Teacher Newsletter - June 2014

Hello everyone!

A month will hardly pass before many of you have a goodbye class with your students and leave for enjoyments of summer. In anticipation of the happy season, we have prepared some year-end activities for your professional development.

Recent Events

English Online Webinars

Our weekend PD webinar this month was about Self-discovery and language learning in the ESL literacy classroom. New ideas, resources and links along with video recording are safely placed on our website for your reference. Watch the video

Teaching with Technology Webinar

Have you already tried flipping your classroom? Not sure how to do that? Watch the recording of our webinar How to Get Most Out of your 60 Minutes or Flip your session with Open Access Resources and read blog about flipped learning. Watch the video.

TESL Canada Conference

This year, University of Regina in Saskatchewan warmly welcomed an annual event for ESL professionals.

Our team was glad to meet old friends and find new ones. Thank you for visiting REALIZE booth - we had lots of positive feedback and inquisitive minds stopping by.

REALIZE! 2015 National Online Forum Updates:

First Advisory Committee Meeting - with fresh blood on its board to bring in new ideas, we started our planning for next year.
Planning goes as scheduled, so the date and Call for Proposals for REALIZE 2015 will be announced at the end of June. Visit English Online website soon to submit your presentation idea.

Monthly Topic

Why Blended Learning?

In a world hardly imaginable without technology, students use a variety of platforms, social networks and web-based tools that could be beneficial for language learning.

Online environment itself is an unlimited and unabridged authentic resource of language. But how effective is it if students learn independently? Certainly, level of comfort, self-directedness or even readiness to go online differs for every learner. Teacher's facilitation and guidance can help students build confidence and skills to take the most of online resources for their learning. And small steps can bring your classroom to new format of learning - blended learning.

Blended learning is a combination of face-to-face classroom instruction and computer mediated activities. It is considered as aurea mediocrita of the two worlds. There are no regulated rules on how much of each type of learning should be included in a program. In fact, teachers are in charge of their own blend depending on the needs of their class.

Broadening options

Extra time for learning - with blended learning, material can be presented online, which makes it accessible at any time. Students can do activities on the platform, watch educational videos, read web documents and pages, write posts or blogs.
Less time for preparing - to develop authentic learning context might be a challenge. With free web-based tools, teachers can curate online resources and combine them into interactive lesson plans or assign homework to be done online.
Learner outreach - ability to access recorded materials is beneficial for those learners who cannot attend face-to-face class and opt for self-paced schedule.
Addressing various needs - blended learning suits diverse learning styles as it contains asynchronous and synchronous elements, self-paced or collaborative projects.
Fostering learner autonomy - because learning happens outside of physical classroom, students become more self-directed and disciplined.