Week 7: Interactive online resources for blended learning classrooms

Introducing Blendspace 

Welcome back to my ICT in TESOL blog! I hope you enjoyed reading my previous entry on Screencast-O-Matic.  In this post, I would like to talk about a website that I think is very useful for interactive online resources for blended learning classroom – Blendspace!

Blended learning 

The tool that I will discuss in this post is useful for supporting “blended learning” so it is best that I first briefly talk about it before we look at Blendspace later in details. According to Gruba and Hinkelman (2012, as cited in Gruba et al. 2016, p.135), “blended approach” in ELT refers to the teaching and learning process that incorporates the use of modern technologies and media in a face-to-face situation. Thus, if a teacher uses an online platform such as Blendspace to share reading materials and notes for their students before they come to the actual class, it is considered as a blended course.

Here is a YouTube video on ‘blended learning’ if you are interested to learn more about it:

[Source: YouTube - 'Blended learning & flipped classroom']

Blendspace by TES

Blendspace is a powerful website that acts as an online platform for content creation and curation tool for teachers. With Blendspace, teachers can design and create teaching materials for their online lessons. They get to keep the materials that they have made and reuse them in the future as well as share them with other teachers. However, if you are too busy and don’t have time to create your own materials, worry not! You can actually search for other teaching materials that were made by other teachers and use them for your own lesson (you can even edit them too!).

  A screenshot of Tes blendspace website homepage.  

Advantages

In my opinion, there are 4 unique selling points for teachers to use Blendspace in their lessons:

§  A free and powerful tool

Blendspace is a powerful tool that allows you to search for a variety of resources from the internet such as from Google Search and YouTube or you can also upload your own materials such as PowerPoint slides, Words, Excel or PDF from your Dropbox or Google Drive to be used as materials in your lesson. Blendspace also have its own vault of resources which they called it as ‘TES resources’ which you can access for free! Isn’t that wonderful?

'Free TES resources for teachers to use - how cool is that!'

§  Teachers as content creator and curator

Blendspace empowers teachers by allowing them to create, share, copy and edit materials for their own lessons. There are plenty of interesting activities that one can do with this website. As teachers you can design online lessons, embed other educational webpages into your Blendspace slides and incorporate them in your lesson that best suits your students’ level and interest.

If you are interested in creating an online lesson using Blendspace, you can watch this tutorial video from YouTube to help you to get started with your first lesson:

[Source: YouTube - TES Teach Tutorial (Create digital lessons)]

§  Collaboration

i)               Since the materials and the lessons are online, teachers can collaborate and share the materials that they have done with other teachers from all corners of the world. You can link your account with your social media such as Facebook, Twitter or share it via QR code or email! This surely will help teachers to save time in terms of lesson planning and creating their own teaching materials.

Blendspace allows you to share your teaching materials with other teachers because after all - sharing is caring! 

ii)               On top of that, as a teacher, one advantage of sharing your material is that you can get useful feedback on your materials that other teachers have used and tested in their lessons. You can use the comments you received as constructive criticism and choose to improve or expand your lessons in the future. However, I believe that people will generally be nice and thankful to you for sharing your materials and that can be a great source of motivation for teachers to keep creating materials for their lessons and sharing it with others.

I've made my own online lesson on the topic of 'Colour' for my young learners class using Blendspace. It was definitely a fun and interesting learning process for me.

§  Privacy and security

Once you’ve created your material for your lesson, you will get a class code that will allow your students to enter your digital classroom and use the material for that particular lesson. You can also use link or QR code and only those who have it will be able to have access to your lesson. As teachers, you can monitor student’s attendance for your class as well as check on the work that they have done.

Scan the QR code and check out the lesson that I've made! 👨‍🏫

Limitations

Having mentioned all of the wonderful things that we can do with Blendspace, I believe that as teachers, we should also be aware of some of its limitations:

§  Not designed for teaching in low-resource context

When it comes to using Blendspace in ELT, both the teachers and the students need to have their own devices in order for the lesson to work and function effectively. Ideally, they should also have good internet connection at home in order to be able to read or do any tasks that were assigned by their teachers prior to the actual lesson that they’re going to have (e.g. flipped classroom). If not, this might lead to inequality between the learners and a divide between those who have and those who have not.

§  Receptive skill Vs Productive skill

In my opinion, Blendspace is an excellent tool when it comes to creating materials for reading and listening activities because it supports receptive skills. For example, learners get to preview and familiarise themselves with the reading materials or the audio materials for the listening task prior to the actual lessons. However, especially in a blended approach, it is perhaps not the best tool for teachers to use in designing writing and speaking materials (productive skills) because there might not be much interaction which can be problematic especially for speaking lessons.

§  Learners preferences

Technophiles would definitely love and welcome the idea of using online tools such as  Blendspace in their learning process and feel motivated in using it as a learning resource for them. Unfortunately, some encouragements and supports from the teachers might be necessary to persuade some students who are technophobes and might be uninterested when it comes to using technology in learning and acquiring new knowledge.

As teachers, I believe that we should encourage our learners to use technology in their learning process to help prepare them for their future. [Source: Image by April Bryant from Pixabay]

Blendspace: love it or loathe it?

Overall, as a strong proponent of the use of technology in language learning, I believe that Blendspace is an amazing tool that teachers could use as an online resource especially in a blended learning classroom. It is free and the website design is simple and very user-friendly yet still powerful enough to support teachers to be creative in designing online materials for their own lessons as well as sharing them with other teachers as valuable teaching resources. Its affordances definitely outweigh its limitation and therefore; my final verdict is definitely – LOVE! 💕 

Please leave your comments below. I would appreciate your ideas or suggestions on using Blendspace in ELT classrooms and thank you so much for reading my blog! 😊


References:

Gruba, P., Hinkelman, D., & Càrdenas-Claros, M. S., (2016). New technologies, blended learning and the "flipped classroom" in ELT. The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching, 135-149.