Day 7

What things have you covered in today’s sessions?

Today's course started off with a wrap up of Blended Learning. Edmodo and Moodle serves as main platforms to be used for Blended Learning. They make it easier for both teachers and students to link what they do in class with the things they do outside the class. The tools, software and other resources that can be used are:

• Google Slides / Google Docs / Google Forms
• Youtube
• Blogger
• Screen Capture Technology Software (SnagIt, Screencast-o-matic, Camtasia etc.)

Another highlight of the day was our guest speaker John McMahon, who is also a trainer at NILE. We discussed how we can integrate critical thinking skills and higher order thinking skills to our classes. We started with a video activity that required group work, retelling of the story and discussion. Basically, we were divided into two groups and each group watched only one of the videos below. Next, we tried to tell the story in the video to the other group members who didn't watch it. You can watch the videos below.

Later we discussed how we can use these videos in our classes in line with higher order thinking skills.  The questions that can be used with the two videos might be:

• Compare the two films. Who behaved worst? Why?
• Imagine the shopkeeper in the first video had been honest. How do you think the story would end?
• Imagine the boss comes to the office the next morning. How does he react? 

The activity was really useful in that it reminded us how we can activate students' critical thinking skills. John also shared with us "Bloom's Taxonomy: Teacher Planning Kit", a very useful document for us to review higher level thinking skills. 

What technologies have you been exposed to?

In today's session, we focused on how we can integrate Google Forms for Blended Learning.

How might you use the technologies/techniques in your own teaching and learning?

Google Forms can be used for variety of purposes including

• to create questionnaires, polls for the first day of school at the beginning of the term. The results may shed light on students' expectations, needs, interests, weaknesses and strengths. The results can also be used at the end of the term for students to monitor how much progress they have made.
• to get feedback from students through mid-term and end-of-term questionnaires. This might help the teacher to get a general idea of how s/he is doing 

What value would these techniques/technologies add to your teaching and learning?

What challenges do you foresee?