Paper.li

Hybrid and Blended Learning, Online Teaching Practices, Paper.li, Reflective Teaching, Teacher Development, VLE 0 comments

Web-based resource tools allow teachers and students to share, analyze, develop, and locate content across a wide-range of subject matters and fields. These web tools can be quite useful in an online or blended course by supporting student learning and facilitation of the course. Paper.li, a content curation service based in Switzerland, is a sharing/resource tool that can help teachers to consolidate course content or that can help students to locate new trends and information in their fields of study.

In terms of ELT (English Language Teaching), Paper.li can perfectly be used twofold. In language learning, for instance, this tool can be used in the creation of a newspaper for one’s community of practice and/or learning. By creating the paper, instructors and learners can keep current on what is going on around English teaching and education-related topics. In one’s courses, Paper.li can also be employed to spot relevant information from leading authorities, organizations, or publishing houses. In ELT [or in any field], this paper-creating site can help us connect with authors, worldwide colleagues, and foreign communities of practice.

If Paper.li can become a great tool used by ELT professionals [or people in any other field of study], how much can it do for students? As soon as learners become users of this tool, they can start sharing resources with their peers. ELT students, when working on research projects or term papers, can easily identify new tendencies in methodology, classroom management, student language performance, sample activities, or sites to evaluate or use ready-made material. Conversely, students can –no doubt- cover or develop course content on their own or guided by their instructors.

As it can be seen, Paper.li can be a great tool for students as well as for instructors. As soon as teachers and learners can sign for an account on this website, they can start curating a topic of their interest and report to the class their findings and share useful sites for themselves and for their partners. When writing a paper, research, report, and the like, instructors can assess the use of this information-gathering tool by requesting bibliographical references containing quite recent publications from organizations, magazines, independent authors, bloggers, and so on. Paper.li can indeed be a great tool to explore and use with one’s students.

Sample Activity with Paper.li
Paper.li is actually an app that can either work with people’s accounts on Facebook or Twitter. By allowing the account to access this curation platform, students –as well as instructors- are ready to create an online paper. Depending on your course content, ask your students to follow the following step: · Sign in to Paper.li by either using their personal accounts on Facebook or Twitter. · Have them watch the paper-setting tutorial so they can guide themselves to start their own paper. · Have them keep in mind the importance of using hash tags to allow the system to track content shared by friends/followers, companies, NGOs, publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, etc. · Ask them to be ready to present their newly produced online paper in class and talk about the kind of information they are interested in finding on the web. The teacher should create a wiki within the LMS platform, so all members of the class can have access to all partners’ papers’ web address.	Introduction Instructions Suggestion
Activity designed by Prof. Jonathan Acuña

E To fully develop and comprehend this teaching issue, it’s advisable to research and expand these areas:

1	Web sharing tools for learners
2	Web resource tools for learners
3	Web assessment tools for instructors
4	Paper.li papers by their fields
5	Paper.li widgets for papers