 Okay, it's Sunday evening and I'm overlooking the Indian Ocean. I'm staying in a hotel just outside of Port Louis in Mauritius. And yesterday I was meant to give a presentation for Athea. And for the first time ever, and I tried to work this out, I think this is the 23rd country that I've done a webinar from when I've been travelling and working, the webinar didn't work and the connection on the internet was not good enough. So I'm recording this webinar. So at the moment there's lots of talk about digital competency. And what I'm going to do is to describe how I think digital competency links with blended learning and also links with independence of students and student autonomy. So I'm going to do my best to make this practical as possible. So there's lots of examples that you can apply in the classroom. I really hope you like the webinar and I really hope you like this view. You can probably hear there's lots of birds in the background just behind me. But this is the view from my hotel. It's about 6.30, 6 o'clock in the evening now. So the sun is just going down. I'm going to start with a really nice, warmer activity. This is an activity I've done many times with my students. Now a lot of people think that Google Earth is difficult to use because it's internet heavy. But you can download Google Earth as you can see. I've got it downloaded. It's free to download. And what I'm going to do is just show you how easy it is to present something or somewhere using Google Earth. And what I'll do is I'm going to try and take you to exactly where I am. So I'm going to just do a quick search. So what we need to search for first of all is Mauritius. And let's at least get Mauritius up on the map and then we'll do a little presentation. So I get my students to do presentations with Google Earth because it's such a brilliant tool. Look how you can use it to zoom off to a certain place. We're coming right up to Mauritius where I am at the moment. And if I now kind of just click on this button here, you can notice that I can kind of just zoom in to exactly where I want to go to. Look at that. It's just absolutely fantastic. And where I want to go to at the moment is Grand Bay. Let's see if we can bring it up. See I'm Port Louie here. I'm just slightly up from Port Louie. So I'm just going to come right in. I'm really hoping that this is going to work. So in I come really, really close. Look at that. I can bring and this is great to get students to do presentations. I get you can get them to sort of present anywhere that they, you know, I've done, got my students to present. For example, the school they went to or their favorite monument or it's just such a powerful thing. And as I said, you don't need the internet version. So watch this. I'm going to bring you right in to the place where I am currently staying. And I'm literally in fact now I'm actually in the actual building where I was. But before I was standing outside to look at this, I'm just going to come in here. Then I'm going to take my little man and I'm going to drag him onto the street. I'm just going to drop him here because I'm actually in this place here at the moment. And bang, there I am. That obviously now it's the night time or it was the night time when I was just filming a little while ago. This was where I was just just a little way down from here doing that film. So you can get students. I often stop by doing a presentation myself and then getting my students to present somewhere, whether it's their favorite monument where they went to school, where they were born, where they went on holiday or a place that they wanted to visit, etc. Google Earth is great. And you can move between the map version and then move exit street view and come back into the map. So you can always be playing around between showing, you know, and you don't need to do a really kind of complicated presentation where the students are necessarily jumping from one place to the other. They could just present one place just like I'm doing now. That is a wonderful tool. But what I'm going to show you now is something else that you can do with this is really clever. Now you would need to download Google Earth. But the point I'm trying to make is that with a few basic skills in using key technologies that are really useful, we can begin to do some really exciting things. Now I know some people are going to complain, the internet connection. But obviously if you download Google Earth, you don't need to use it. You don't need the internet. What you will need the internet for is a completely free tool that I want to show you now because I'm going to record myself doing a presentation. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just jump over to the internet. I'm going to launch this technology called Screencast-O-Matic. So I'm going to click on Screencast-O-Matic. And you can see it launches like a little recorder. Now if I jump back to Google Earth, so just going to click to open up Google Earth. And I don't even need to really do that to do it that big. I could just make it a little bit smaller. So I just click on there. Just click on here a minute and wait a minute. It's going to make this a bit smaller. Okay, so I mean that will do. So I've just sort of got it nice and centered. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to record myself talking, doing a little presentation about Mauritius. Okay, this is where I currently am. I'm in Mauritius and you can see fairly near. Though it's still about 300 miles, 400 miles is La Reunion. And here I'm more than a thousand miles away is Madagascar. Now what I'm going to just do is try to show you exactly where I am in Mauritius. So I'm just going to zoom in. And I can do that by just clicking on this button here and zooming into where we are. And here we go, zooming into Mauritius. Let me just move so we come right into Mauritius in the center of the, okay. And the area that I'm currently staying in in is this area in the north. So this is the capital and here is Cromby and I'm staying here. So look, I've just done that recording. I'm going to stop that and I'm going to click on done. And I'm just going to save that recording. Let's play it back a few seconds. It will take a few seconds to open up. And there it is, that recording is made. Let's just play that recording back and listen to it. So let's just play that. Okay, this is where I currently am. I'm in Mauritius and you can see fairly near though it's still about three. I mean, that's quite simple to do. And now what I could tell you is just save that onto my computer. So I could click on save as and that video would then be saved on my computer. Okay, I can give it a name. So if I want to give it a particular file name here, Russell Mauritius. And then I could save that and then share it with my teacher or whatever. I mean, I've got lots of other options as well. So just click on publish and that would now be saved directly onto my computer. So this is, you know, a great possibility. And what I'm really talking about here is that maybe you would train the students in using Google Earth in the classroom and maybe even doing a presentation yourself. And obviously showing them how to use Screencast-O-Matic, which you can see is very easy. Just literally mark out the area and click on the button. And then get your students to do those recordings at home. And maybe they bring them back into class and they share them maybe in groups. They listen to each other. Maybe they give feedback on each other. Maybe they listen to a few and vote on the best one. You know, you're encouraging your students to do a speaking activity at home. They don't have to do the recording at home. They could just prepare a presentation and come into class and even present. I'm just opening up the possibilities. But all these things, all these possibilities require a certain amount of digital competence on the part of the student and the teacher. And that's one of the key things I want to talk about today. And this particular example is a little bit more complicated. But what I want to do is talk about some other examples that are much, much simpler. A little survey I often do when I'm working with groups of teachers that I train or even sometimes when I get the chance to go and do some practice lessons with students. Particularly when I'm working with high-level students is I ask them, well, how did you actually learn to speak English or whatever language it is that they've learned as a second language? And I often say, well, did you learn it in class? Did you learn it because of the homework that the teacher set you? Or did you really learn it on your own finally through all the activities that you might have done by, I don't know, watching the television, traveling to the country, making friends with people from that language, reading books, listening to music as a really common one, watching YouTube videos. And nearly everyone in the end, though many people will say, yes, the class had a big impact on me, will say that actually it was their extramural activities, extramural activities, refer to activities that students do on their own and not part of the lesson or part of the homework. They are really the activities that helped towards them learning to speak the language. Now this is definitely my case. Now I speak pretty good Spanish, fairly good French, it's not as good as it used to be, which I'm now realizing as I'm out here in Mauritius and it's kind of a bit rusty, but it's coming back and now I'm learning Polish. And if I think of any of those languages, really, though the teacher definitely plays a role, it's my effort. With French it was simply going to the country and then making friends with French people and then reading, I read a lot. With Spanish it was because I lived there and I really only had lessons for about four or five months and then I did have some lessons when I was preparing for an exam. In Polish it actually is more to do with the fact that I get the chance to go out and spend time with my family but the point I'm trying to make when my wife is Polish, the point I'm trying to make here is that actually, ultimately, to get to a fairly good level of language learning we have to do a lot of activities on our own. Now that doesn't denigrate the teacher's role. I really think I like being in class with teachers and I've certainly done that in Polish, I've certainly done that in French and I've certainly done that in Spanish, but ultimately it's the extramural activities that really lead to language learning and what I'm trying to make is that we should be thinking about the types of technologies that we introduce into our classroom and into the homework with the idea that it's going to help our students to become better, more effective extramural learners. Let me try to explain that in a little bit more detail. When we're talking about blended learning we're often talking about the balance between what we do in class and how that links with what we do for homework. Sometimes we're talking about what we're doing in a kind of face-to-face context without technology and how that links to the use of technology either in the class or homework. It's a quite complicated issue these days, but really the point I'm trying to make is that if we set up activities with our students and set up homework with the view that we're always trying to encourage our students to get a better understanding of how they can work independently and do more extramural activities. So we encourage reading, we encourage use of YouTube, we encourage our students to learn to record themselves speaking, we encourage students to become effective searchers of content so they can study on their own. All these sorts of things can really help our students to become more effective extramurally, in other words independently, that that should be one of our goals and of course blended learning can really help us to do this. So maybe the way, the choices we make about the technologies that we're going to introduce our students to, should depend a lot on the types of technologies that would really encourage them to become independent learners. Now I've given you one example because I've done that myself, that is recording myself speaking using ScreenCasterMatic as a way of doing speaking activities with my teacher. I've certainly made good use of Google Earth even in the class with my teacher as well. And now I want to show you some other ideas, in other words things that, introduction of certain technologies that I believe can really encourage our students to become more effective independently. So I'm arguing that the use of blended learning and the choices that we make about what technologies to introduce into a blended learning format should be influenced by the types of technologies that are going to help our students to become more independent learners. That's really the crutch of the point I want to make. So we all know that YouTube is a really common way of getting access to content when we're learning a language and I continually use YouTube, particularly now for finding content for learning Polish. Now let me just show you a couple of, just a few simple examples of things that I train my students to do, either in class or part of homework with the long term aim that this will help them to become effective extramurally. I'm going to do a search for English shopping, or shopping in English. So I'm going to just write in here, shopping in English, okay? And I'm sure that loads of videos are going to come up on the screen when I do that and off they come. And we can see here. Now, do your students realize or do you even realize that you could also, for example, click on filter and say, okay, well, yeah, I want videos about shopping in English, but I don't want them to be too long. So I'm going to only search for videos that are between four and 20 minutes. And notice that to do that, all I have to do is click on this filter button here. And now I've chosen four to 20 minutes. And what I'm also going to do is I'm going to search for videos that have got subtitles, because I really want to work with subtitles, because that's really going to help me. Okay, brilliant. So now I've got some videos on the screen. I can even see that they've got subtitles. It tells me that. And I'm going to actually click on one of these videos. Let's take this first one here. And I can see that that's got subtitles in it. So I'm going to click on it. So that's great. Isn't it straight away? That little skill just helping students to be able to search for videos that have got subtitles. It's such a silly thing to do, but it really does make a difference. And that's something I do in Polish all the time. But watch this. Now that we've got a video with subtitles, if we clicked here, we can actually find that the video also has this little button where we can open up the transcript. And we've now got the transcript on the left-hand side. Now, that doesn't work with all videos. It only works with subtitles that have been added by YouTube. If the actual subtitles are embedded into the video, in other words, they're included in the video itself, then this transcript won't come up. But if the video, if the transcript has been added by the person that uploaded the video afterwards, which is very common, then you will be able to access this transcript. Now, that's great, isn't it? Now, what about this then? I could now click on any part of that transcript and the video will jump straight to that part of the video, and I could play that. All right? So if I, like you can say, so be sure to hit the subscribe button. So it says it there. And if I was to click on that... So be sure to hit that subscribe button. And I'm just going to pause it back and button, and I'm going to click back here. And now we're going to come back to another part of the video. Okay? So I can actually use this as a way of navigating to different parts of the video. So that simple skill, and there are many, many more skills like this that we can teach our students and do activities that encourage the students to learn how to search effectively for videos, how to make use of the transcripts. We could take this a little bit further. I'll just show you one more example. So another thing that we can then do is that we could, for example, let's just take this as an example. I could copy that. Okay? So I'm going to copy that. And I'm going to just copy that one, that sentence. And I'm going to jump over to Google Translate. And now what I'm going to do in Google Translate is I'm going to paste that in that sentence. So let's imagine I was a Spanish speaker. Okay, so I'd want to know the translation into Spanish. And I can get the translation. Now what I can also do with that is that then I could actually save that by just clicking on this button here. And if I click here, I can see the list of all the saved sentences that I've got. Now I'm learning Polish, so this first one is in Spanish, but your note is actually that I'm doing this all the time. So every time I find an interesting sentence in the videos that I'm learning in Polish, I paste in the Polish and then I get the English translation. And then I've got all these words here as a list. And I can do a lot of things with this list, which are one day or in another video, perhaps I'll show you, but I can, for example, listen to the sentences. Okay, next one. Okay, etc. So let me just go back over the point I'm trying to make. I'm saying that when we're making decisions about how we're going to blend and what tools we might introduce into our teaching and learning, which is obviously very connected to digital competence. So what competences do we want our students to develop? The answer is that really competences that are going to help them to be more effective extra-mural learners, because ultimately that is how we learn a language. Now I'm going to do one final point that I want to make and this is really interesting because it's actually connected to my own experience of learning Polish and it's a real eye-opener. So just before COVID, I decided to go to Poland and go to a language school. I love being in class. It was really interesting. In the lessons, we never used any technology at all. Apart from, we had a training session in using the platform that went along with the book that we were using in the classroom. So we were using a booking class, but there was an associated platform for doing loads of online activities. And we spent a whole lesson, in fact more than a lesson. It was an hour and a half. We even went into the second lesson just learning to use this platform. And at the time, you might have felt, oh, this is a waste of time. However, what happened was that very quickly, the teacher began to set activities for us to do for homework on the platform. And very quickly, I realized that this was an example of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about extra-mural activities because very quickly, I started to really make use of this platform, not only doing the homework that the teacher was setting me, but was also brilliant for me to access loads of extra content. And I was thinking, wow, this is great. I love the way that the platform is connected to what we're doing in class. And yes, I can do the homework that the teacher sets, but I can also do a lot more. Now, most books have platforms that support them. And these platforms have loads of material. They often have grammar exercises and vocabulary and reading and audio files and video. And you can get lots of variety into your activities. And this really opened up my eye to this option of using the platform. And I just want to think a little bit more about why this is so useful. So the point I'm trying to make is that one of the technologies that I would really be encouraging teachers to find out about and introduce to their students is the platform that goes along with the book that they're using. So let's just think about why the platform is useful, particularly from the teacher's point of view. It's easy to set homework. The teacher can just set homework and then we go home and we do the activities on the platform, which is exactly what we were doing during the course. It's easy for the teacher to track because the platforms will show the teacher who did the activity, what scores they got. So they've got really good control over what's going on and who does the homework and who doesn't. They can link everything to the lesson. So you might repeat a listening activity you've done in the class or you might do some extension work or you might do some listening work connected to the grammar that you've done or to the reading you've done. And it's really varied because the platform that I had access to had masses of activities and it had loads of extension work as well. Now from the point of view of the student, again it's linked to the lesson, it's great for revision and it means that all the content is one place. The other good thing about that from the teacher's point of view of course is that the teacher doesn't have to make any content or find any content, it's all there in one place. So I'm a big fan of these platforms and I'm just going to kind of show you a platform and show you. Now since this talk is sponsored by Express Publishing I'm going to show you their platform and just focus on a couple of examples. Lots of the publishing companies have these platforms but I would really suggest that you look into them. Certainly the Express Publishing one works very similarly to the one that I was using in Poland. So from the teacher's point of view this is great because look at this, obviously you're going to have an account where you can set assignments for your students to do so you can choose an activity and then choose the class that you want to do that assignment and it will then track the students in that class and who have done the assignment and who hasn't and what scores they've got. So it's really really easy for you to set assignments and to sort of check how students are doing from the student's point of view of course they get access to the content. Let's just have a quick kind of look at an example. So I've got access to a whole ton of books here so let's just sort of jump into one. So this is what the student will be able to do is literally just to access the book and do the activities. Remember we can set specific activities that we want the students to do and those activities will appear when the student logs in and they'll be able to see the activities that they've got to do but literally if I'm a teach student I can just come in and go to a certain activity and then do the activity whatever that's linked to it might be listening it might be in this case you've got the numbers and I guess you're going to have to drag the number into the correct box that type of thing so this one's a reading activity. Okay so really easy because I get a whole range of different activities that I can do for homework connected to what we've been doing in the classroom but look at this from the teacher's point of view as well as that they can find a particular activity that they like and then they can say right okay I want to set that on a particular date choose the class that they want to put it into so they can select the class and they can then get the class to do that activity in other words that activity is directly sent to that particular group of students. So these platforms number one the teacher hasn't got to make anything you know all the content is there it's all connected to the book and from the point of view of the student it means everything's in one place and it means that okay they can do the homework that the teacher has set them but they could also do extra activities or go back and revise things I personally in my experience of learning Polish have found this really useful I'm not trying to say it's the only thing to do I love using YouTube videos as well I make use of other technologies like Quizlet I'm suggesting lots of things but I am saying that I think these platforms are really worth looking at one of the obvious things about using a platform that I like is the fact that you know if I think back to say me teaching 30 years ago when I was working out in Greece as a teacher is that you know outside of the classroom the types of activities that I could have asked my students to do for homework whether they would have been more or less dictated to by the workbook that students had and maybe by a few extra things that I could get them to do but it was very restricted now I can get my students to go home do activities on the platform for example here we've got some audio content and an audio listening material that we want the students to do it could be grammar it could be reading etc so the platforms offer lots of variety in terms of the activities that we can set as homework apart from the things that we might encourage them to do with things like YouTube and Google Earth and other tools that I've showed you today so the big game changer for me is really what the students can do outside of the class and the platforms will make a contribution to that just like using YouTube just like using YouTube I'm sorry just like using Google Earth we've got to introduce these technologies including the platforms to the students so that they know how to access them and they know how to use them and then that becomes through that competence through that ability to use the platform a brilliant opportunity for our students to work on their own and to develop the ability to do extramural activities that is work completely independently from the teacher and be to become more effective learners and that's really the key point I'm trying to make so in conclusion I've really tried to focus on three things the use of Google Earth a bit more sophisticated but it's a brilliant technology and again we can encourage our students to to record themselves speaking and doing speaking practice knowledge of YouTube as another great competence that can help our students to be more effective independent learners and finally making use of the platforms that go with the books that we use because they really offer a great variety of activities just by training our students to use the platform we've suddenly got access to masses of material that we can set as homework