Flipping with Blendspace!

In the spirit of Valentine's Day, I thought I might share with you a fantastic online tool for Blended Learning called Blendspace. Flipping classrooms with blended learning has been quite a hot topic in the last few years, but not just because it's the hot new thing in education. It really does shake things up because with blended learning, you can balance out your guidance to reach more students, which you can't maximally do with the time and place restrictions of face-to-face interaction. Students can learn at their own pace, get greater access to knowledge and have more interaction with peers.  Of course, all these positive responses to flipped classrooms come when we design blended learning materials pedagogically and aesthetically well. Blendspace (formerly known as EdCanvas) will do just the trick. 

Does it really take only 5 minutes to set up?
Yes! That is if you've already planned your lessons and prepared all your materials in advance. At a click of a button, you can create a lesson, upload or drag-and-drop your materials (they can be pictures or PowerPoint slides, videos) and your class is all got to go! With only dragging here and there, it barely even takes that long.

Are there any restrictions on what files to upload? 
You can basically compile any kind of resources you want to present to your students, be it a YouTube video, a  Google webpage, Flickr images, Gooru lessons, imported files from Dropbox or  Google Drive - literally limitless! Just think of the possibilities that you can do - take collaboration for example, you can embed a file from Google docs where students can collaborate to write essays, or have them comment on pictures from Thinglink! If you're stumped on ideas, there are lessons already set up by other teachers which they have generously shared, so why not also make use of them and tweak a bit to suit your classroom needs?

How do I make sure the students are learning from my materials? Or even worse, how can I tell they actually see the materials I've pulled together?
To find out if students are really buckling down on their studying, why not have them do a short quiz on your materials? You can simply assess their progress by creating a quiz right on Blendspace and tracking their results,  as well as overall number of views, comments, and likes on it.



If you're still not convinced on the wonders of Blendspace, watch this short video on how to optimise this tool:

What are some practical ways to use Blendspace in my English lesson? 

I guess the best way to explain how effective Blendspace is to actually show you a lesson. I haven't tried this one out yet because I'm currently studying full time (no teaching at all), but I hope there's a preview of Blendspace features that you can play around with. The lesson I have here is on Valentine's Day (since tomorrow is the big day!) and I've thrown in a bit of listening, reading, grammar and writing. The unit objectives are to practice listening about events told in chronological order, and use the second conditional structure correctly. You can take a peek at the actual Blendspace lesson at the end of this post and explore it, but here are the steps of the unit:

1. Students comment on a picture of chocolate and flowers based on teacher's prompts and a short video. I used Thinglink to link questions on certain parts of the picture, and add videos and quizzes to get students engaged and activate schemata. 
2. They watch a video on the history of St. Valentine, comment on the characters, setting, conflicts, climax and resolution of the story. 
3. To check their listening comprehension, students complete a short quiz on the video content.
4. Another video on the history of how Valentine's Day came to be from the past to present, but this time students are to make a timeline of how this festive day has changed over the years.
5. Students read about Valentine's Day traditions around the world and choose the one they like most to comment on in the chat box. 
6. Students are given a writing task based on one of the traditions mentioned in the text: "What would you do to express your love to someone you secretly like?" The target structure that students are supposed to use is the second conditional, but at this stage they can use whatever linguistic resources they can think of. 
7. Students study the second conditional to talk about hypothetical situations by reading and doing exercises from the British Council website.
8. They then repeat the task, but this time try to use the target structure in their writing. Students post their answers on Stormboard (see my previous post) and give votes. 

Here is my lesson on Blendspace; just click on the little icons (the link, video or picture icon) on each tile and you'll be directed to the material and comment section.