Bring your lesson material Everywhere!

Have you ever experienced losing teaching materials you prepared before the class? If they gave me a plate for each time I forgot where I put my teaching files, I would have dozens of them home. This is why I was so excited to know there is an online platform enabling me to create my teaching materials in one place. Blendspace makes it possible for teachers to create and manage their teaching materials in one place. You will have easy access to many sources pages, such as Google search, Google images, YouTube, Google drive, and embedded website links. No more having a long list of tabs on your screen 😭. Teachers can also create classes on this platform. But if you have an online class on google, you can embed the lesson in that class. 

To explore the use of this platform, I create the following lesson! (click on the image to get directed to the page)

My first impression when I create the lesson was this platform can be an easy way out for a clumsy teacher like me! I will explain the features to you, so you will relate to what I said 😁

This is the appearance of the dashboard on my Blendspace page. If you wish to create a new lesson, you will need to click on the green new lesson button. Then you will be linked to the following page:

The next step you need to do is to fill the provided boxes with your lesson based on the lesson flow. There are several things you can do to create part of your lesson in each box. First, you can click add text and type your instruction. Second, you can drop the resource of your lesson. The resources can be found by searching them in the right toolbar. Life is easier since we can simply type what we want to search in the searching box. You can select from which pages you want to search your files. For example, if you want to search  YouTube videos, you can click on the YouTube toolbar on the right side first before you type what you want to search there. 

Blendspace is not only helping teachers to simplify the material creation but also allowing students to engage more in the class. The discussion chat box in the video player will enable students to express their thought about the video they watch. This opportunity can encourage interaction between students in the class. Blendspace will also ease students to follow the lesson as they do not need to open their books or prepare their notebooks in class. 

However, this platform can only be effectively used under two circumstances. First, both the teacher and the students are equipped with devices and internet access. Second, the teachers need to creatively build the materials, not just merely search for materials on some websites and copy-paste them. It will not be a meaningful learning experience for the students unless the teacher knows how to integrate the use of this platform with their strategy to bring the students to reach the learning goal. 

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Images: https://www.pexels.com/

screenshot Blendspace.com