“Good teaching may overcome a poor choice of technology but technology will never save bad teaching.”
Tony Bates
Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org
This is my first attempt at designing a blended course and I am afraid of overdoing it. Every day, my Twitter feed is cramped with ideas, links, advice on digital tools from educators out there doing amazing things. I get so excited and try out every single tool and learning platform. No, seriously, I lost count (and internet addresses) of all the services I registered for. It is overwhelming. Furthermore, it creates confusion, my head is buzzing with all the different constructive ideas that I cannot make head nor tail of what my course should be.
Therefore, here is my first executive decision. I am limiting myself to several tools for achieving my primary goals of going hybrid: ensuring the continuity of learning and facilitating student centered learning. The course will combine three learning environments each dealing with separate set of language and learning skills, which would also support each other in the ‘presentation-practice-production’ cycle.
Main layers:
1. Face to face
Flipped classroom approach will primarily free up the class time for productive skills, especially for much needed speaking practice and simulation. It wil also be a time for students to acquire and use meta skills through collaborative projects. For instance, producing video instructions on how to use Tumblr as a class blogging platform.
2. Moodle: AMRES E-learning
The good people of the Serbian Academic Network provide free hosted Moodle to all HE institutions, as well as tech support and teacher training. I like that my course on their platform will become a part of a wider academic context. Consequently, I am not just taking my students outside their classroom, but also putting them in the middle of the national academic community.
Moodle will act as supporting learning platform in a sense that it will contain the syllabus and all the course materials, something to fall back on in case a student misses a class, or is unable to attend at all. In addition, it will be a home to drill-and-kill grammar work. Thirdly, it will be a place for practicing all the different academic reading skills; as it was intended, at home, on their own, by the computer. Furthermore, the possibility to embed Quizlet vocabulary cards makes Moodle a perfect environment for vocabulary practice. Finally, the automated platform it is, Moodle will serve as a testing tool. No more wasting precious class time on term tests.
Being a social learning tool as well, Moodle will be our class network. Open meetings plugin will be a valuable tool for one-to-one consults that are often overlooked in the daily practice.
3. Class blog: SEJ Community Blog
I have looked into different platforms that support class/group blogging and finally opted for Tumblr powered by Disqus add-on for comments. Firstly, my students are young adults who are familiar with Tumblr. Secondly, I believe that using something that is, in youth popular culture, mostly associated with hilarious gifs and memes as a learning tool and promoting digital storytelling will set a good example of the learning philosophy I am trying to arm them with.
The class blog will be a place for them to share their reflections on learning, findings on English language and culture, resources for learning English, and their musings on the topics we cover in class, as well as post their written assignments for peer review.
Optional layers (student-led environments):
1. Facebook group
2. Joint Twitter account: @SEJ_Comm
Final considerations
My students are not the digital natives you’ve been reading about. To quote Peter Diedrichs from his workshop Pedagogical Use of Moodle, students are not web-wise in a role of a student. They do use Facebook, maybe Twitter and/or Instagram, but they are not trained to use the internet for their learning. In addition, those young people in my class are first year students who have just stepped out of their comfort zone, the togetherness of a high school class, and, in my experience, it takes them a long time to redefine themselves as individuals among a hundred new people they will spend most of their days with. They come to the university with already set conceptions of how things work and I am about to tear them down. For these reasons, I’m keeping things simple. This course in only delivered in the first semester, so there is more time next semester to take things to the next level.
