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 common doubt that we, language teachers, often have is whether our lessons allow enough production time for our students to produce meaningful output. For novice teachers like me, it's easy to fall into the trap of stuffing down exercises or "testing" previous knowledge. Collaborative learning seems like the doable way-out since it shifts the focus onto the learners and promotes features of scaffolding, but as the infamous saying goes, it is easier said than done. In this post, I'll be sharing about Stormboard, originally designed for business and industry team organisation, but will do wonders in constructing a truly collaborative learning experience in the ELT classroom.