flynn089

This is just a short post to anounce the publication of my new ebook ' Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking '. Exploiting Infographics follows on from 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy , which is a collection of lesson plans based around infographics, and looks in more depth at the genre and how infographics can be used as both sources of information and as creative learning tasks for students. The tasks that accompany the infographics are intended to encourage students to think more critically about the information they are exposed to and to question the sources of information they find whilst browsing the internet. Exploiting Infographics should help teachers to start creating their own tasks, activities and lesson plans for students and to integrate infographics in a way that will enhance students’ critical thinking, digital literacy, language and communication skills. Exploiting Infographics was conceived as part of The Digital Classrooms Serie...

I recently revisited Phraseum , an app which I first discovered and reviewed in March 2014. I’m glad to see that the tool is still around, has gathered a loyal following and has developed both in terms of design and functionality since that first review . In this article I’d like to show you some of the new features and also share some ideas for how you can use it. Let me start though by recapping what Phraseum does. Phraseum is a tool that students can use to capture lexical chunks, collocations and expressions while they read online text. It helps students to collect these expressions into theme based phrasebooks that they can then use to revise and share their learning.  Within the platform there are also a number of features to help them learn the phrases, these include tagging of phrases and links through to Google translate. Phraseum also records the source of the phrase so that students can go back and find the phrases in their context.  A new feature that’s been ...

AnswerGarden is a very simple tool for creating short answer polls and displaying the answers as word clouds. It’s really simple and quick to use and can be used in the classroom or embedded into webpages, blogs or in online courses. To create an AnswerGarden poll just go to http://answergarden.ch and click on the + sign at the top. Then you can either type in a topic to brainstorm or a question. AnswerGarden poll responses are limited to either 20 or 40 characters so be sure that the type of question you use doesn’t require a long complex answer. AnswerGarden works best when only a single word answer is required. Once you have added your topic or question you can just click enter and your poll will be ready. Then just share the URL with the recipients. You can refine your poll and add some security to it if you wish. There are a number of modes you can choose for your poll. You can allow different users to repeat the same answer, in which case the repeated word will appear larger d...

Back in April 2013 I delivered a workshop at the IATEFL 2013 conference in Liverpool. The topic of the workshop was ' Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps ' and in the workshop I encouraged participants to share and explore their subconscious criteria for deciding which apps and web based tools they used with their students. I particularly encouraged them to think about 'authentic' apps rather than those made for learning. This is because in many ways I feel that most made for learning apps have made very little pedagogical progress beyond their roots in CALL from the last century. I also believe that encouraging students to get 'hands on' with authentic apps has a much more important role in helping them to develop digital literacies which they can use outside of the classroom. Check out my ebook As a result of that workshop and the research that developed from it I've now developed this list of criteria for evaluating mobile apps for educational purp...

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 ...

I'm often getting asked what my criteria are for choosing the tools, apps and resources that I feature on my blogs and in my teaching and do be honest I don't really think about it that much. I look at so many sites and apps that I just get a feeling when I see something that I think will work. As that isn't a very satisfactory answer to give people I decided to start exploring my own criteria for what influences my choice. I ran a workshop on this topic at IATEFL 2013 on looking at apps and how we can evaluate them. I came up with a number of 'first impression' criteria that I think I apply before even thinking about 'how' I will use the app / tool. Here is the presentation / workshop recording You can download a copy of the presentation from here: Evaluating Web-based Tools Please feel free to browse the list and add any 'pros' and 'cons' for anything you think I've missed. powered by tricider I hope you find these criteria useful as...