Teaching English online – opportunities and pitfalls. Sylvia Guinan, online English teacher, website editor and winner of the British Council TeachingEnglish blog award, walks us through the opportunities and pitfalls of teaching online in one of our top five articles of all time, illustrated by artist Jamie Johnson. There are many different things to consider when it comes to online teaching. The good news is that online teaching opens up new levels of creativity and opportunity for you as a teacher.
In a way, it drives you to surpass yourself and focus more on best practice as well as innovation. As for students, they deserve to be taught with 21st-century technology. Technology basics Many freelance teachers teach through Skype. Resources and content creation As for resources, the following sites have wonderful materials if you don’t feel like re-inventing the wheel. Beyond that, you may wish to supplement your basic course offerings, specialise for specific purposes or simply follow your own instincts and inspiration. Building rapport. Faculty Engagement in Online Learning WP. 6 Tips to Enhance Instructor Presence in Online Learning - F.learning Studio. Full control of the time and place of study is both the advantage and drawback of eLearning. Offering students more freedom could also raise their study attitude and self-motivation. However, the lack of human interaction, especially instructor presence in online learning, could cause a feeling of isolation and discouragement in the students.
Is instructor presence that important? In a traditional face-to-face classroom, instructor presence seems to not matter because it is a physical thing. However, this is not the case for online courses since most of the time, there is no lecturer-student interaction. The problem is severe for those online classes designed with mere presentations without any signs of lecturers. What happens if a student doesn’t feel the presence of instructor in a virtual classroom?
Isolation. Enhancing the instructor presence in online learning is vital for both educators and learners. How to improve instructor presence in online learning? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Read further: Behaviors & Strategies for Improving Your Instructor Presence. David, A. & Glore, P. (2010). The impact of design and aesthetics on usability, credibility, and learning in an online environment. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 13(4), DuCharme-Hanson, R. & Dupin-Bryant, P. (2005). Course planning for online adult learners.TechTrends, March/April, 49(2), p. 31-39. Ice, P., Curtis, R., Phillips, P, & Well, J. (2007). Jones, P., Kolloff, M., & Kolloff, F. (2008). Palloff, R. Ragan, L. (2007, August 27). Welcoming students in an online class. (2011). Blended Learning Essentials - Blended learning in practice. 7 Free photo sources teachers can use for online courses. Including photos in learning materials is the first step towards offering students a more visual learning experience.
I won’t go into why there should be more visual elements in school instruction, nor into the many options teachers have to organize learning materials in a visual manner. I already did that here and here. The focus of this blog will be the photos. While including photos in learning materials is a noble idea, including stolen photos in them is not. If you just copy and paste any photo you find on the web into your lesson, you might be a thief. You might be using that photo to instill knowledge into the brains of your students — which is great — but you might be a thief nonetheless.
Don’t be a thief There are rules to abide by, even on the internet. In order to do that, you first need to know what qualifies as copyrighted material and what not, and to understand the principle of fair use. And now let’s move on to that part of the internet that is indeed free. Over to you Related. 5 Simple Blended Learning Strategies for the Connected Classroom. It’s a fascinatingly complex digital student that attends today’s classrooms. Instructional methods that meet their needs and expectations have evolved.
The good news is these have largely been integrated into the lives of teachers and students with much success. One of these methods is blended learning. The concept of blended learning has been around since the 1960s. Something that has survived in educational culture for that long deserves applause. Today we continue to expand and improve on its methodologies. Hallmarks of Blended Learning Blended learning is defined by these characteristics: A portion of the learning is delivered with digital or online media.Some of the learning is student-directed in terms of time, pace, path, and place.It provides a learning experience that is appealing and that delivers successful learning outcomes. The Clayton Christensen Institute says most blended learning works on one of these four models: Why Is Blended Learning So Popular?
Take it Easy. This Online Audio Editor Is Beautiful. Beautiful Audio Editor is a free audio editor that you can use in the Chrome and Firefox web browsers. Beautiful Audio Editor lets you record spoken audio directly and or import audio that you have previously recorded in MP3 and WAV formats. You can edit and blend multiple tracks in the Beautiful Audio Editor.
When your audio editing project is complete you can download it as an MP3 file, download it as a WAV file, or you can save it in Google Drive. For the last few years I've recommended using Twisted Wave to record and edit audio on Chromebooks. Beautiful Audio Editor offers more options and is what I'll be using on Chromebooks from here on. Applications for EducationBeautiful Audio Editor could be a great tool for your students to use to create podcasts on their Chromebooks. The use of multiple track editing will let your students fade-in music or other canned introductions. Learn more about using Chromebooks in your classroom when you attend the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp. Interactive materials EAP David Read IATEFL 2017. Claudia Ferradas. H5P – Create and Share Rich HTML5 Content and Applications.
10 Free Tools for Building Blended & Online Learning. As internet connections improve and costs of classroom hours increase, it’s becoming increasingly important to offer some form of blended or totally online materials to enhance courses. In this posting I’ll introduce some useful free and freemium tools that can enable any teacher to start creating content for online delivery. You can find more tools like these in Digital Tools for Teachers 1. Perusall – This tool enables teachers to build onto more traditional course book based courses and add a blended element. 2. This is a very similar tool to Perusall, but it’s completely free and works around any web-based text. 3. You can use Teachable to create and sell your own online courses. 4.
CourseLab has been around for a while now and is a free tool for authoring your own interactive digital content. 5. 6. Ed is a really impressive course creation and LMS tool for creating highly interactive and touch responsive learning content for mobile devices. 8. 9. 10. Save. Spiral - Free collaborative apps for 1:1 classrooms. Key Principles in Blended Learning | Lectures on teacher tools. Kindersite Reviews. Models of Blended Learning. Blended Learning & Flipped Classroom.
Brainstorm and mind map online. What is Blended Learning? Blended courses (also known as hybrid or mixed-mode courses) are classes where a portion of the traditional face-to-face instruction is replaced by web-based online learning. How much of the face-to-face instruction must be replaced by online coursework? This question will vary greatly by class, discipline, and learning objectives. The Online Learning Consortium (formerly, the Sloan Consortium, a professional organization dedicated to postsecondary online learning) defines blended learning as a course where 30%-70% of the instruction is delivered online. While this is a useful guideline, it may not be sufficient to cover every blended learning configuration. The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides many useful resources related blended learning. The National Center for Academic Transformation has done a significant amount of work related to course redesign, including the innovative use of technology for blended learning.
Courses can be blended in many ways and for many reasons. What Is Blended Learning? - Mindflash. Blended learning is a term increasingly used to describe the way e-learning is being combined with traditional classroom methods and independent study to create a new, hybrid teaching methodology. It represents a much greater change in basic technique than simply adding computers to classrooms; it represents, in many cases, a fundamental change in the way teachers and students approach the learning experience. It has already produced an offshoot – the flipped classroom – that has quickly become a distinct approach of its own. No single, reliable definition of blended learning exists, or even a universal agreement on the term itself. Many use terms like hybrid, mixed, or integrative to describe the same trend. But the trend is significant. A learning model in three parts There is a general consensus among education innovators that blended learning has three primary components: Blended learning redefining teaching roles Image used under Creative Commons by Flickr user Sarah M Stewart.
Blended learning information/kits.