DAY ONE

What things have you covered in today’s sessions?

from the left Paola (Italy), Husnu (Turkey), me, Alla (Ukraine)

I have met Russell Stannard the tutor and the other students -Paola, Alla and Husnu. Russell told us about blended learning in general. We have looked at TodaysMeet, Google Slides and Blogger and we have begun learning how to use them.

What technologies have you been exposed to?

todaysmeet.com

Google Slides

Blogger

How might you use the technologies/techniques in your own teaching and learning?

TodaysMeet and Google Slides are great for quick, collaborative tasks. It's a perfect tool for students to use for expressing their opinions, sharing ideas and commenting on them; revising vocabulary and grammar.

Using TodaysMeet and Google Slides I can easily extend students learning of English outside the classroom. It's great for homework.

Examples of tasks (TodaysMeet):

• Getting to know each other: students talk and ask questions - they write as much info as they can remember in the message box (using single sentences) as a summary of what they have found out - they come up with new questions - they type them in - they choose a student (or they ask their teacher) to answer the question.
• Vocabulary revision: students brainstorm adjectives typing in the words in the message box - then they need to come up with prefixes to make opposites.
• Grammar revision (narrative tenses): students together create a story: s comes up with a sentence and another student develops the story - students continue until there is a whole, logical story.

Examples of tasks (Google Slides):

• Speaking, expressing ideas: T creates a slide with a question - students work in pairs coming up with as many answers as they can and type them in their slide - then they add more ideas to other pair's list using a different colour font - then they choose three best answers/ideas - then they comment on why they chose the three in front of the class.

What value would these techniques/technologies add to your teaching and learning?

This definitely makes classes more attractive to students giving them access to their classmates' ideas and comments at the very same time they're expressing theirs. This also gives them a great opportunity to extend learning outside the classroom and do the tasks whenever and wherever they want.

What challenges do you foresee?

It's going to take me quite a while before I can feel really confident using those technologies.