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. 

A tutor of mine once told me that for a student to internalise or completely "acquire" a word correctly, s/he would need to read the word 11 times! Now we can't expect our students to be that committed in reviewing their vocabulary list, and we certainly don't have time in class to keep reinforcing the same words for that many times. How can we motivate students to actually go over words introduced in class and even better explore other unfamiliar words on their own? This is where Quizlet comes in.

At times lesson planning can become a tedious chore for teachers, especially if we keep recycling the same materials over and over again. How do we make sure our lessons are dynamic, exciting and memorable for our students? I think it's always good to look for new materials and incorporate different approaches, one of which is benefitting from ICT. 

A particularly good blog that I know of which hosts insightful resources for English language teaching or independent learning is Larry Ferlazzo's. What Larry seems to have done exceptionally well on his blog is to recap a cornucopia of useful websites and online tools (as the blog title implies). These web links range from language learning sites to history, social studies, classroom management to character building. Not only will it appeal to language teachers, but also to subject teachers in general, tutors or even parents.  There are dozens of links to materials (lesson plan ideas, sample activities, presentations, etc.) or online applications and amusing yet relevant videos. Larry posts on a daily basis so you'd know that these materials are up-to-date and revolving around current issues. An example of a post I like is the one on Bloom's Taxonomy, which teachers in Indonesia, where I used to study and work, are obsessed with - certainly useful to 'renovate' our lesson plans.