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Showing posts with label interactive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interactive. Show all posts

10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses

Over the last few years I've done a lot of work developing writing and redeveloping online courses and course materials. In the initial rush to get learning online many organisations got themselves a Moodle platform and then attached a whole load of PDFs and .docs, added some forums and the odd video clip and called it an online course. It's no surprise then that drop out rates for online learning courses have been so high.


The advent of Web 2.0 though, brought a whole bunch of new tools that course designers could take advantage of to make content more social, interactive and engaging.

Here are some of the tools I've been using recently to embed a bit more interactivity into the courses I work on.


Storify - http://storify.com




Storify is a great tool for collecting together  a mixture of web based resources and references into a web based widget that you can then structure into a digital research paper. You can easily pull in comments from Facebook, Twitter or Google searches as well as a range of other social media sources. You then add blocks with your own commentary and reflections. The whole thing can then be embedded into a webpage. This is a great tool for developing digital literacy and referencing online sources.


Tricider - http://tricider.com


Tricider is a great tool for crowd sourcing opinion. You start with a single question problem and then you or your students can add possible solutions to the problem. Students can also add some pros and cons to the solutions and vote on the ones they prefer. These can be embedded into webpages and can give far more structure to online discussion than things like threaded forums which often become garbled and confusing.

Urtak - https://urtak.com


You can use Urtak to create simple social questionnaires for your courses. Although the responses are quite limited (Yes / No / Don't care) This can still be a useful tool for quick straw polls before developing deeper discussion through a forum. It also give students the chance to compare their opinions anonymously with those of classmates and also add their own questions to the questionnaire. The questionnaires can also be embedded into web pages and materials.

Intervue.me - http://intervue.me



This is also a tool for creating questionnaires, but in the case of Intervue.me the questions can be open ended and the respondent leaves their answer verbally using a web cam. Intervue.me can't be embedded into pages , but you can link to your questionnaires and you can download the video clips of the answers as mp4 so you can then use these in materials you develop and as the basis for further discussion.

VYou - http://vyou.com/



You can use Vyou embed a video booth that students can go at any time of day to ask you questions. The video booth gives the impression that you are always available and builds some presence on your course. The messages students send you are delivered to an inbox and you are notified so that you can answer them. Vyou also has a very handy mobile app so you can answer the questions where ever you are on your iPhone or other mobile device.


Keek - http://www.keek.com/



It's a good idea to get students to keep a learning journal on any course they do. It can feel a bit dull though writing journal entries to yourself, so why not get student to create a video based learning journal using Keek. They can add entries each day just using a web cam and microphone and you can leave video comments on their entries. Students on your course can also be encouraged to 'follow' each other. Individual entries can also be embedded into web pages which can enable you to build pages that share insights from your course participants. Keek also has a free mobile app that allows you to up date from mobile devices such as iPhone.


Bundlr - http://gobundlr.com/


This is a really useful tool for sharing theme based collections of bookmarks. It creates a very visual record of the book marked links which you can then embed into your course pages as widgets. This can be a really useful tool for setting research tasks based around a group of online resources.

Zooshia - http://zooshia.com/


Zooshia is a handy tool for creating widgets from social network sources that can be embedded into web pages. The widgets show a dynamic stream from whatever source we select. This can make suggestions for twitter or facebook people to follow much more informative and can also allow you to embed dynamic widgets from YouTube channels which will make your content much more dynamic too.

Present.Me - http://present.me/



Present.Me  can help you create online presentations from your PowerPoint slides. You can then add your talking head commentary to your slides and embed the whole thing into your online course. This works well as a lecture replacement and having a presenter that you can actually see along side your slides can help add to the engagement with your learners. You can embed this into your page and build a forum around it for follow up discussion.

Goanimate - http://goanimate.com
 

Online course content can become very dry and serious, so why not spice it up by creating a few animations using something like GoAnimate. It's a an easy tool for creating short animated dialogues that can be exported as video clips and embedded into your course. You can use these to introduce topics or raise issues for further debate.



I hope these ten tools and the links from them have given you a few ideas into how you can spice up your online courses and make them more engaging and enjoyable and help you to retain students. Please leave a comment if you have suggestions for other free tools you have found useful for developing online content.

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Nik Peachey
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Create Image Books

I've always liked sites that take images and enable you to do something interesting with them. Pim Pam Pum seems to be a company that is remarkably good at helping us to make the most of Flickr images, and I particularly like this little tool called Bookr.

Bookr enable us to create nice interactive image books with text captions.
Here's an example that I created based on the poem 'In White' by Robert Frost.

I found the words to the poem on Poem Hunter here: 'In White'
You can see the full size version here: In White by Robert Frost

The books are really simple to create, you just need to type in a key word to find the images you want and then drag them onto the pages and add your text.
Here's Bookr video tutorial to show you how easy it is.


  • You can download a higher quality (4.9Mb . mov) version here: Bookr Tutorial
  • You can download a version for iPod (5.6 Mb) here: Bookr Tutorial
So how can we use this with our students?
  • Poems - Like my example above, you can get students to illustrate poems, by typing in the words and picking an image for each of the key words in the text. If you have pairs of students illustrating the same poem they could justify their choice of image and how they felt it linked to the poem. If students illustrate different poems you could collect them together on a blog or webpage as a kind of poetry carnival and even choose the best ones.
  • Grammar Examples - You can get students to create books of personalised sentences based on various grammar structures.

    - For present perfect you could ask students to create 'experience books' with images of places they have been and things they have done.
    - They could create their future plans book with illustrations of things they are 'going to' do, things they 'will have done by ... ' etc.
    - They could create conditionals books with an image to illustrate each clause of the conditional
  • Narrative and story telling - Students could pick some images and then tell a story about them in their book. You could do this a few different ways:

    - You could try give the students ten keywords, they find images to match the words then create a story linking them all together.
    - You could search out the images yourself then ask the students to write the text for them. (You can do this by publishing an image book, then get the students to open the book and click on the 'Recycle' button. They will then be able to edit the book and save their own version.
    - You could also create a blank book with your own text in and ask the students to read and select images for the text (Again you do this by creating a book and then the students click 'Recycle' to edit their own version).
  • Matching text to image - You can create your own image and text matching exercises by creating a book with images and the descriptive sentences on the wrong pages. Students would have to cut and paste the sentences in to the correct pages.
  • Error correction - Select some images and write some text to describe each image, but include some mistakes (Errors in the description rather than the grammar - e.g. blue flower when the image is of a blue moth etc.). Ask your students to correct the mistakes.
  • Personal information book - Students could create a book to illustrate things about themselves such as hobbies, interests, favourite singers etc. (Make sure they don't include location or contact information)
  • Favourite things - They could create a book describing some of their favourite things, a bit like the song (Rain drops on roses etc.)
  • Hobby book - They could create books to illustrate information about favourite hobbies or sports which they enjoy, like a guide to basketball (Including images of all the equipment etc.) or skateboarding.
  • Scrap book - They could create a scrap book using images to illustrate a trip or holiday they went on. This could be even more effective if they have their own Flickr account as they could actually use their own images from their holiday.
What's good about Bookr?
  • It's free and very easy to use.
  • Gives students access to loads of images
  • You can pull in images from your own Flickr account if you have one.
  • Great that you can embed the books into blogs or webpages.
  • Really nice way to personalise and add creativity to classes.
  • Students have a really nice product at the end of their work.
  • Students don't need to register or part with any personal information
  • I like the way the pages turn!
What I'm not so sure about
  • Be careful with younger learners, some images may be inappropriate
  • It's a shame that the text is quite small and doesn't show up so well on the embedded version of the book.
  • Would be nice to be able to print the books up.
  • All published books are public
I've really enjoyed playing with Bookr and exploring some of the creative possibilities and it's a tool that I'm sure I will use in the future. Hope you enjoy it and by all means add a comment if you want to share other ideas or materials you have created with it.

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Nik Peachey
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Microsoft's free Learning Content Development System

When Microsoft start giving stuff away for free, it always makes me curious, and when I spotted this free LCDS (Learning Content Development System) a while back I decided to download it and give it a try.

If like me you've never had the patience (or the time and money) to really master a tool like Flash, but like the idea of creating interactive materials that can run online (SCORM compliant to run in an LMS), then this could be a handy tool for you. I spent the best part of a day working out how to use it and creating some materials with it for a teacher training session and by the end of the day I had two 'modules' each of 4 -5 different activity types combining images, audio, video and swf animation. Considering that I hadn't used this before and I had to actually write all the materials to put into it, I think that's pretty good for just one day, and having put the time into learning the program, I'm pretty sure that my next efforts will be much quicker.

What I liked about it
  • It wasn't difficult to learn how to use. The interface is quite intuitive and I didn't need to consult the help or any support documentation.
  • It's all point and click, no programming languages to learn.
  • The results look quite professional
  • It's SCORM compliant
  • It has some nice task types. These are a few of my favourites:

This one is grouping type activity played against a timer. Users have to click the correct bucket to drop each item into.

This is one of my favourites, it's called 'Adventure' but I know it as a reading maze. User are shown a situation and given some options, They then see the outcome of the option they choose and have to make another choice and so on until they find the 'correct' way to resolve th problem. These can be really complex to write and arrange, but this one was quite easy to do and to review and make changes. I was also able to add different images to each page.


Another task type I liked was this tile flip activity. It's a novel variation on pelmanism, but it combines the matching pairs with a kind of true false activity. Basically each tile has a true statement on one side and a false one on the other, and the user has to line up rows of true statements. They also have a limited amount of cards they can turn to get it right and if they exceed the number of turns they have to start all over again.


Lastly, I liked that you can also set up tasks using either video or swf files. This is one I created using a Flash tutorial and the built in Note taking part of the interface.


What I wasn't so sure about
  • It only seems to support swf and wmv files for video, which is a bit annoying, especially for MAC users.
  • When I came to 'publish' / upload the materials to run online, it turned out that they wouldn't work without being uploaded to an LMS (with its own viewer)
  • You need IE 7 with Silverlight installed to view the files (though there does seem to be a way to configure the files to run in Flash instead, which I'm assuming would allow you to view them in Firefox too).
Despite all of this, Microsoft's LCDS does seem to have huge potential for people like me who struggle with coding, but want to produce something that looks good and works well.

If you work in an institution that has its own LMS and you want to digitise some course materials to run online, then it could well be worth looking at as a cheap (free) solution.

If you'd like to try out the materials I created for training teachers in the use of IT and evaluating different task types, you can download the zip file of the whole session (9.4Mb) from here.

As I said above though, you'll need to have MS's Silverlight installed, then go to the file named 'wrapper.htm' and open it to begin working through the materials.

If you want to download the free LCDS and have a play yourself, then go here: https://www.microsoft.com/learning/tools/lcds/default.mspx

I'd be really interested to hear from anyone else who's tried this, especially if they've managed to get some working examples up online, so do drop me a line and share your experiences.

Best

Nik Peachy
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Interactive multiple choice activities

This is the third part in a series that I’m writing on how to use word processors to create computer-based materials. This one looks at how we can create interactive multiple choice activities using 'dropdown' menus.

Multiple choice must be one of the most common question types in the history of education. I’m sure we all answered them when we were at school and we have all given these question types to our students.

When I was at school, we used to call them ‘multiple guess’ questions, because we knew that even if we didn’t have any idea what the correct answer was, it had to be one of the choices, so we had a 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 chance of guessing the answer correctly.

In the movie tutorial you will see how to insert the dropdown menu, add your choices and also add a ‘help text’ which can be used to give clues or the correct answer.
Students access the ‘help text’ by clicking on the dropdown field and pressing F1 on the computer keyboard.

Here’s document with some interactive fields in. Click on them and then push F1 on your keyboard to see how they work.
There are a range of ways you can give clues
  • Direct students to a part of the text
  • Remind them about time relationships (for verb tense exercises)
  • Remind them of context
  • Remind them about part of speech or word morphology
  • Give them pronunciation clues (it sounds like)
  • Give a translation
  • Remind them of the unit of the coursebook / lesson when you covered the topic
Adding clues, rather than correct answers, will help to make the exercises developmental rather than a test of knowledge / memory.

You also need to be careful in your choice of words both when you select the word that you want to use from the dropdown activity and when you add your choices.

If you are selecting words from a text, then look for clues within the context which will help the students to deduce which word is correct.

When you add the ‘distractor’ words, try to make them reasonable alternatives. You could use this exercise to focus students on common problems, by using errors from their own written texts and the correct version as alternatives. If you do this, don’t focus only on their negative aspects, but also try to include some of their positive aspects of their work, like good use of vocabulary.

Anyway, hope you find this useful and by all means leave a comment if you have used this feature in other ways.

Best

Nik
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Creating an interactive cloze text

This is the second part in a series of tutorials based around using word processors to create interactive and multimedia materials.

This tutorial looks at how you can use a word processor to create a close text - also known as a 'gap fill'- that users can interact with on their computer.

This is quite a common type of activity that we use in the classroom. The students usually do it in a book and then the teacher tells them the answers. But we can create these materials to be used on the computer.

Here is an example text that I created based around a Shakespeare sonnet. Click on the gaps and then hit F1 at the top of your keyboard. You should get a clue to help you fill in your gaps.
At the end you can scroll down and check the answers.

Here is a short tutorial movie showing how the interactive 'gaps' were created (Using MS Word 97)
How to use this with students
This feature could be used in a number of different ways. You could use the text to give the students:
  • The correct answer
  • The first letter of the missing word
  • A synonym
  • Some instructions telling them to add to the text
  • A textual clue or prompt
The advantage of getting students to do these activities on the computer, is that by adding prompts or clues there is some middle ground for development between getting the answer right and getting it wrong, so this isn't simply a test.

Close activities like these can be used for a number of purposes:
  • Students can listen to an audio file and fill in the missing word
  • Students can watch a video and complete a description of the action
  • You can delete all the prepositions and get students to add them
  • Delete all the verbs and students replace them
  • Take out all the vocabulary words of a lexical group
  • Delete words at random ( every 5th, 10th word etc.)
Making the right gaps
Generally I think it's best to take out words where there is some chance that the students will be able to work out the meaning of the missing word from the context that surrounds it.
  • Example 1: "He went to the shop and bought a ____ " doesn't give you much clue to the meaning of the missing word, but
  • Example 2:"He reached into his pocket, took out a _________ and lit a cigarette" gives you a much better chance at guessing the meaning of the missing word ( Probably match or lighter)
The same can be true of grammatical words.
  • Example 1: " He had an operation on his __ last year" Not much chance of guessing this, though you would know it was probably a part of the body.
  • Example 2: " He had an operation __ his leg last year" Good chance of guessing this. If your students know their prepositions they'll know that the missing word is 'on' (operate on).
Hope you find this useful. The tutorial movie above was done on MS Word 97, I'm guessing that other versions of Word operate in a similar way, but if anyone knows how you can do the same thing on other free software like Open Office, then please do leave a comment.

For anyone interested in using the Sonnet worksheet above, there is also a recording of Alan Rickman reading it here on Youtube (Thanks to Jo Bertrand for the link)

Best

Nik
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Phonology can be fun and free

Phonetics Focus is a really wonderful new free resource produced by Cambridge English Online Ltd.

Basically it is a collection of interactive multimedia Flash based games and resources that can be accessed through the CEO website at http://cambridgeenglishonline.com/Phonetics_Focus/

What is it?
In all there are almost 20 different interactive tools all accessible through the one page. These vary from an interactive phonemic chart where users can click on the symbols to hear the sounds and so develop their knowledge of the chart and the phonemic alphabet, through to more fun games which involve shooting the correct sounds to make a word in a ‘duck shoot’ type game.

What I liked about it
All of the activity types are pretty intuitive as they draw on standards like hangman, odd one out, word searches etc and they all have clear instructions. Many of the games and quizzes also have more than one level so this isn’t just for beginners.

Some of the really exceptional features are:

  • ‘Record and Practice’ which is a small tool that users can download to help them record and listen back to what they are saying.
  • ‘Flashcard Maker’ which helps you to make your own flashcards by either using images from an image library or sketching you own pictures on the program, and adding phonemic symbols to them. You can then print them up for use in class.
  • ‘Entry and Exit’ tests so that students can check their level before using the tools and then check again as often as they want afterwards.

What wasn’t so good
I can’t think of anything much wrong with this

Conclusion
I have to say that it’s rare to find really good computer based pronunciation materials, but to find them for free is a real exception. They are really nicely designed, work well, load pretty quickly and have made really good use of multimedia. This is a fantastic free resource that will be useful for teachers and for students of any level or age too.

Be sure to check it out

Please feel free to leave a comment if you use these tools and let me know how it goes.

Best

Nik
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MS Word tutorial 1: Adding ‘comments’

This is the first in what I hope will become a series of tutorials on exploiting the teaching / learning potential of some of the more common desktop applications like MS Word. Like many people I’m a regular user of this application and it’s probably the one I use most, with the exception of my web browser.

Despite the amount of time I have spent using it, I’m often surprised to discover another useful toolbar or technique that I can use to make life easier or my teaching more effective.

This first tutorial shows how to use the ‘comments’ feature that can be found on the ‘Reviewing’ toolbar.

The ‘comments’ feature allows you to add comments to the text of a document. These comments don’t appear in the text itself, but can be seen on screen whenever you hover the cursor over the part of the text that the comment refers to.

To find out how it works, Watch a tutorial (450k Flash movie)

What I like about it
  • This tool enables me to start a dialogue with my students about their work on the actual work itself, without interfering with the flow of the text. I’ve tried using tracking before and found that it can soon become a real mess, so nowadays I much prefer to use this ‘comments’ feature.
  • It doesn’t add greatly to the file size so you can email documents back and forth as you review and re –review them with your students.
  • It’s an ideal tool for encouraging a ‘Process writing’ approach, as students don’t have to re-write their compositions every time they need to change it.


A few ideas for using it with students
  • You can use it to add explanations of difficult words
  • Students can add translations or explanations to words within the text
  • You can comment on students’ work and suggest improvements, or better still they can use it to comment on each other’s work.
  • You can add questions to a text at very precise points. These could be comprehension questions that you would like to ask, or could be questions about a text they have produced which encourage them to write more or add further detail or description
  • You could simply use it for error correction or to point out weaknesses in the text.
  • You could build up dialogue with students about the text, by adding questions to it or asking students to add questions and then reply etc.

None of the ideas above are exactly revolutionary and they could all be done with pen and paper. The advantage though, that I have found, of using this method on a computer is that students seem much more willing to go back and revise work if it doesn’t involve rewriting text. After all the real process of writing that we want to develop and aid is the act of creation, not the physical process of forming letters.

If anyone else uses this feature in other ways, I’d love to hear about your ideas.

Best

Nik
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Interactive presentations

I’ve just been looking at a really interesting on line tool called Voicethread.

What's Voicethread?
Voice thread enables users to create online presentations using their own images. It also allows the creator to add audio or written text to the images and give access to other people to leave audio or text comments on the presentation. This is a really nice way of creating presentations that can interact and create dialogue with an online audience.

Here’s a couple that I’ve created. I decided that I wanted to use this tool for a class of students I teach in Second Life. I wanted them to explore various islands and take snapshots of what they found. They would then be able to upload these to Voicethread and record audio reports, which they could then share with the class and leave comments on. I thought this would be a good way to get them to really concentrate on producing a high quality fine tuned finished product, as they would know that there was and audience for these presentations.

I created these two presentations of examples of what I wanted them to do.
  • Example 1 This one is a tour of Edunation II in Second Life.
  • Example 2 This one is a visit to Vassar Island and you’ll see that a few people have already left comments.

How do I use it?
In order to help them understand how to use the tool I also created this movie tutorial.
I really think that this is a remarkable tool. It’s been specially created for educators and so it has some really nice features.

How can I use it with my students?
Here’s a few other things I think you could get students to do which would help to develop their language abilities.

  • Ask then to upload some images of things with personal significance and create a kind of online show and tell.
  • Get students to create and tell a story using pictures. If they have access to digital cameras, you could get the students to work in pairs or small groups to produce a story together.
  • Upload two images and ask students to record what they think is the connection between the two images
  • Upload images for students to describe, such as rooms or people etc.
  • Upload images of people speaking and ask students to add a dialogue. They could also add text bubbles of what they think the people are thinking
  • Ask students to research a member of their family then upload an image of the person and tell about them.
  • Get students to upload pictures from around their town and create a sort of interactive tourist guide
  • Upload some images of graphs and statistics and see if students can describe them appropriately
  • Upload some images with incorrect descriptions and see if they can spot and correct the errors
This page is also well worth looking at: http://voicethread.com/classroom.php
It has some user guides which you can download and also shows you how to set up identities for your kids so they don’t have to disclose any personal information.

I hope you find this useful and do let me know how you use it.
Best
Nik
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