Day 4

Today a new teacher from Turkey joined the class. Welcome Ugur! (impossible to pronounce!)

Unfortunately (for me!) he seems to be a computer geek (just like his friend Husnu)!!! so now, there's 5 of us . What a fantastic class!!

We started with some theoretical info about Blended Learning. How did it all start?

Teachers moved from “F2F” lessons to “F2F” lessons integrated with plenty of new technology (videos, podcasts, forums, chats, wiki, blogs…). This meant that the amount of content would double and students felt overwhelmed; to overcome the problem , sometimes the length of the course was reduced to give space to the new contributions from ICT.
Students worked at home on their own and in class. This is NOT Blended Learning.
Blended Learning is when we create a link between what is done in class and what is done at home, remembering always that all the assets MUST be used in class.

Golden Rules

n. 4: always create a link between class and home activities (either in a discussion form or creating a contest…).
n. 5: let’s not overwhelm the students with content ; we should keep the amount of content under control.


And now, something more about Edmodo:

Steps to be made by the teacher.
-sign up an account
-create a class/group which will be given a code by the platform
-ask students to log in the class thanks to its code.
-lock the class/group (if you want to make sure that  nobody from outside can log in).

Possibilities offered:
-post videos, documents, links, images 
-create quizzes (multiple choice, true/false, matching , short answers, fill in the blanks) that the students can do and that will automatically be corrected by the platform. 
-create a poll
-give assignment (post a video, a recording, an image and ask questions about them, or comments, or essays..
- keep records of the  results of the individual students 

 Golden Rule

n.6 : the assessment of the Edmodo activities MUST be integrated in the general assessment (to avoid students thinking the use of technology is only secondary) .