Overview Edublogs webinar – “Free & Easy”

Introduction

This Edublogs Fine Focus session (recording here) was a spin off from the previous week’s Serendipity session where one of our topics assessing with technology. Because all of my students are off-campus literacy students who access resources through the learning management system (LMS) I am always on the lookout for ways to include interaction in their work. Most interactive content lends itself well to a role in assessment – usually formative in my case but with the potential to be integrated into the learning management system and recorded. There are three free and easy to use applications that are my main tools and this session is an overview and comparison of some of their features.

The Session

As is usual when I present a session the first thing I did was to get some idea where everyone was “coming from” on the tools we were comparing, ARED, Hot Potatoes and eXe. This revealed that the majority were fairly unfamiliar with all three.

CfAREDHotPoteXe

The three tools are all free to download.

After a brief introduction to the tools we used Application Share to take a look at some examples of the types of interaction/assessment activity that can be built with each of the tools. Throughout this main part of the session there was a lot of text chat interaction with a variety of questions about the tools.

All three of They all originated through funded projects in different parts of the world and have been around for some time. So they don’t have the latest “bells and whistles” in terms of interaction options. I use all three tools because they have different interaction types available, although this has its downside in having three different looking products and needing to remember three sets of “how to”.  ARED, Hot Potatoes and eXe can all be saved in different formats including SCORM objects enabling them to be integrated into an LMS such as Moodle or Blackboard.

I personally find these three tools very useful because they are easy to use and I don’t have to worry about licensing issues if I have copies on several different computers.

Conclusion

This session was very interactive (mostly in text) despite the fact that I felt I talked too much! I’m not sure whether it is possible (in the limited time) to avoid a relatively large amount of talk from the person presenting. I do try to leaven this by using application sharing and picking up questions from text as I go, and I hope that this is reasonably effective.

Next Week

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session, one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic. Then join us on Thursday Oct 28th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Oct 29th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.

Overview Edublogs Serendipity webinar – Maths failure? & Assessment with tech.

Introduction

The recent Serendipity webinar recording here was one of those where we looked at two topics. We had a full house of five to choose from very quickly. There was a tie between “Why do so many people fail maths?” and using technology for assessment. The consensus was to look at both rather than tie-break them. Both topics generated a lot of discussion through audio and text chat with many ideas on the whiteboard also.

The Session

We started with a look at why many people fail maths. A quick poll revealed that most of us did not teach maths as a named subject those teaching science or technology inevitably had aspects of maths in their delivery. Everyone had much to contribute either from their own experience as teacher or learner of maths or from their own children’s experience. We finished this part of the session with a whiteboard of possible strategies that might help to reduce maths failure.

MAthsFailWordleResizeFor the second part of the session we moved on to using technology for assessment. Again this generated considerable discussion with much sharing of ideas and current tools being used.

AssessWTechresize

The wide variety shown here suggests that we could have many future sessions looking at the use of these tech tools and strategies for assessment.

Links shared – this week as a “one off” I am including the links shared during the session. They have simply been “grabbed” from text chat and I apologise that I have not attributed the sharers, checked the links, or reviewed the content. Lack of time!

http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/13/math_class_need/

http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/

http://akevy613.posterous.com/the-21st-century-student

http://philhart.edublogs.org/2010/10/12/is-using-the-internet-cheating/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF-d7xz7rvM

http://teachingcollegemath.com/2010/10/shifting-assessment-in-a-world-with-wolframalpha/

http://www.teachertechnologies.com/2010/04/some-thoughts-on-the-7-current-trends-in-ict-and-education-gary-putland/

http://cegsa.editme.com/

Conclusion

This was a great session with lots of interaction and much sharing of experiences and ideas. As often happens many of the ideas and strategies shared could easily become the basis of the more in depth “Fine Focus” sessions.

The session topics and link to the Elluminate/Edublogs Community Partnership Elluminate room can be found here and also usually on the following calendars:

Edublogs Webinars (scroll down for the calendar)

LearnCentral under Events or the Australia Series

The Educator’s PLN

Next Session

FineFocusSmall

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week in “Free and Easy” we will take a brief look at and compare some of the free, and relatively easy to use, tools (downloadable and online) available for generating quizzes, other assessment activities and content presentation. Join us on Thursday Oct 21st at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Oct 22nd at 1am CEST, 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.

Webinar Overview – Going Live & Paperless with GoogleDocs

Introduction

This fantastic Edublogs Fine Focus session (recording here) was a follow up to a quick and impromtu look at GoogleDocs in a Serendipity session a few weeks ago when we were lucky enough to have Rachael Colley (@burntsugar) with us when GoogleDocs was the chosen topic. In that short time Rachael gave us a quick look at some of the GoogleDocs features and whetted our appetites for more! So this week she was back with us to give us a more extended look at how she goes live and paperless in using GoogleDocs with her students.

The Session

This was very interactive and great fun! Rachael set up a doc for us to play with – she gave us a link for a fill in Google form so that we could submit our emails to enable her to give us access to the doc. This gave us all an opportunity to add our own comments to the sample doc – Rachael has now made this doc public for us and locked the editing so you can see what we wrote! We were also writing in the live chat and comments on the doc, so with the Elluminate chat as well it felt as if we had four backchannels all going at once. As usual the Elluminate chat window was scrolling fast with comments, questions, tips and ideas.  Throughout this Rachael also application shared through Elluminate – very useful for anyone who had not been able to access the doc for some reason – and also great for showing us where to find features such as the live chat.

Composite resizedAgain through application share, Rachael showed us examples of how she has all her course resources in GoogleDocs and uses a blend of the available tools to give her students different levels of access depending on the purpose of the resource.

Conclusion

This was a terrific session with so much going on that the time flew by even faster than usual in these webinars. I learnt so much and will definitely be using Googledocs with my distance students. I try to avoid anything with my students that is locked into a particular word processor as they don’t all have up to date word processing on their computers and I have been struggling to find a good practical solution (other than a word processed doc with spaces) to filling in questionnaires that enables them to keep a copy and also to submit the doc to me. Now thanks to Rachael I think I have the answer! It is well worth catching the recording as there is so much to see.

Next Week

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session, one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic. Then join us on Thursday Sept 16th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Sept 17th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.