Blended Learning: a different way of conceiving education

           Along this year we have analysed the use of various technological tools for material designing and classroom work. Therefore, we would like to introduce you to blended learning which, as explained by Frederic Skrzypek, is the mixture of two models: online teaching and face to face teaching.
           There are four main blended learning models we can work with:

•  Lab rotation: students will move in and out of a classroom to a computer lab. The data from the content in the leanring lab informs the instruction in the classroom.
•  Class rotation: students are divided into small groups which will move across different stations –one will be with the teacher, two of the other may include work with computers and another group can work on their own, integrating information for their project or practising.
•  Flex: there are smaller rooms within the lab for students to work in groups and the teacher can intervene for a seminar or direct instruction.
• Pod: 'school within a school’. Each pod might have multiple grade levels. The role of the teacher is discrete (an adviser, a behaviour specialist, an instructor to support each pod).

           These models are intended to give students more control over their own learning and allow teachers to personalize instructions and feedback since they can work with the small groups.
           We have had the opportunity of working with blended learning as students at Brown Institute since many subjects integrate the use of virtual classrooms at the Institute’s Moodle platform. Some other subjects gave us the possibility of working with Edmodo and for other subjects we are part of Facebook groups. They are all different tools used to complement face to face teaching and learning at the institute. Teachers post there our assignments and homework so as to remind us of them but they also create forums (on Moodle) for us to debate and express our opinions on several topics related to the specifics of each subject. If we wish to express our opinion in Edmodo or Facebook, we can comment on a particular publication and respond to it. All in all, our experience using these tools have helped us remind our assignments, they have become a repository of the material used along the year and we regard them as good elements to mix with face to face teaching.
           However, we would like to highlight again -as we have mentioned in older posts - that the inclusion of technology in the classroom needs to have a clear purpose and, ideally, it has to do more for our teaching than substituting pen and pencil work. According to the SAMR model, substitution is the lowest level of the hierarchy and we should aim for redefinition of our tasks. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to take into consideration the fact that we should always use these tools as complements and not as a replacement. That is to say, we should share digitally what we cannot show to our students in the classroom and the works we ask them to do should include ICTs only with a clear purpose, not just to make a simple work more complex. We believe that this is the best way to work with blended learning and that it should help our students in their learning process.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIh4jJlvF44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xMqJmMcME0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5txJfv2q0c

Further reading:

https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/why-we-still-need-face-face-teaching-digital-age

Useful digital tools for material designing: Wordclouds and Voki

           We would like to share with you our personal experience when working at the Institute with these digital tools a few weeks ago, one of our teachers at Brown presented the idea of working with these resources so as to integrate them in our lessons.
          First of all we want to make clear what wordclouds are. By means of wordclouds generators such as wordclouds or tagul we can create ‘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, 2016). Here is an example:

           These could be thought as not so relevant technologies to manage when thinking of material designing but it is important for us, future teachers of English, because our field of study sees languaage as a whole, being the written word an integral part of it. We can use them with different texts, we can also provide them as material during our lessons so the students can work on the words present in the clouds or we can even encourage them to produce their own and share them with the rest of the class. The possibilities are endless and the use each of us make of them depends on our personal choice since they offer many opportunities by being such a flexible tool.

           For instance, the ones you can see above are the ones we produced to share some related concepts with the rest of our classmates in a subject where we work on material designing and ICTs integration for this purpose. They are simple and easy to read but there are many other shapes, fonts, colours and sizes to choose so that wordclouds can adapt to any topic and to all kinds of needs, you just need to include words in isolation or you can paste a selected text.

           As regards Voki, the other tool we have used in this lesson, we can say that it is another tool we can use to integrate ICTs in the classroom. They mix written and spoken language since

you can also paste a previously selected text  and then, a cartoon character would ‘recite’ it aloud. It is an interesting tool since it is innovative and it definitively calls students’ attention but we, as future teachers of English, dislike the fact that the characters sound like robots and pronunciation is hindered, affecting the perception of connected speech, That is why we should consider using the microphone function where teachers or students can record themselves.
           All in all, we can conclude that the experience of using these tools has been enriching because we could be acquainted with different kinds of devises for designing material which we were not used to work with, being these two different ways of integrating ICTs into the classroom.
Sources:
http://www.voki.com/
http://www.wordclouds.com/

Is a school without specific subjects feasible?

Hugo Pardo Kuklinski

At least this is what Hugo Pardo Kuklinski believes. Having attended to his talk at Universidad Nacional del Litoral on September, 28th, we wonder: can we work through projects at workshops instead of following strict curriculums for every subject?  He proposes that teachers in this ideal context should be ‘mediators’ to which turn for help or guidance only, but not so a necessary actor that students cannot work if he or she is not around. Something Hugo tries to achieve by letting students work in “networks” (in groups that are in constant connection) is that they become independent learners.

You might be thinking “Okay, so I need to change the whole system if I want to create this learning environment, how do I do it?” Hugo Pardo gave us an insight on how he tried to change the system in his project “SERo” in Colombia. To give you an idea of what this project was about we can say that during his stay at Colombia he and his coworkers visited a school where they made all sort of change. They modified the sitting arragement in the classrooms challening the idea that the teacher should be always the center of attention in front of the class. In order to do this, they encouraged group work and project work as well. He admits that since it was a totally different way of teaching which tried to turn upside down everything, he and his co-workers found some resistance among parents and teachers which led the project to ‘fail’. He also mentions that students had a rough time in adapting to this new learning environment because of the drastic change. Seeing this, we came to the conclusion that if teachers and schools are trying to adopt the “networking” method, they should create a new school from scratch or they should do it gradually on existent schools.

On the other hand, he also told us of the same kind of project taking place in our country. Due to the fact that the context was so different to the one in Colombia, it was a success and students together with the teachers at such school enjoyed the experience and were motivated to participate. Therefore, we can state that is worth it to take the risk of getting out of our comfort zone so as to try new ‘methodologies’ and practices which can motivate our students to go to school with renewed energies and expectations.

It is a fact that nowadays people need to be creative, innovative, and independent as well as able to work in cooperative groups if they wish to succeed in what they want to do (all concepts mentioned by Pardo in his talk), so the learning environment should be one in which this characteristics are encouraged. What is more, the inclusion of ICTs in the education of 21^st century students is a must for them to have all the necessary tools to succeed in further activities.

To read more about Hugo Pardo’s projects you can visit www.outliersschool.net or his  blog www.digitalismo.com/blog.

SAMR Model and the Transformation of Teaching and Learning

           When we think about including ICTs in the classroom, we need to have a clear purpose for doing so; that is to say, we should not use technologies just because they might be a new interesting tool to catch student’s attention. To show you this, we would like to share a lesson we planned. Here we made use of Power Point to practise vocabulary related to food together with likes and dislikes. The Power Point presentation aimed to be an example of the student’s final task which is one of the last parts of the project. To see the lesson plan in depth follow this link.

           After sharing our lesson plan with our classmates at the institute, we were introduced to the SAMR model proposed by Puentedura. “Dr. Ruben Puentedura is the Founder and President of Hippasus, a consulting firm based in Western Massachusetts, focusing on transformative applications of information technologies to education. He has implemented these approaches for over twenty-five years at a range of K-20 educational institutions, as well as health and arts organizations. He is the creator of the SAMR model for selecting, using, and evaluating technology in education, which currently guides the work of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, as well as projects in Vermont and Sweden. His current work explores new directions in mobile computing, digital storytelling, learning analytics, and educational gaming, focusing on applications in areas where they have not been traditionally employed. He can be reached at rubenrp@hippasus.com.” (Puentedura, 2004)

           According to the model presented in this picture, we could classify our Power Point presentation at the substitution level since it plays an enhancement role in the teaching and learning process. We choose to place our presentation in the substitution level because the same task can also be achieved by using non-digital tools such as flashcards.

           As we can see in the picture above, the higher levels of the hierarchy correspond with the actual transformation of tasks by using ICTs to redesign them in a way that would be inconceivable otherwise.

In order to take our presentation higher in the hierarchy, we thought of replacing the Power Point presentation with a video students would create in groups about the food they like or don’t like. They will share the videos on Youtube. After they have done so, we will tell them they have to classify the food present in the videos as healthy or unhealthy so as to reflect on our eating habits.

           For further explanation of the SAMR model you can watch the following video:

- 
Source:
Puentedura, Ruben R, 2004 . Retrieved September 27 2016 from
  http://www.hippasus.com/team/rrpuentedura.html

Digital Literacies: The Importance of Detecting Reliable Information

           According to Nicky Hockly ‘digital literacies refer to our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal’. Two of their most important subskills are search and information literacies, that is to say ‘the ability not only to find information amongst the mass of sites and sources afforded by technologies, but also to evaluate that information.’ We consider fundamental for our students to know when to trust what they are reading online and when to suspect the information is not reliable. In order to do this we can encourage them to pay attention to the layout, whether the sources, authors, date of last update, copyright and address are present on the web page or not. So as to help them develop these subskills we could work with guidelines similar to the ones offered by the British Council and Lesley University (see reference).

           In our opinion, teachers should also try to fully develop these subskills since the websites that offer the opportunity to design material are not always reliable.  As teachers, we need to be aware of the aforementioned factors so as to choose which websites to use and which not to. In our experience, we have worked with Discovery Education’s page which we found trustworthy, even though we had troubles downloading the word-search puzzle created there. This is why we will not share the PDF version with you. Another reason is that the size of the font used by the page was too small, and the label of 'Discovery Education' was too big.

During this lesson, we tell our students -at primary school- a story where the different animals play the different instruments. This word-search puzzle allows them to identify the written words and become acquainted with their spelling.
We invite you to try this tools and if you find some other webpage where to create a word-search puzzle with a better printed version please leave a comment and share it.

References:

• Hockly, Nicky. (2013) Digital literacies: What are they and why should we care? (https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/digital-literacies-what-are-they-why-should-we-care)

• Lesley University (2007). Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria for the Classroom (https://sites.google.com/site/eiawebsite/Home/evaluating-websites-lesley-univ)
• http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/WordSearchSetupForm.asp?campaign=flyout_teachers_puzzle_wordcross

Digital Natives and Teaching

           An important aspect to take into account in material designing is the fact that most of our students are regarded as ‘digital natives’. This is a term coined by Marc Prensky and it means that they were born surrounded by technology and know how to use it ‘instinctively’. With this kind of students we can use online material and design activities which are meant to be solved with their computers or even with their cell phones.

           Although it is true that most of our students are ‘digital literates’ of the digital language, not all of them are. In some contexts, many students do not have internet access or computers at their homes because of different political and social situations they live in. We should be aware of this and base our teaching on what they have experienced and on the knowledge they have about technology. Moreover, some students may allege that they know a great deal about technology and software while they may not know basic tools such as Word Processor or information-searching. We should encourage them to learn more about these tools so they can become ‘digital literates’ and profit from them.
           Taking into account that technology will keep being developed and will become a more essential tool in people’s lives, teachers should guarantee that every student has a fair chance in developing his/her digital skills. In our country, Argentina, we have the advantage of having the netbooks provided by the State (from the Conectar Igualdad program) and we should not forget that. It is true that they not always work and that schools may have Wi-Fi connection problems, but it is the teacher’s task to help students and guide them to solve the problems they may have with the equipment.

           Once that we have the necessary equipment, we can design tasks that include technological tools to solve them. The teacher should try his/her best to make tasks meaningful, so students can be more engaged in doing them.

           For more information on this topic, you can read Marc Prensky’s article on ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’ following this link: https://edorigami.wikispaces.com/file/view/PRENSKY+-+DIGITAL+NATIVES+AND+IMMIGRANTS+1.PDF

Why should I consider material designing as an option?

No matter where you live, or the level of English you are teaching at, we are sure you have said or heard someone say:  “My students cannot follow the book that we use in class”, “The activities that are in it are dull and boring”, “The content and topics do not fit my students’ interests and context”.  The major reasons for this incoherence in the relation content-students seem to lay in the fact that coursebooks are commercial materials. This means that the designers and publishing houses in charge of producing coursebooks aim at a general public with the purpose of addressing the majority of the EFL market. In other words, commercial materials like coursebooks “are necessarily generic and not aimed at any specific group of learners or any particular cultural or educational context.” (Howard & Major, 2005:101) These characteristics led teachers around the world to design their own materials so as to contextualise the contents and activities.

           There may be plenty of reasons why teachers decide to design their own teaching material. For example, teachers and students might not have the amount of money that is required to purchase commercial coursebooks. The coursebook may not fit the students’ interests or way and pace of learning. Another relevantaspect that is entailed in the decision of choosing either pre-designed material or personalised material is the theories of learning and teaching we base our practices on. This is crucial for our lessons to be coherent and logically organised.

          It is important to make clear that we do not assume material designing as an easy task that all teachers must involve themselves in. We are aware of the difficulties and amount of time that the task of designing carries. Wealso need to be aware that the outcome we must expect will not have the same ‘professional’ appearance as commercially produced materials. Here, different technological tools will aid us in the production of attractive and useful materials. Moreover, some other materials require handicraft abilities on the part of the teacher. We have to be aware of our capabilities, skills, and, also our weak points.

        As the teacher’s task is to help students to learn the language, we have to provide the materials that will help us to achieve that aim. It is in our power, as long as the educational context is flexible, to choose whether a commercially produced material or a more personalised self-designed material is more appropriate in a specific occasion. Do not forget that it is our task, and no one else’s, to choose what to teach and how to teach it, providing that we have clear our teaching goals.

Resources

Howard, J. and Major, J. (2005) Guidelines for designing effective English language teaching materials. Seoul, South Korea: PAAL9, Oct 2004. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics: 101-109.
http://www.paaljapan.org/resources/proceedings/PAAL9/pdf/Howard.pdf. (Conference Contribution - Published)