Kamal Shafie's Blog

Flipgrid - Your Voice Your Story! [Source: Flipgrid's logo from  Flipgrid.com] Hello and welcome back to my ICT in TESOL blog! I hope you enjoyed reading my previous entry on ‘ Blendspace ’ (if you haven’t then please do so – you will thank me for it!). If you are like me right now - stuck at home because you are trying to avoid crowded places since you are worried about the massive outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and you don’t have anything good to watch on Netflix, then why not spend some of your time to read this post on  Flipgrid ? Who knows, perhaps by the time you have finished reading this post, you might even want to create your very own Flipgrid video too! The story of Flipgrid is the story of YOU!   [A s creenshot of Flipgrid website homepage]   What is Flipgrid? Flipgrid is a web-based platform that can be used by both teachers and students to create  a video-based discussion on a topic or 'grid' of thei...

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 y...

What is Duolingo? The homepage for Duolingo website. Duolingo is an online language-learning platform that includes a website and mobile app. According to its website, Duolingo is the most downloaded education app in the world, with more than 300 million users. It is so popular that there are plenty of funny parody videos made about Duolingo such as this one from the famous American show - S aturday Night Live (SNL): [Source: YouTube - 'SNL: Duolingo for talking to Children'] Duolingo co-founders are Luis von Ahn and Severin Hackers.  Duolingo's founders: Luis Von Ahn and Severin Hackers. [Photo from Forbes.com -'Duolingo takes online teaching to the next level, by crowd sourcing new languages'  ] Currently, you can learn 23 different languages using Duolingo – isn’t that amazing? I’m sure that more languages will be added into its platform in the future. So many languages for learners to choose from. How can language te...