appearing with writing, and even displacing writing where it had previously been dominant. Also, screens (of the digital media) are replacing the page and the book as the dominant media.

Simultaneously, the concept of ‘design’ appears. Both the making of text and the reading of text demands much more attention to all possible means of making meaning. In text-making, design requires the apt use of all resources (modes, genres, syntax, font, layout) appropriate to content and to audience. Design is also at work in text ‘reception’: multimodal texts, with their organisation on visual principles, and their multiple entry points offer and even expect the reader to construct the order of reading for her/himself. That is to say, the reader is not only reader but he/she also becomes the author of the text.

As we can see, in this not-that-new digital world, not only texts or the media where they appear change but also the role of text-maker and text-receiver. As teachers, if we want our students to be fully functional citizens in the 21^st century, we should be acquainted with this new literacies and promote their development in our classrooms. For that, we should bear in mind that developing digital literacies means working to enable students to develop their understandings of and skills in using certain tools, not as decontextualized competencies but in ways that are connected to other aspects of their learning.