Saturday 22 February 2014

Book Creator for Anecdotal Records

I watched a presentation by a teacher named Gabrielle Trinca on the AITSL Website - The Learning Collective. It was an extremely interesting presentation about contemporary teaching and project based learning. One thing she mentioned, though, that was quite unrelated was an idea with book creating Apps that I hadn't actually considered. At KPS we use Book Creator to create books for students and to have students create books. Another idea is to use Book Creator to keep records about students. A book can be created for each class member and photos, videos, written notes and audio notes can be added to the book. What a great way to keep digital records and have evidence for assessment!

Quizzes

After such fantastic success with Kahootit the first couple of times I used it, I have now encountered some difficulties. The last two times I attempted to use it the students couldn't join - very disappointing but I will try again.

This week I have been trying out NearPod which, like many of my favourites is an app and also browser based. Excellent for blended learning and similar to Blendspace, but with less options for uploading material but more options for quizzes, NearPod is quite easy to use. You need to make the lessons in the browser version, easier on a PC, and then students can log into your lesson through the app or browser. They need no ID etc which makes life easier, you just start the lesson and they type in a short code. I used it with groups from year 1 to 7 with very good results - 100% engagement. With a free membership you can do all of the above but I am going to sign up to a gold membership for a month. This allows you to set the lessons for homework. I will use this to make the lessons more self paced, particularly for the older students.

Friday 7 February 2014

Quizzes in a Blended Learning Environment

For the last couple of weeks I have been really exploring the various ways I can use technology to present quizzes. My current purpose is to pre-test the students but I have found that there are some really good formats for a variety of purposes. I thought I would share what I have discovered so far.

I had great fun with Web-based Kahoot today. This is a type of student response system. You need to create an account and then create your quizzes. These are multiple choice and would be fantastic for mental maths, spelling and many other things. The presenter displays the quiz on an IWB or even a screen mirrored from their iPad and students log into Kahootit and use the game pin shown. They read the question and answers on the big screen and the select the corresponding answer on their computer or iPad screen. When all students have answered it shows a leaderboard and is ready for you to move on. Students get a higher score for answering quickly and it shows them if they were correct or incorrect on their scree . Teachers can download the results to excel. The boys loved the competition side of it!

Socrative is an app that is specific to quizzes and feedback. There is a teacher version and a student version and both are free. You can develop multiple choice questions as wells as short answer questions that can include images. This, too, works on iPads or computers and responses can be displayed on the board as they are entered. Socrative quizzes can be student paced, so they move on after each student has answered, or teacher paced. Results can be downloaded.

Quizzes that you can make on Edmodo have a nice range of options for the types of questions you can use such as multiple choice, short answer, fill the blanks, matching the answer. You can also add web links and files.

Blendspace is an excellent tool for blended learning. In the lessons you create you can include a huge range of resources such as YouTube clips, Educreations, photos, we pages, files from Dropbox and a Google Drive and you can add text. The quizzes you can make in Blendspace are just basic multiple choice but excellent to check for understanding. Blendspace is also a free app that is available in Edmodo and once you have assigned the app to your class or to your groups you can create resources and share them through Edmodo.

I will continue to explore tools for creating quizzes and other blended learning resources and hopefully add some more information as I discover it.