Blended Learning and Blendspace

Blended learning and Blendspace

Hello, everyone. Today I am going to briefly talk about blended learning.

The definition of blended learning

To simply put, face-to-face classroom methods are combined with online educational tools and activities in a blended learning programme while e-learning is totally based on online classrooms.

Benefits of blended learning

• More individualized learning (leaners work on at their own pace)
• To motivate students’ autonomy
• Time and money saving (once it is created and kept being used after)
• No limitation on learning space as long as learners have access to PC and the internet
• Can supplement constraints of face-to-face classroom learning (time/ leaner’s proficiency gap/material and activity preparation)
• No limitation on times of reviewing what learners have learned

Disadvantaged of blended learning

• Difficult to develop high qualified programme and expensive at the first developing stage
• The success of learning depends too much on students themselves because there no teacher(monitor) exists
• Technical difficulties (it requires proper digital equipment (both software and hardware) to operate properly)
• More burden to teachers (even consider aesthetic aspects)

Blended learning tool-  BlendSpace "Create digital lessons in 5 minutes!"
Go to the website: https://www.tes.com/lessons

How to use?

As long as you have a google account, you can log in without any bothering sign-up process. When you log in, you will see already created featured lessons in the dashboard.

To try one out or actually take a lesson about a particular course, you can just go to the Gallery. You will immediately see existing digital lessons vary from math to fun animal things.

Now, let's try make our own online lesson using this tool for our students' extra work! :)

Click "Lesson" and type the title of your lesson. Then you will have your blank online learning space right away as seen blow. 

For example, I will try making an online lesson for basic English. I can search online materials related to it using the search box on the right side of your template. As you can see below pictures, the searching engines are tes, youtube, goolge, search gooru, flickr and also my own video clips can uploaded.

 

I believe this tool will be very useful to give students extra lessons and work. Once the teacher have created a lesson, she can keep updating it and students can easily join the class by just entering a class code!

My thoughts on blended learning in ESL context 

When we are to implement blended learning, the leaners' autonomy and self-motivation is crucially required to keep them on track. Since no one is going to monitor and give feedback immediately while learning happening online, it is really tempting to just skip a few pages or unfold model answers even before having a thought on questions. Or even learners might consider learning outside the classroom not that serious. Thus, no matter the purpose and contents it might be, for effective blended learning, some rules or sort of devices to control online learning alongside the off-line class will be first needed.