[Tool Sharing] Blended learning with blendspace

What is Blended learning?

According to Thomlinson and Whittaker, blended learning is the mixture of face-to-face teaching and online technological tools in the language classroom. Many teachers face the same problem of not having enough time to provide basic linguistic and content input and advanced, analytical exercises. Therefore, blended learning has become a growing approach for teachers to use in class sessions effectively as students get the receptive component done at home (such as readings or online lectures) as they meet in person to learn critically. Blendspace is a tool that allows teachers to design input and comprehensible tasks for learners to complete before coming to class.

Blendspace is a tool that has many educational sources for you to search for and incorporate into a mini lesson for students to complete when they're outside the classroom. It is user friendly as it has templates for you to choose from as you package the materials and exercises into the lesson. 

Sources: Ready-made materials 

In this screenshot, you can see that there is a large bank of ready-made teaching materials for you to incorporate into your lesson. Simply type in the keyword of your topic in TES Resources Search search bar. Sources you can find may include worksheets, factsheets, videos, booklets...etc.

Sources: Online Materials 

If you do not fancy using others' ready-made materials, you can find more "raw" and authentic materials from other sources such as Youtube, Google web or images, Flickr, or even materials you have from your computer!  However, one thing I found a bit frustrating with this function is that it does not filter the search results, so sometimes the list of sources may be a bit messy and overwhelming for you when you're trying to find something educationally appropriate for your learners.

create questions to check students' understandings

Sources: creating your own 

If blankspace or the web doesn't have anything that matches your needs and that you don't have anything complete at hand, you can start from scratch and just type in your content in the "Add Text" function. The functions are pretty similar to a blog post setting! 

You may also use the "Add quiz" function to create comprehensive questions to evaluate whether students have understood the text or material given for them to study before class. This is very useful, as it gives the teacher a better idea of where the students' understanding currently are at so that they can make any last minute modifications to their lesson before meeting the students in class, such as reinforcing a grammatical rule that students are confused with, or rephrasing a point in the text that students did not understand, etc. 

Learner interaction outside the physical classroom 

Lessons created on blendspace can also promote collaborative learning with the "Comment" function. The teacher can add in the description section questions for students to respond to and hopefully start a discussion. How collaborative this task can get may depend on how the teacher structures the question! :P 

Blendspace is quite flexible and suits different needs. If you're a busy teacher and have no time to create your own lesson, you can use the ready-made materials and modify it to match your students' needs. If you cannot find anything that fits your syllabus, you can use this template and create an online lesson with your own materials and exercises to share with your students to complete at home. By integrating blendspace into your class, you'll save yourself time from providing the input that the students can gain on their own at home and focus on more practice, communicative, constructive and/or meaningful tasks in class.