Blended Learning in MFL, before, during & beyond lockdown

Blended Learning is a bit of a buzzword nowadays courtesy of lockdown.   However, blended learning as an idea has been about for some time and it is possible to find a number of definitions ranging from flipped learning to teaching with technology or even electronic and online media.  For me, this explanation here is a true representation of what a blended learning approach is.  

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

Now, there's two terms that we did not know much about before lockdown.  They are certainly words that have slipped into the zeitgeist though. It is important to recall that a Blended Learning Approach brings together the main advantages of synchronous learning such as:

1. teacher presence
2. immediate feedback
3. peer interaction

and asynchronous learning: 

1. independence
2. flexibility
3. self-pacing

I am fortunate enough to teach in a school where the students have Surface Pro devices with digital pens and where we have made very good use of Microsoft Office 365 Tools for the last three years.  These tools include the following and there are many more.

Before lockdown my classroom used a blended learning approach and this approach did not change dramatically once I was ensconced in my attic delivering lessons via Teams.

As lockdown approached I had already delivered lessons to my classes where half of my pupils were already at home. These lessons I delivered via Teams. While most students were able to join the lesson live some watched later on 'catch-up' in the Team Channel as each lesson was recorded. 

Adapting my approach

At this point, I was not thinking about how I was delivering the lessons; I was doing these in my usual way.   At the front of the classroom introducing the topic, the text, the Sentence Builder or whatever it may have been and then the usual activities and they may have been delivered using online tools or not.   A couple of lessons in to our full lockdown learning where we delivered all lessons as per the usual timetable, I realised that I did need to adapt my processes in a way that would allow my students to make the most of the lessons and make progress, of course.  Importantly I wanted to build in ways for me to check for pupils understanding and for my students to be able to access information and explanations with ease.

Maximising OneNote

All my classes are on OneNote. Each year group has a Class Notebook set up by me and you can read about how I do this here.  

I would start lessons with a chat in Teams and make use of the Q&A function even asking students to let me know how they were doing using an emoji (always a popular way to start the class).  Polly is also an excellent tool to use to find out about how your students feel about something or to quickly assess their understanding.  I might also make use of Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter. - although I prefer to stay within our Teams call at the start of the lesson to ensure we are all in the right place.

After this lively start I would guide my students to the relevant page in our Class Notebook where work would be ready to access and guidelines given.  In this example below you can see how I have embedded video instructions for my students which they can access again and again, so no need for me to be constantly explaining activities.  I simply used the Insert Video option in the Class Notebook to record these short explanations which I dot throughout the Notebook page.  Students, thus, are never lost or unsure of what they should be doing.

You can also see that the first activity is Quizlet and I would use this, Quizizz, learning apps or even a simple, read, cover, write activity or the like, to assess prior knowledge, or to practise an area that would lead into the following exercise. From this point,  I could let my students move on independently, at their own pace. 

For me, what was positive about this approach and about harnessing the power of OneNote Class Notebook  is that I could see at a glance, thanks to the student review tool, how my students were progressing, giving them vital feedback and asking them questions to get them back on the right track in their learning.  I cannot deny that the digital pen is so helpful in this respect as I can simply ink in a question or even audio record some thoughts. So, although the students are working individually I am there, in the Class Notebook and in the Team, able to provide assistance as I would in the the normal classroom except that on this occasion I have enabled my students to move on as and when they are ready.  

Listening & Speaking in Lockdown

On the Class Notebook page for the lesson my students would undertake a variety of tasks and this included listening and speaking which perhaps traditionally would be considered too tricky to complete remotely.  Conversely, the Class Notebook and the ability to voice record means that my students were able to complete a variety of listening tasks including dictation. 

 

And these listening activities are not confined to the audio function in the Class Notebook. It is possible to use learningapps and quizizz for example to complete listening activities and that variety is often very important for students.  Both of  these online tools allow the teacher to create a diverse set of activities testing different skills and allowing for repetition of language in different forms which is vital for language learners. 

In terms of being able to help my learners construct language based on work we had done on texts or sentence builders (you can read more about Sentence Builders and how I use them in OneNote Class Notebook here) I would also use the flippity randomizer to provide a starting point for students to create their own sentences either orally or written down.  Here's an example on les déplacements. Also helpful is wheel of names.  Both these tools are a stepping stone on the path to getting students to start producing language independently, they scaffold the production of language and they are both tools that I would use in my classroom before lockdown.

There was a lot of concern among the language teaching community that speaking activities would suffer under lockdown but the tools that I was using before lockdown commenced really came into their own.  The ability to be able to record audio in the Class Notebook meant that my students had the wherewithal to practise their speaking in a non threatening environment, which is obviously key when tackling a foreign language.  I would also get them to use the dictate tool (having set the language to French first, of course) to practise their pronunciation.  The benefit of this is that students can see immediately if their pronunciation is spot on or not and with a click on the audio of the correct pronunciation they can then self correct.    These are both activities that my students have benefitted from both before and during lockdown. 

Flipgrid 

Flipgrid is a fantastic tool that I have used on numerous occasions in the past for speaking activities.  In lockdown the speaking activities continued which provided me with the opportunity to hear my students speaking individually and more imporantly gave my students the chance to practise their learning in a non-threatening environment.  

However after the first few remote lessons I knew I need to create some videos with detailed explanations for topics or grammar points and that I might need to annotate verb tables or particular sentences and examples so I found that Flipgrid Shorts was a perfect tool for what I wanted to achieve.  I knew too that these videos needed to be readily accessible to my students at any time so that they could go back to the explanation as and when they needed.  I could then embed the short video into the Class Notebook page like this:

Flipgrid shorts is versatile in that it allows text and picture inputting on a black or whiteboard. The fonts can be changed to suit your needs and there are a range of recording options from audio to screen recording. Here's an example of how I create them.

The Power of Flipgrid - A Short Video

Peer Interaction

Finally, I wanted to give my students opportunities to interact with each other.  They could interact orally in channels in Teams if I set this up and I could then pop in and out of channels to listen to my students speaking and practising the language. On paper, I found it useful to use the collaboration space in the Class Notebook and I set this up like this with a sheet of paper per student.  Students would then zoom in on their sheet and write their answers and could then zoom in on other students' work to provide feedback.  From my point of view as the teacher, I could have an overview of learning and for the students it meant that they could see and comment on the work of their peers. 

Going back to where I started blended learning is a bit of a buzzword nowadays but for me it is not something that is confined, as we have been, to use only in lockdown.  Much of what I have described here are activities that my students carried out before remote learning began.  Certainly, there are some that are new to me.  For example, using channels in Teams for student oral work or using Flipgrid Shorts to explain a concept that can then be rewatched whenever necessary. This latter is definitely a major takeaway for me as I can see how much benefit it has for my students.   There will be other takeaways too; completing dictation for homework is now a possibility or asking my students to use create their own Flipgrid Short to describe a tense or difficult grammatical concept for example. 

I am looking forward to returning to my classroom and my ability as a teacher has been enriched by the time I taught remotely from my attic space.