BL- 10 golden rules

Golden Rules of Blended Learning

To recap  the main ideas we had been discussing throughout the course, we were requested to state the 10 golden rules of BL or what you might well call the 10 commandments of BL.

1. Balance: Don't overload students. Think about what is essential and what is extra. If you put something in, then you take sth out.
2. Aim:Think about your aims first and the technology afterwards. Take into account the affordances of each tool. Your choice will be driven by your teaching and learning principles. Sometimes they can also be grammar oriented, especially to reach a higher leve.
3. Blend: Link what goes on in the class and the world outside.   Focus on the learner. What matters is what goes in their heads. 
4. Bloom: Review our own classes. Check your activities against the SAMAR model. Higher thinking skills should take place in the class, lower thinking skills can be set for homework.
5. Technology: Stick to a few technologies and learn them well, explore the possibilities and be consistent when using it. Do not try out lots of them superficially and keep changing them.
6. Multimodal: Enlarge the modes information is delivered. The interactions that take place in a lesson should be engaging with different materials and people. Attacking an issue from different angles. richard Maryer's ideas. Care for visual, audio and kinesthetic learners.
7. Flipping Flipping is scalable. Not everything in one go!
8.  VLE: Choose a user-firendly VLE.  Labelling and organization are of utmost importance.
9. SGC: Always use Student Generated Content for some kind of activity ( discussions, presentations....). Don't leave it in isolation.
10. Screencasting: an effective way of providing enriching feedback.

Role of NT

Today we looked at  Edmodo

This is a VLE that can be used as the central location for your teaching. It is a central material repository and it allow to create quizzes, polls, discussion, assignments to activate students'  learning. 

Its possibilies can be extended by using other tools such as quizlet, voicethread, snagIt (screencasting) and all google apps.

The role of the New Technologies in the classroom

When deciding how much technology we want to bring into our classes and which technology is most suitable we may want to look ath the SAMR model. 

THE SAMR model developed by Ruben Puentedura "offers a method of seeing how computer technology might impact teaching and learning".When moving from a traditional setting to a context where we include ICT it is vital to consider the affordances that traditional activities offer teachers so that we can plan and / or anticipate any changes in the setting or how the new technologies may affect the interaction in the classroom. 

Substitution: technology acts as a direct tool to substitute more traditional activites and has no functional improvement.

Augmentation: technology acts as direct tool to substitute and has some functional improvement

Modification: Techology allows for significant task redesign.

Redifinition: Technology allows for the creation of new tasks that were previouly inconceivable.

Teachers should't go techology crazy and we must be aware of the the effectiveness of using technology with students. Chose the right moment and for the right activity. 

In relation to this topic we read the article "Is technology tranforming education?"by Russell Stannard. We discussed it in little groups and summarized our ideas in a google document that was edited simultaneously by the different groups. This was an example of transformative teaching (SAMR). Using a technology to get a tangible outcome (the class' notes) . Technology takes you on a journey of discovery. Technology transforms the way you design your lessons and start seeing more and more possibilities.

However, when it comes to redesign your lessons, think about the benefits of using traditional activities, and consider the interaction and the communicative purpose of the task to blend F2F contents and online tasks. Remember you can have a look at SAMR Model or Bloom's taxonomy to let students do the lower thinking part at home and get some help from the teacher for higher order thinking tasks. This  bears much in common with the idea of Flipped Classroom.