FCE Blended Learning

Introduction

Right after I came back from my teacher training course on Blended Learning in Norwich I was really excited and very eager to try out what I had learned with my new group of students. The first chance I got was with a group of young adults (15-18) preparing for their Cambridge First Certificate exam.

Since they hadn't started the course with me, we basically met halfway through the course and we had only two weeks to get things going. With this in mind, I decided to keep it simple. From my previous experiences teaching FCE, I knew that one of the biggest challenges while teaching the course is monitoring and giving feedback on the students' speaking performance and grading writing accurately.

Tools

After I gave it a bit of thought, I decided I would partially blend my classes.

The first thing I asked my students to do was to create a google account. This way I was sure we could use the main tools I had in mind:

- Blogger: that's our central location. Everything we did was there. It's our repository.

- Youtube: where I uploaded my video tutorials.

- Soundcloud: great website for sharing audio files (not copyrighted ones though)

- Google docs: a google tool similar to word with some more convenient features

- SnagIt: screen capture software I used to create video tutorials

Speaking

As I have already mentioned, monitoring speaking in class is quite challenging, so my blend was organised as following:

Class activity: 

Teacher boards a few simple ways of giving peer FB, in my case they were three of the following, but I would tweak them according to the specific aim of the activity (part 1, 2, 3 or 4):

- Range of vocab 1-5

- Fluency 1-5

- Interaction 1-5

- Pronunciation 1-5

- Content 1-5

For the timing part, I would use a countdown timer or a smartphone.

Homework activity:

Now, the homework for them would be simply an extension of classroom activity. What I did was to consult my tutorial blog here, watch the video and produce a podcast with their recording on it and post it on the class blog, which you can check out here.

I decided to use soundcloud for several reasons: first, it's very user-friendly. Second, it allows students to record themselves using either their phone or their own laptop/pc, third, they can share their recording and finally, and most important for me, I can give them a written feedback! If you're curious on how the whole process worked you can check my video tutorial right here.

 

Writing

Those of you who have already taught FCE prep courses probably know that grading writing is one big chunk of the work. Students usually get demotivated and you get loaded with tons of paper to mark.

I decided I wanted to step up my game by using google docs. See, this program not only allows you to simply save paper, it gives you the chance to give instant feedback as well, to clearly comment on students' mistakes on the margin and for the students to compare between versions without going through the effort of deciphering your corrections.

How I did it:

Of course you can't just walk in class and tell your students "ok, for homework write this essay at page 11 but with google docs this time". It simply won't work. Students still need directions, tips, preparation, drafting, brainstorming, etc. so we did that in class. Taking notes by hand, discussing the topic with their peers, planning are all elements I believe can be hardly thrown out of the classroom. Only once my students were ready to go, they got to know what they had to do, and they were happy and relieved to know that they had time to write their essay properly. Of course, even for this tool, I provided a guidance. Students loved it, and so did I.