What is Blended Learning?

Blended learning combines face to face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities to form an integrated instructional approach. In the past, digital materials have served in a supplementary role, helping to support face to face instruction. The goal of a blended approach is to join the best aspects of both face to face and online instruction. Classroom time can be used to engage students in advanced interactive experiences.  Meanwhile, the online portion of the classes can provide students with multimedia-rich content at any time of day, anywhere the student has Internet access, from school to the coffee shop or the students’ homes. This allows for an increase in scheduling flexibility.

In addition to flexibility and convenience for students,  there is evidence that a blended instructional approach can result in learning outcome gains and increased enrollment motivation.

The following scheme, from the blog Free Technology For Teachers, sums up how an educator can take advantage of using tools, such as a blog or a wiki, as a complement of traditional ELT:

What is Blended Learning?

Credits: Educators Technology

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and ICT Tools

Many teachers use Bloom's Taxonomy and Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in developing and structuring their teaching & learning experiences. Bloom's Digital taxonomy is an attempt to marry Bloom's revised taxonomy and the key verbs to digital approaches and tools. This is not a replacements to the verbs in the revised taxonomy, rather it suppliments and supports these by including recent developments, processes and tools.

Many of these tools that are FOSS (Free or Open Source Software). Click here for a comparison between Traditional and Digital approaches.

So what is Bloom's Taxonomy?

Benjamin Bloom developed, in 1956, while working at the University of Chicago, a theory on Educational Objectives. He proposed 3 domains or areas:

- Cognitive - person's ability to process and utilize information (thinking), this is what Bloom's Digital Taxonomy is based on;

- Affective - This is the role of feeling and attitudes in the learning/education process;

- Psychomotor - This is manipulative or physical skills.

Bloom's Taxonomy is a taxonomy of activities and behaviours that exemplify Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS). Bloom's allows use to rank and structure different classroom activities and plan the learning process. In 2001, Lorin Anderson and others revised Bloom's original work, creating Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.

Bloom’s and Revised Bloom's give us a learning process:

- Before you can understand a concept or fact you must remember it;

- To apply a concept you must understand it first;

- To evaluate a process you must have analysed it.Each layer builds on the previous. The creative process naturally incorporates these elements. You must remember (even if you are learning as you go), understand and apply these principles and concepts, analyse and evaluate the success of your design, the process and concept.

However, we don't need to start at lower order skills and then build piecemeal throught the taxonomy towards higher order thinking like creativity. By providing a suitably scaffolded task, the lower order skills of remembering and understanding become inherent in the learning process. By challenging our students to be analytical, evaluative or creative, they will within these processes develop understanding.

Bloom's Original taxonomy		Bloom's revised taxonomy
Evaluation	(HOTS)	Creating
Synthesis		Evaluating
Analysis		Analysing
Application		Applying
Comprehension		Understanding
Knowledge	(LOTS)	Remembering

HOTS is an abbreviation for Higher Order Thinking Skills and LOTS for Lower Order Thinking Skills.

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. This diagram details Bloom's Revised Taxonomy with some of the original verbs.

Diagram of Bloom's revised Taxonomy showing the flow and process of learning. - A Churches

If you want to learn more about Bloom's Revised/Digital Taxonomy, read here.

Web 2.0 Tutorials

Without a doubt one of the best resources on the web for web2.0 Technologies is the commoncraft show. Lee LeFever's productions are clear, simple and to the point; most of all they are "In Plain English". Here are the links:

• http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter
• http://www.commoncraft.com/photosharing
• http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english
• http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_show
• http://www.commoncraft.com/blogs
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-googledocs
• http://www.commoncraft.com/mylocation
• http://www.commoncraft.com/wetpaint

SOURCE: Educational Origami

Glogging on Google Drive for Learning

Glog by Susan Oxnevad, 
suggested by my colleague Filipe Mendes @ The Blog Teacher

Wikipedia, redefining reasearch

Implementing Blended Learning

Source: gettingsmart.com via TRACIE'S on Pinterest

Tips for building a community on Facebook

image credits: Business2Community

Here are some authentic and practical ideas that can assist you in using Facebook to engage your students.
Facebook is extremely popular and leads off the list of most used social networks. For teachers who are looking to add a social media aspect to their classroom or even a single lesson, Facebook is nowadays one of the top choices. Engaging your audience by offering them dynamic content can help you to create an engaged community both in and out of the classroom.

Be Short and Precise

When using social media, being precise brings success. Short messages tend to be more useful and will generate more response compared to the longer ones. This is because longer messages tend to lack focus and readers may not find them interesting. A concise message can grab your audience’s attention more easily.The quicker you are able to get your point across, the more likely it is that you will generate a useful reaction from your community.

Question, Question, Question

You can easily spark a discussion by asking your community about their opinions, experiences, and suggestions. You can ask about a particular assignment, suggestions for future work (ie, of the following three books, which would you like to work on next) if your curriculum allows that, or give some sort of incentive for interacting on your page.

Include Media

Whether a still image, video, or music, sharing multimedia content with your community via Facebook is a great way to encourage them to become more engaged. Whether you’re sharing a cool video news story about something cool happening in the math world or a popular foreign language song to your language students, showing your community that all the information they’re learning in school exists in the ‘real world’, too can be an interesting way to get them more interested.

Upload At Appropriate Times

Unless it is part of a class assignment, most teachers don’t want their students spending class time twiddling around on Facebook.  Scheduling or posting content during the ‘after school’ hours is a great way to ‘re-engage’ your community when they might not otherwise be.

By Haword Roze @ Edudemic (slightly abridged)

Using online portfolios in the classroom

Our digital world is transforming the way we learn, and today's teachers are tasked with the challenging job of sifting through the deluge of educational technologies and creating a meaningful learning experience for students.
Next-generation education portfolio platforms - such as Digication, Pathbrite, Taskstream and Epsilen - are one way for teachers to start early and educate students about how they can manage their own academic and professional accomplishments. From using portfolios for giving students educational feedback to the portability of transcripts and official academic documents, new opportunities exist for lifelong learning and sharing.
Here are five best practices for implementing an education portfolio platform in any K-12 or college classroom.

image credits: Carbon Made Portfolios

1. Build in Opportunities for Peer-to-Peer Learning
Focus on the goal of increasing students' digital literacy by fostering a collaborative learning environment where some of the more tech-savvy students can guide and help others learn. These practices can generate trust, offer problem-solving opportunities, and deepen peer-to-peer learning on the educational lessons taught in the course.

2. Create Lessons That Foster Data and Knowledge Curation
Sifting through the endless hoards of information on the Internet is becoming a necessary skill. Students need to learn how to find reliable sources and how to conduct research in an organized and discriminating way. Eleventh-grade English teacher Amy McGeorge of Leadership Public Schools, a high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, began using next-generation education portfolios in the classroom to teach the literary classic Catcher in the Rye. She assigned a digital literary analysis and asked students to create an online portfolio that included what they learned about the characters. The results showed better-than-ever student engagement and understanding of the story.

3. Engaging for All Levels of Learners
One of the biggest challenges for today's large classrooms and high student-to-teacher ratios is offering high-performing students engaging activities that won't hold them back while the teachers focus on students who need additional support. Online portfolio projects are a stimulating activity that allows learners of all levels to deepen their knowledge on a subject matter or assignment while maintaining a common ground with their peers.

4. Develop Organization Skills and Plan for the Future
Instead of sorting through crumpled assignments in the bottoms of backpacks, students are able to login to their online portfolios and find everything in an organized manner. Using tags for common subject areas helps students sort through all of the information they have collected so that they can see the "bigger picture" and be reminded of all the work they have done in a specific area. I saw one example from a graduate level course at the University of Illinois in the School of Library and Information Science. Here, students were given the assignment of creating an online portfolio that showed digital materials reflecting theoretical concepts on gender, race and sexuality learned in the course. Not only did student understanding of the concepts far surpass the classes that weren't using online portfolios, but students also reported high levels of satisfaction with their ability to share their class portfolios with professional and personal contacts beyond the classroom.

5. Not All Online Portfolios are Created Equal
When picking an online portfolio, look for portfolios where the creators remain the owners of the data compiled. It's important that students and users have access to the content of the portfolio beyond the course or college education.
Using online portfolios successfully gives early adopters in the classroom the latitude to teach peers how to master the technology. Learning can be accelerated through the process of independently curating new knowledge and can also be extended beyond the classroom for a long-term collection of academic and professional successes.

By Heather Giles @ Edutopia - Technological Integration (slightly abridged)

Blended Learning Resources by MIT

BLOSSOMS is an MIT educational project in partnership with colleagues in Jordan and Pakistan. Each BLOSSOMS module is a multi-segment educational video to be shown in a high school math or science class, with the in-class teacher leading the students in interactive educational activities between each BLOSSOMS video segment. BLOSSOMS is funded by the Hewlett Foundation with additional funding by the Sloan Foundation and by partners in Jordan and Pakistan.

Check the following video to understand the potential of this tool:

MIT Video - WHY IS THE SKY BLUE AND THE LEAVES GREEN

Blended Learning

Blended learning combines face to face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities to form an integrated instructional approach. In the past, digital materials have served in a supplementary role, helping to support face to face instruction. The goal of a blended approach is to join the best aspects of both face to face and online instruction. Classroom time can be used to engage students in advanced interactive experiences.  Meanwhile, the online portion of the classes can provide students with multimedia-rich content at any time of day, anywhere the student has Internet access, from school to the coffee shop or the students’ homes. This allows for an increase in scheduling flexibility.

In addition to flexibility and convenience for students,  there is evidence that a blended instructional approach can result in learning outcome gains and increased enrollment motivation.

The following scheme, from the blog Free Technology For Teachers, sums up how an educator can take advantage of using tools, such as a blog or a wiki, as a complement of traditional ELT: