Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students

Over the last few weeks I have been playing with a very simple brainstorming and voting website called tricider. The great thing about tricider is that it is incredibly quick and simple to use, and yet it enables users to collect information and opinions from all over the web in a very easily digestible and powerful way.

It's very easy to create a tricider topic or question and you don't even need to register, just type your topic or question into the field.


You can also add a bit more detail and instructions to guide your students.

After you have saved the description, you or your students can start adding solutions.

Once there are some solutions added it's easy to either vote for them or add arguments for or against, using the + or - symbols.


Once you have set up your page you can add your email so that you get notifications when ever anyone adds something new or votes. You can also get a URL to edit the page (in case anyone adds something offensive) and a separate URL to either share with your students or post to Twtter or Facebook.

Here are some examples that I have set up to crowdsource in formation from my PLN.

• What digital skills do students need for the 21st century?
• How do we encourage pedagogically sound exploitation of technology in language learning?
• What do you want from a digital coursebook for EFL / ESL?

So how can we use this with students?

• Set up some controversial statements and get students to vote for the ones they agree / disagree with and leave pro and con comments. You could assign groups of students to all think of pros and another group to think of cons and see which can come up with the most convincing arguments. Example: Controversial Issues
  
• Your statements could be about a particular book your students are studying and they could add arguments for or against. Example: Goldilocks and the 3 Bears
  
• Get students to brainstorm word or phrases based around a theme. Example: Computer Phrases
  
• Get students to vote on a list of topics they want to study. Example: Topics
  
• Put up a list of favourite films or books or bands and get students to vote and debate which is best. Example: Favourite films
  
• Get students to brainstorm, debate and share knowledge about any particular topic or even language point. Example: Present Continuous
  
• Set up true false questions to check comprehension of a text.
• Create action research questionnaires to get feedback on the things you do in class. Example: Things we do in Class
  
• Create needs analysis questionnaires for your students or other colleagues. Example: Needs Analysis
  
• Get students create their own questionnaires and circulate them online (through Twitter or Facebook) to collect opinions. You could also get the students to use this information as part of a written assignment.

What's so good about tricider?

• It's free and really quick and easy to use.
• It's allows people to interact and share opinions.
• It doesn't require any registration.
• It's very simple for students to add their arguments or just vote.
• It updates very quickly so you could use it live in class and just click refresh as students add opinions or vote.
• It's versatile.
• It can help students pull in opinions from outside their classroom and also share opinions beyond their school.
• It creates easily digestible information.

What's not so good?

• Well there's not much wrong, but a couple of nice extra features would be:
• An embed code to allow me to embed the page into a blog or wiki.
• An archive button to enable me to close some of the debates so they don't go on forever.
• The ability to export the results to pdf or csv.

Well I hope you find tricider a useful tool and please do share any ideas you have for using it in the comments below.

Related links:

• Create a Video Q&A Booth
• So Ask Me a Question
• Create Video Questionnaires
• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• Pros and Cons as Web Based Research Tasks

Best

Nik Peachey

Making quizzes for i-pod

With the growth in interest in mobile learning and the ubiquitous nature of the i-pod among our younger (and increasingly older) students this piece of software looks like a really useful tool we can use to extend learning beyond the classroom.

The software I’m referring to is I-Quiz Maker. You can download I-Quiz Maker for free at:
http://www.iquizmaker.com/

Once you’ve installed it you can make quizzes using either True / False question types or Multiple Choice questions. The quizzes a very simple to make and you can make as many questions as you like and as many quizzes, as you like.

• This demo tutorial shows you how to create the quiz

This looks like a really useful tool to:

• help revise and develop your students vocabulary. You can write a vocabulary quiz and up- date it each week with new words that your students have learned
• get the students to create quizzes for each other and share them
• set up revision exercises

Although there is a bit of work involved in creating the quizzes, once you made them you’ll be able to keep them and use them again with other students.

Once you have finished creating your quiz you can then export it to your desktop and it can be uploaded to the I-pod through I-Tunes. The only catch here is that you and / or your students will need to buy the I-Quiz game for your I-pod. It is really cheap though (less than 1 US dollar / 79 p in the UK) and it does come with some ready-made quizzes.

What I like about it

• You can set the quizzes so that students get a maximum number of questions in each game and so that they loose after a specific number of wrong answers. This should make it more competitive.
• The game will randomise the questions so you could input 50 questions and they would get 10 or 20 random questions each game.
• It’s very easy to use and is just simple point and click
• You can update quizzes so that they grow as your students’ knowledge grows
• There's a version for PC and for MAC!
  

What I’m not so sure about

• Students will need an i-pod, they can’t just run the quiz on their computer or i-Tunes
• The game is only compatible with Fifth generation i-pods (This may become an advantage as more people trade up to more modern versions and the older ones become available more cheaply second hand) which isn’t much help for students with older i-pods.
• I couldn’t get the user manual to download so there wasn’t much documentation to help me learn how to use the software
• I think there may have been one more question type, but I couldn’t get the button for it to work ??
• Students will have to buy the I-Quiz game (though as I said it’s quite cheap) and that means setting up an i-tunes account.

On the whole though, despite the above drawbacks, if you have a classroom full of students who carry i-pods about then this could be just the thing for you.

Let me know how it goes

Best

Nik

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.

• Dropdown tutorial movie
  

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.

• Dropdown examples

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