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ookmarking because social bookmarking sites allow users to share theirbookmarks with other groups or site users. Using this technology within the courseallows participants to work in research groups to collaborate in discovering usefulresources and information. This forms a strong model for the kinds of study skills andpractices they need to encourage within their own classes.Micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter enable users to build global informationsharing networks. Training participants to use these kinds of platforms during thecourse enables them to reach out beyond their course cohort and expand the scopeof their research, collaboration and learning into the global ELT community, not onlyfor the duration of the course, but to help them to sustain learning after the courseis completed.The socially interactive nature of the tasks is designed to promote the connectivistaspects of peer-to-peer learning within the online community. Some of the mainprinciples of connectivism outlined by Siemens (2004) in his essay ‘A LearningTheory for the Digital Age’ are that: ‘Learning and knowledge rests in diversity ofopinions. Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or informationsources. Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continuallearning.’ So the focus is very much pushed towards building an online community ofpractice that works with minimal tutor support using the tools previously mentioned.Creating the initial element of the course online enabled the integration of a numberof web-based Web 2.0 type social tools as well as much greater integration of socialnetworking, collaborative creative tasks and multimedia elements within the course.Overall the course is a form of ‘loop input’, a ‘style of experiential teachertraining process that involves an alignment of the process and content of learning’(Woodward, 2003), in that a blended learning course is being used to developunderstanding of blended learning approaches and methods based around contentfocused on blended learning methodology. This gives participants experiencessimilar to those their students will have as learners.Using an online medium in this way as part of the blended learning course gaveparticipants some genuine experience of online learning on which they could thenreflect. This genuine experience of learning through an online medium and all theissues that emerge through it helps teachers to understand the strengths andlimitations of the medium in a way that could not be achieved in the face-to-faceclassroom alone.Blended benefitsThe overall advantages of taking a blended learning approach to the course asopposed to doing the course completely face-to-face are many. The greatestadvantage is that having considerable parts of the course online enables us toextend the period of learning over a far greater timescale than would be possiblewith face-to-face teaching. This means that teachers have more time to developand absorb the materials they are studying. It also enables the teachers to learn intheir own teaching context, try things out with their own students and gain genuineA blended learning teacher development course | 69