 I've been teaching educational technology for more than 20 years, I've run master's degree programs at the University of Westminster, the University of Warwick, Kings College London and now with Nile on their master's degree program as well. What I want to do in this video is go through 10 of the key points that you need to understand if you're going to effectively blend your learning. This would be particularly interesting for anyone on the master's degree program but also for perhaps for directors of courses, heads of department, people that really want to understand the things that you need to really take into consideration if you're going to effectively blend your learning. For each idea I'm going to really try my best to highlight exactly what I mean even with examples so you can clearly see the points I'm trying to make. Let's get started, really hope you like the video and as always if you do please like it, please share it, love to know your comments, really be interested in your comments and of course join me on my YouTube channel. So one of the biggest mistakes that nearly everybody makes is that they obviously are teaching face to face and then they're adding content for the students to access after the course and they basically overwhelm the students by putting up way too much content, way too many links, way too many things for the students to actually do. So the course becomes actually counterproductive because it puts the students off, they're overwhelmed, they never even look at all that additional material. An online course or a blended course needs to be tightly integrated and everything that you add into the course, you need to carefully think that through. How's that linked to the actual lesson and is this necessary? Is it going to help my students? So the tendency is for a blended learning course not to be carefully crafted rather people just put up links and links and links all the time and there's way too much material. Now I've got an example of such a course here. If you look at this course it's just masses and masses of links, masses of stuff to click on to read, there's no video, there's no images, there's no kind of clear indication on many of the links exactly what the content is. This just would overwhelm any student and it would almost put them off learning this course straight from the start because there's just too much content to work through. And unfortunately this is very common. I'm going to contrast it really quickly with the course that I worked on recently. So here's a unit of my course, it's got an introductory part, this is the pre-lecture activity that the students have to do. They get the readings here, it opens up as a window which they can go back to, it's got the actual lecture content here with a video so the actual lectures were also recorded and then they've got additional links afterwards. So this is just so much more digestible in terms of the feeling and I've very carefully selected all the links to the course to make sure that everything is really integrated into the actual live lessons that I do. The second mistake I see it all the time. When teachers are teaching and they're using technology perhaps they're getting the students to collaborate together, share ideas. So they get the students to work on something, the students generate content and then the teacher never uses that content. I call these empty modes, that is students have generated something, they've made some learning content on the course and then the teacher doesn't do anything with it. You really need to make sure, if you're going to get your students to collaborate and share ideas that you use that content in some way, you summarize it, you get the students to summarize it, you get the students to pick out the best points, you pick out the best points, you need to think about some type of activity that when the students generate content you use the content that the students have generated. It becomes an integral part of the course. So this is just a quick example, I asked the students to write about what they find hard in teaching and learning, what they find hard about using technology and then what I did was set up a second activity where people had to read what people have said and then comment on it. Now often what I do is I ask them to do something very specific like pick out the best point or ask a question. Perhaps I could have done a more interesting activity here because people simply just needed to comment, but it's very important that if students are going to add content onto a padlet, a Google doc or whatever, that we try to make use of that content and bring it into the teaching and learning. Many courses don't provide the guidance that is necessary. When students do my own online courses, one of the things they comment is Russell, you always provide loads of videos that make it super clear exactly what we want to do. There's a big mistake, this kind of idea that students can pick it all up and work out exactly what you want them to do online. It's much more frustrating. I've done courses myself, making sure there's lots of guidance on the course particularly at the beginning to get the students going is absolutely vital and it's also vital that each unit of the course is organised in a similar way so that once the students understand the basic way the course is organised, they then obviously understand how the next unit will be organised as well. That consistency is a key principle in web design and it's really important when you're looking at blended learning. I just want to highlight this importance of supporting a course. Let me show you some examples. It really is one of the most common comments I get on my own courses. This is a very popular course that I run and if you come to this course and let's just go straight to unit one at the beginning of the unit straight away. If you click here, there's an introductory video. Every unit starts with an introductory video where I talk on the screen and then afterwards I actually take you through all the different tasks that you have to do in the unit. I just go through the unit and make it super clear everything that you need to do. Now, you might say that I'm hand-holding the students too much but the reality is it means that they often never need to contact me because they understand exactly how the course works. We found that it means that we really do get very few emails or messages at the beginning of the course. So these introductory videos. Hi, welcome to the course. I really, really important and that video actually moves into me starting to go through the unit but even more important than that. If I jump over to where I'm doing some tasks. So in this course, everyone, in fact, in every unit of this course there is a task to do and sometimes these tasks are quite complicated. So this one here, the students have to produce an e-portfolio and then they have to do some work on patterns and then they have to do some work on Padlet. What do I do at the bottom? I put two videos that show them exactly what to do. So if I quickly play the video a little bit, first thing is give your Google sites a name. So I'm going to quickly add in a name. These instructions, these things that help the students to understand exactly what they need to do are vital. Now, as the course goes on, there aren't so many help videos because the students slowly establish all the things they need to do. They understand but at the beginning it's absolutely vital and even so, even at the end, I still put in some help videos though not as many. There's a really important point to understand about the technologies that you need to organize either fully online or blended. If it's fully online, there are three key technologies and these are the most important things. You need a webinar tool like Zoom, perhaps Microsoft Teams. You need a platform for organizing all the learning content so it's all in one place. The students can find everything. That could be Edmodo, it could be Moodle, it could be Blackboard, et cetera, Canvas. There are many of these technologies around now. And thirdly, you need use of screencast technology because screencast technology allows you to make the help videos. It allows you to also do things like make the learning content. You really can't build a course unless you have knowledge of those three technologies. Now, if you're teaching in blended learning, you may not need the live webinar tool because obviously you're going to be in the classroom with your students. In that case, there are two fundamental technologies but if you're teaching online fully, then there are three. Now, I just want to go through a few points now about these technologies because they are vital and they're often misunderstood by institutions, by management, et cetera. Teachers often get confused about platforms. Platforms are virtual learning environments. They are specific places where all the content for the course is organized in one place. So on this course here, for example, all the posts are on the front page. If students want to have discussions or share content with me or I want to share content. But also in this course here, I can go to the folders and I've got all the folders for the students. So week one, week two, week three, et cetera. And also, for example, if I want my students to do a quiz or I want to set an assignment, I can do it from Edmodel. Okay, now, if you want to learn about Edmodel because it's a great free tool, there's a link on the screen now that you can click on and watch the video about using Edmodel. But there are many of these tools. For example, perhaps you want to work with Moodle or perhaps you're working with Blackboard. So many of these tools, you just need one. You just need to know how to learn just to use it. And it's the way that you can organize your students. They've got one place, everything's there. Incidentally, if you want to learn more about Moodle, I'll also put a link on the screen now so you can learn more about Moodle as well. Now, the other super important thing is to learn to use screencast technology or screen capture technology. This one's free and I use it quite a lot. Let's just click on the button and just show you how it works. So this allows you to record videos basically so that you can record yourself talking over a PowerPoint slide, talking over a graph, talking over a picture, talking over a diagram, showing someone how to use a particular website, showing someone instructions, explaining the marking scheme, all the sorts of things that you might want to do on a course to give students the support that they need. So it's absolutely vital that we learn to use these technologies. Now, I've just opened up the technology here on the screen and I'm just going to give you an example. So what I'm going to do is just click here and minimize the screen so that I can record myself talking over these PowerPoint slides. And what I'm going to do now is just move this into place so I can reset it. Once I've opened up, it's like a little app. It's free. You saw me do it. You just click on the button. Now, what I can do is I can record myself going through this PowerPoint presentation. So this could be easily something that I wanted to put online. So just to quickly show you how that works, I'm going to click here. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We're just going to do webinar number four today. So I'm going to click on pause, jump to the next screen. Carry on now. Just really glad to know that no one's yet ever hasn't asked me about the assignment, which is really good. What I want to do today is talk about what you have learned on the course, what has it got you thinking about, and what would you still like to learn. So I can see, I can record myself. If I click on stop here and I just click on done, incredibly that video is now ready. I could upload that into my Edmodel course, or I could put it onto my YouTube channel. I could put it onto up in my Google Drive. I just click here. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And we're just going to do webinar number four today. Just really glad to know that no one's yet ever hasn't asked me about the assignment, which is really good. What I want to do today is talk about... So I could have recorded myself talking over a picture, talking over a website, explaining to the student how to use the YouTube channel, how to study with Quizlet, etc. This technology is absolutely essential. So along with working with a platform, you really do need to learn to use this technology, particularly for online courses. Not quite so much for blended, but it's still really important. You can even use this for giving feedback to students, which is something I do. Now, I'm going to put a link on the screen to a really popular video about using Screencast-O-Matic, in case you want to learn more about this technology. So as I've said, there are three key technologies. Learn to use a platform, Edmodel, Moodle, Blackboard, etc. Canvas. Learn to use Screencast technology. Really useful. You can make videos great for feedback, for assessment, for student guides, for learning content, for talking over PowerPoint slides, etc. And of course, the other tool that you need if you're teaching fully online is a webinar tool, like Zoom. Now, if you want to learn more about Zoom, I've got a video that's very popular. I'll put it on the screen now. You can click on it and watch that. How to use Zoom. Just a super quick break from the video. If you do want more free videos, please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com. You'll see loads of stuff on the opening page, including some of the most popular videos. But you can also access the content from here at the top, including Moodle and working with Edmodel. If you're interested in the course that I mentioned, I'll put a link on the screen now, but also you can come here and click on this link, and it will take you through to give you the information about the course. And finally, please sign up to the newsletter. I keep you updated with all the latest videos, the webinars, the blogs, of course, any online courses that I run. And at the moment, there's a little promotion. If you sign up, there's a 12-part free video course on using technology. Right, let's get back to the video. The pedagogy comes first. You have a philosophy about how you want to teach. You want to do certain things with your students. You understand that's going to help them. Perhaps in my case, for example, it's language learning. And therefore you look for the technologies that are going to help to support the pedagogy you've got. Those technologies might stretch it even more. So for example, if you want to get your students speaking more, technologies can encourage students to do recordings, et cetera, of themselves speaking. The pedagogy is fundamental, and this is often missing when teachers are thinking about introducing a technology. So they introduce a technology simply because they think it's a bit of fun. It's going to make the lesson more interesting. They're not really thinking about what impact that technology is going to have on the learning. And what happens as a result is often these technologies are badly introduced. Nothing is how are you going to introduce the technology, how are you going to set it up to make it useful for the students to work with and to understand what they're going to do. What are they going to do with the technology? What type of feedback are you going to give to the students? So what tends to happen is lots of technologies are thrown into a lesson without a lot of thought being given to how that is impacting on the teaching and learning and particularly how the activity is set up, what the students need to know to do the activity, what they do during the activity and therefore also what feedback you're going to give them afterwards. This is always lacking, and the result is often when I watch teachers, they'll introduce one technology, then another, then another. And I go to ask them, why did you introduce the technologies? Normally it's simply because they're fun, they make the lesson more engaging. That isn't enough. There needs to be a real understanding of what that technology is going to help to support in terms of the students' learning. Everything needs to be linked together and this is fundamentally misunderstood. I'll give you an example with the flip classroom. Many teachers that work with me on my flip classroom courses, what they do is they get the students to do an activity at home, perhaps to watch a video and then maybe to answer some questions and then when they come in the class, they say to the students, okay, let's correct the homework. That's not really a flip classroom. That's not really linking the lesson together. Really what you want to do if you're doing a flip classroom, which is just a form of blended learning, you want to make sure that whatever you do for the homework is the springboard and you take some notes after watching a video, bring them into the class, put them in groups and get them to discuss the video and discuss their notes. You're linking the two parts of the class. This is a big problem that happens all the time. So for example, a teacher will put loads of links onto additional materials that the students can access when they're working at home on their own. But because you never introduced those technologies into the class, you never showed the students how those technologies work. They never look at them. Much better just to share one link to one interesting website but do something with it in the lesson first so they understand how the technology works and why it could benefit them. So for example, if I was teaching my students how to use Quizlet, I might say, look, this is a great website that you can use on your own today. We're going to do an activity in the lesson using Quizlet. This is how you link things together. There's no point in having loads of material online that you've not introduced into the class. And there's no point in setting activities that really don't connect with what you're doing in the lesson. One of the key things about teaching online is to think about it as one lesson, the component at home and the component in the class with the teacher, or it might be in a Zoom session if you're teaching fully online. Basically, everything's a blend. Now, this is really important to understand. We've already discussed that, for example, the Flip Classroom is a form of blended learning where you're asking the students to do an activity at home online with the idea that's going to connect to what you're going to do in class. That's a blend. But you may have a course where predominantly you're face-to-face but you're sharing one or two interesting links and content for the students to access at home. But as I've said, there's no point in doing that unless you introduce those activities first in the classroom. So everything requires a blend. Everything requires some attention in the lesson and then obviously, in some cases, activities for the students to do for homework. So sometimes teachers say to me, ah, but this isn't a blended course because I've only introduced four or five technologies. Well, it isn't a blend because you're simply sharing those links for the students to access at home and keeping the two things completely separate. But if you did, for example, introduce the technology into the lesson and say to the students, look, this link could be interesting for you to work with on that home, yes, it is a blend because you're now connecting the technologies that you're suggesting to the actual lesson. So for me, everything is a blend as soon as you're introducing some technologies into your teaching and learning, you're blending your learning. What are you taking out of the lesson? If you decide to introduce a technology into a lesson, let's say you play a car hood or a Socrative or that type of activity, what are you taking out of that class to introduce that technology? And what you're taking out is that better than what you're actually introducing? You've got to make sure that when you use technologies, they add real value to the lesson and we've got to think really carefully just about what we're bringing into the lesson but also what we're taking out of the class. It's a really, really important point, particularly in the classroom because in the classroom you've got people live, you've got discussions, you've got groups, they can work together and you've really got to ask yourself when you're using this technology, is it really contributing to the overall impact of the lesson? And it's a very dangerous thing sometimes because often we take things out of the class to bring in technologies that actually in many ways were more effective. Now not long ago, I went to Poland to do a course in learning Polish and my teacher never used any technology in the class at all. They did for the homework. It was a blended learning course but it was very much in the class about group work, pair work, working together and I really didn't see the need for any technology because we already have the students working together, doing group work, doing pair work, standing up, moving around. There's no need. So you've got to be really careful. There's no point in having a top-down policy. We've got to introduce more technology into our teaching learning if the result is that actually the lessons aren't more effective or in fact the opposite. They're actually worse. Really hoped you liked that video. Please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com loads more free content and you can see all of my courses on the page. Don't forget to sign up to the newsletter that way you get updated with all the latest blog posts, the webinars, the latest videos and the courses. Of course you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. Don't forget to click on the bell that way you'll get all the updates and finally if you do want to contact me perhaps about doing a conference or doing some training with your organisation you can contact me Thank you very much. Really hoped you found that video useful and on the screen now I've added some other videos that if you're a teacher you might find very interesting about using technology in teaching.