Blended learning is a significant approach that starts with an attitude or mindset change.
It is the first step for any trainer or school educator to break those old conventional ways of instruction and open doors to more technologically woke ways of approaching the process of learning. Today, the learners, irrespective of age, crave to be a part of the future learning society and this is possible only if they are given an opportunity to have an autonomy on the learning, give priority to what they want to learn so as to make it more personalized, and make learning visible. What better way to kickstart with adopting the blended learning philosophies in your andragogy or pedagogy today!
EdTech In Blended Learning
There are different types of blended learning, depending on which model of BL you prefer to use for your class. Online, specifically asynchronous blended learning, affords the learners to experiment with their learning. Various EdTech tools comes to rescue when it is about fostering learners to empower learning. Apart from breaking the barrier of demography, blended learning also removes the limitation of pace and allows the learners to take control of the learning without unwanted anxiety and stress that comes with rigid pace. With fading trends and constructive criticisms for EdTech tools, not many of them sustain in the regular use, but there are some apps that have stayed as constants and some that are making headlines as per the recent updates.
With a diverse bunch of uses in conjunction, the following tools should fit your most of your blended learning needs this year:
Microsoft Sway is an efficient tool that can be used for authoring personalized content that can be shared with the students to enable out-of-the-school learning on mobile or laptop devices. This tool helps creating visually striking documents in minutes in the form of an online canvas, which is easily accessible through a link.
Apple Mac’s QuickTime player is a boon to all those trainers and educators who want they content to reach as in without any additional themes by the designers. This screen recording tool is accessible easily on a Mac laptop with a feature to record your voice and video in tandem with the screenshare feature.
This is a comparatively older tool, but it is known that not many are still using this and encouraging the use of Kahoot in the class for learning or even to just stir some fun it totally worth your time.
Making learning in the classroom much more effective and engaging with this tool is simply something we all have always wanted in our classrooms. This creative interactive tool comes as an Add-on to the Google Slides. It has new and hassle-free intriguing features being added, even today, with every new upgrade.
In the world of TikTok and Snapchat, this app lets the students to involve themselves in an active sense of social learning inside or outside the class by encouraging them to make short videos (maximum 5 minutes). You can create small learning communities within the app and pose the right questions (argumentative or Socrates questioning would be better to stir discussions). The learners address to the questions in the form of video and you an provide them with engaging feedback.
Who doesn’t love to listen to podcasts? Think of it, you have the leverage to invite the students or parents on board within the app to answer the questions or to take a gander at the students’ performance respectively. People call this tool as the Flipgrid for audio-only.
This powerful tool helps the learners record their own audio or video and upload it along with the scenes (images) that makes your presence feel in that tour for real. VR tours are something that makes the learners create their own little tour into a human body or coal mines or even in airplanes and something as abstract and unique as inside a book. You can expect virtual tours of almost anything, just try this one and see creativity emerge.
To create engaging lessons and encourage interactivity within the class this tool is quite handy. This tool is like a dynamic LMS that has templates created by experts online, but also allows the educators and trainers to go in and customize it as per their planning. Web-links, video snippets and other interactive elements makes this app a favourite among learners and teachers alike. With upgraded versions such as Nearpod 3d and VR, this app is revolutionizing EdTech in classrooms.
Using these tools you can expect a paradigm shift in the process of learning. Blending learning is not an easy task either. Only after understanding and accurately analysing the needs and prior knowledge of the students in the subject as well as in using the technology or accessibility of the technology must you choose the tool for use.
