Today is the last day of our course on Blended Learning at NILE. We have started talking about 

1. Clifford Nass (He talked about the change in communication/connects- growth in media use- stealing time from other media TV replace radio, net replace TV etc. ın 1990 the increase in media use created the multitask. Exp: every Stanford student uses 3 media at one time. Rectangle Experiment: "

"Nass and his colleagues, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, set out to learn what gives multitaskers their edge. What is their gift?

• “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it,” said Ophir, the study’s lead author and a researcher in Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab.

In each of their tests, the researchers split their subjects into two groups: those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking and those who don’t.

In one experiment, the groups were shown sets of two red rectangles alone or surrounded by two, four or six blue rectangles. Each configuration was flashed twice, and the participants had to determine whether the two red rectangles in the second frame were in a different position than in the first frame.

They were told to ignore the blue rectangles, and the low multitaskers had no problem doing that. But the high multitaskers were constantly distracted by the irrelevant blue images. Their performance was horrible.

Because the high multitaskers showed they couldn’t ignore things, the researchers figured they were better at storing and organizing information. Maybe they had better memories.

The second test proved that theory wrong. After being shown sequences of alphabetical letters, the high multitaskers did a lousy job at remembering when a letter was making a repeat appearance.

“The low multitaskers did great,” Ophir said. “The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains.” Source "

1. Nicolas Carr , The writer of the Shallows.  What we are losing is to pay deep attention for a long time. We are losing our focus. 
2. Sugata Mitra,  Self-Organised Learning. Here are some articles of Sugata Mitra:

• Article 1
• Article 2
• Article 3
• Article 4
• Article 5

1. Stephen Hepell, 
2. Cathy Davidson (minds jump- brain naturally zooms off all the time.)
3. Sherry Turkle, 
4. Ken Wilson. 

kmşm

DAY 9 @NILE

Today was quite busy and tiring with many practices on Google forms and slides and we worked on these tools collaboratively with our friends. Especially the one that we created with slides without talking to our friend/s and we finished the task only by using the chat option of Google Slides. I worked with Muhayyo and we created a slide representing our hometowns. Then we shared our slide with the others on Edmodo.

We also created surveys and quizzes by using Google Forms.

I love practising and practising, so today was really fruitful for me.

Aysun ;)

DAY 8 @ NILE

Today we all practiced using different web tools and had the chance to work alone and share with the others.
Here are the tools that we worked on:

Grammarly
capture with youtube
quilet
kahoot
snagit
socrative
thinglink
schoology
camtasia

That was a handy revision for all of us ;)

Day 7 @ NILE

We started talking about Flipped Classroom.

Source:
https://facultyinnovate.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/flippedflowmodel.png

1- What is Flipped Classroom?
(Wikipedia) Flipped classroom is an instructional strategy and a type of blended learning that reverses the traditional learning environment by delivering instructional content, often online, outside of the classroom. It moves activities, including those that may have traditionally been considered homework, into the classroom. In a flipped classroom, students watch online lectures, collaborate in online discussions, or carry out research at home and engage in concepts in the classroom with the guidance of a mentor.

2- What is the theory behind it?

3-Benefits&Challenges?

4- What tech do you need to flip your classes?
Central repository (LMS), where you put screen casting, content etc...

5- Is flipped classroom blended learning? Yes it is ;)

6- Is flipped learning relevant to ELT? 
Yes ;) 

Then we started an activity by using GOGLE DOCs again hand we discussed and wrote about answers. Here is the link. There we had the chance to exchange ideas with the other groups ;) That was really nice. There I saw he idea of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development again. Here a picture about this:

Also we watched a video on how to get over the hurdles of Blended Learning. Here is the link. 

Also in the second part of the course, Sedef presented Socrative. Here is a short summary of what she aid. 

Day 6 at NILE ;)

A new week has started. It started with what we have seen last week and then we started talking about SAMR Model and we did this right after reading Russel's article and we wrote on a Google Doc together in groups. 

SAMR model is a nice model to see how a technology worked or not. 

This model helps us to revise, analyse or evaluate after we used it and see whether it worked well or not. 

Also we worked on Google Docs which I always use in my work life and daily life as well. It was surprising that some of us has never used the tool before. At our institution we have been using the tool for a long time to keep in touch & collaborate. 

In my group I tried to talk about the different uses of the tool. (As a rule setting page for the first day, story competition, brainstorming, group works etc.) Also I showed different add-ons in Google Docs.

In the last part of the lesson we tried to set up our own 4-hour-course for a FCE course. We tried our best to integrate some tools (like snag, voice thread and google docs) and create a lesson but at this point one thing that Russel mentioned was great. "The success of a course does not lie in the number of the tools you used, but the pedagogy you have."So if you want to check what we have done , just click on the demo course we tried to create.

That's it for the first day week 2 ;)

Aysun

Day 5 @NILE- The End of the First Week

Today started with an activity in which we,in groups, discussed various articles on blended learning and later on discussed the articles we took notes with the other groups. The activity was a bit long but we learned the details of other articles well. I was stunned with the article about using a blended learning program with taxi drivers in Turkey. 

What I learned from this activity was that " There is no RIGHT mix for the blended learning." One should create the right blend for the needs of their students&institutions. 

 In the second part of our lesson, we watched a video about the girls passing balls to each other.

We followed the instructions of the video but most of us missed the gorilla and the changing colours of the curtain and also the leaving lady.

what we learned from this was that we need to narrow down content while we are blending it as multitasking makes things a bit impossible ;)

NILE- Day 4

I created a video by using SNAGIT on our day 4

:)