Russell Stannard is the founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com. He is also an associate trainer at NILE where he runs courses in the Flipped Classroom and tutors on the MA programme. Today, he joins us ahead of his webinar ‘How can we blend our learning effectively? Tools and Principles’ to preview the topic.
The reality is we all blend our learning these days. Nearly all learning is a combination of face to face delivery and the use of some technology, whether used in the class or outside.
Common problems in ELT blends
The tendency in ELT has been for these blended learning courses to develop out of traditional face to face courses. This can often lead to several problems.
- There is a lack of planning between the F2F component and the digital content.
- Courses often become very big with more content than most students will ever be able to work through.
- The links, videos, audio and other digital content tends to be very disorganized.
- A lot of the digital content tends to be very individually based.
These are perhaps the four biggest problems I have come across, though there are many more. I must admit that in the past, I have definitely made some of these mistakes myself!
Being organised
When you blend your courses, you have to be organised. One way to do this is by choosing a platform that allows you to save and organise your content in one place so that students can easily access it. Moodle, Blackboard and Schoology are just some examples. I think Edmodo is a very good tool and the Facebook layout makes it very easy to use. It is also free and really easy to set up.
Edmodo allows you to organise folders with all your links and files in one place. You can create discussions, set up quizzes, set assignments etc all from one site. What is more you can track all your students work and it even keeps a database of all their marks. The security features are also excellent. Each group you create has a passcode and so you can control access and even lock a class once all the students are logged in, so that now lurkers or outside students can join. It even allows you to moderate your student’s posts before they go live
The amount of content
It is a really good idea to distinguish between what is core learning content and what is extra. Blended courses tend to end up with long lists of ‘useful’ links and content but that can overwhelm the students. I suggest firstly being very selective with what content you share with your students and secondly link it to your lessons. For example, if you come across a useful site for studying vocabulary, like Quizlet, then introduce it in the class and even link it into your lessons. This way students are more likely to make use of the technology. Blended courses are meant to link together and the total impact should be bigger than the sum of the parts, so the key is how you combine and work the F2F and digital.
Group work
It is getting easier and easier to set up collaborative work outside the class. In fact Edmodo can really facilitate this and you can even put your students into groups. As I have pointed out, a lot of the digital content that teachers share, tends to lead to students working on their own so look for opportunities to set up collaborative work.
Russell will be covering Edmodo and looking at the issues around blended learning in his up and coming webinar on April 26th and 27th. If you’re interested in joining this free session, click the link to register below.
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