What do blenders and teachers have in common?

...And no,  we are not talking about food!

Blended learning refers to the mixture of on-line and face to face learning. It is a new trend that is being implemented by teachers around the world.

Some of the advantages of this way of working is that students can choose where, how and when to learn encouraging the development of their autonomy and to assume responsibility for their own learning process.

Another positive aspects is that teachers can create a close learning environment where students have all the materials they need at their disposal. This factor is important, because they don't have to surf the web, avoiding the risk of encountering unreliable websites (for more information about criteria for evaluating websites, visit this post) and therefore working with wrong or inaccurate information.

Incorporating technology into the classroom has its advantages, but there are some things that technology cannot replace. As Sophie Partarrieu (2005) stated, face-to-face education is still needed for several reasons, among them "forming emotional relationships, emphathising and responding to the needs of individual students".

As future teachers, our aim is to strike a balance between these two types of learning, because extremes are dangerous.

Going mobile... not crazy!

 

Last September, Nicky Hockly delivered a talk at the UNL ATE Hotel in Santa Fe, Argentina. She called this talk "Going Mobile", because she addressed a current challenge for teachers to face: the use of technology in the classroom.

She showed different ways of integrating technological devices into everyday lessons, ranging from simpler tasks (such as taking photos) to really sophisticated ones (for example, using Aurasma, a Web 2.0 tool - see our post about this topic). These are really useful ideas to overcome this controversial issue: "to use or not to use technology in the lessons".

In the context we are going to teach, this pieces of advice are feasible up to a point, since in most public school classrooms, internet connection is not available, and this makes this integration of technology difficult. However, on the brighter side, we can use Nicky Hockly's ideas and adapt and re-invent them to suit our reality.

She also mentioned the SAMR model (see this post for more information) to demonstrate that technology not always means innovation.

As a conclusion, as future teachers of this digital generation, we should see technology as a partner and not as an enemy.