flynn089

One of the true keys to learning and developing any ability is the willingness and capacity to reflect on what we have learned. So how can we encourage our students to reflect on what they have learned? Generally we want them to reflect from a slightly more distant perspective of time rather than more immediately within the classroom and this is where Recap can really help. Recap is a cross platform app that allows teachers to create classes and manage students and set them reflection questions that they can respond to using video on their laptop webcam or smart phone from their own home. How does Recap work? To create a class and add your students just register on the site as a teacher. Once you have registered you click on Add Class and complete the class details form. You can also decide at this point whether you want your students to register with a PIN or an email. Email is a better option for older learners, whereas a PIN is better for younger ones as this doesn’t require them to...

On the surface Riddle is a great free tool for creating a variety of quizzes and polls that can have rich media embedded into them, but when you look below the surface it's actually a pretty sophisticated tool for quickly authoring engaging elearning. Creating a Riddle is easy Go to: http://www.riddle.com and sign up. Then you will see the different quiz types. The main types of interactions you can create are: Opinion polls - These are simple single question polls which can contain a number of fixed response for the recipient to choose from. Lists - Lists aren’t questions as such, they are more like a nice way of presenting information in a series of chunks. Each chunk of information can also have media or text embedded into it. This would make a great way of presenting infographic type information in a more mobile friendly way. Pop quiz - A pop quiz can contain a number of multiple choice questions. Pop quizzes can be scored across percentage of correct answers. Students can...

Whilst in the process of designing a unit of online learning I started thinking about the qualities and skills that a good educational technology trainer should have. After thinking of a few myself I decided to draw on the wisdom of my PLN and crowd-source a few more ideas. Please feel free to add your ideas and to copy any of the ones you find here. I'd also like you to selectively vote for the ones you think are most important. You can also add some pros and cons to say why. You can add your ideas and comments without registering. powered by tricider Thank you for your help and participation. I hope you find this list useful. Related links My learning technology reading list My collection of tools for learners My Facebook page A Mural of my work online 10 Tech Tools for Teacher Training Courses   10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses   Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps Best Nik Peachey

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...

The importance of careful thought and reflection on what we do as both teachers and learners can not be overestimated in terms of the learning process and retaining information in a way that we can actually use it and make it part of our experience and practice. Keeping a teaching or learning journal can be a really important part of this process of reflection and writing entries can help us to reformulate what we have read or analyse our experiences and draw conclusions from them which we can later return to, share and reflect on again. For me Penzu is a really good tool which can help me and my students or trainee teachers to do this. How to create your learning journal Go to: https://penzu.com/ and click on ‘ Sign up ’. You will need to create a password and enter a username, email address and agree to the terms of use. Then you just click on ‘ Submit ’.  You can then start creating your journal entries by adding a text and title. Each entry is dated automatically and you can move...