flynn089

For years now I have been happily using EtherPad based services like http://primarypad.com/ and http://sync.in/ to get participants on the training courses I deliver to work collaboratively to create and peer edit texts. Increasingly though I've been having problems with the reliability of the free services these companies provide and the lack of reliable compatibility with mobile devices. At last it seems that now I have a very elegant solution in the form of https://quip.com/ . Quip looks a lot like Evernote and has a similar interface with documents contained in notebooks, but one of the big differences is that Quip was designed specifically to enable peer editing and collaboration on documents and has a very clear way of showing and tracking the changes. Here's a short tutorial showing you how it works: Why should we get our students peer editing? It improves their awareness of accuracy It can improve the quality of their writing Pushes students to accept that writing is ...

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students. Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot. Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles. So how do we use this with EFL ESL students? We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities. Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having. Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism as...

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...

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. Example: Sonnet 130 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) Tutorial movie: Adding help text How to use this with students This feature could be used in a number of different way...

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...