Category Archives: Tried & Tested

Software and Web 2 tools that I have tried and tested with my grade 8 students.

Our Moodle Experience

Posted on by • Posted in Tried & Tested • Tagged , • 2 Comments

I started “Moodling” about 3 years ago. It was love at first sight and my enthusiasm soon spread to other teachers and grade levels at my school. Right now Moodle is being used actively in grade 1, 3, 6 and 8. To inspire even more of our teachers to start Moodling, my teaching partner in grade 8, Çiğdem Uğur and I gave a presentation to our colleagues yesterday entitled “Why Moodle?”. Here are some highlights from our presentation that perhaps will inspire you to start up Moodle at your own school. At least it may give you some ideas as to why and how we use Moodle and also some of our reasons for loving it!

We started our presentation by showing the following video (from YouTube):

We then spent some time explaining why we love Moodle. Our reasons included the fact that it’s a free program, that it’s easy to use (no programming experience necessary), that it provides a 24/7 learning environment, is learner-centered, cooperative, interactive, engages all learning styles, provides multiple methods for learning the same material, provides students with immediate feedback, engages the so-called “digital natives” where they learn best and last, but by no means least : it decreases paperwork and marking for the teacher!

 MoodlePictureMy partner had prepared a wonderful power point to go with our presentation and I’ve included an excerpt from it that shows some of the uses we have made of Moodle in our school (at different levels) for EFL so far. Here’s the link: Examples of how we use Moodle for ESL . You’ll see that we use all the different modules offered by Moodle (and also Hot Potatoes a lot) and that they can be adapted to suit different levels. We did not include the recent (experimental) uses we have made of authoring software such as MyUdutu or Xerte. We’re still testing them out and don’t feel comfortable enough to share, yet … However, if you‘re interested, I’ve previously posted about my experiences (so far) with authoring software (such as MyUdutu) here on this blog.

In addition to the examples from the power point, we also shared a second video (at the end of the presentation) where a grade 8 teacher from the US shares her views on Moodle and her reasons for using/loving it. We especially liked how she wrapped up her speech saying something to the effect of Moodle being addictive in that once you’ve started Moodling, you never want to go back. That’s exactly how we feel! Here’s that video, enjoy!


 

We really hope we’ve managed to inspire more of our colleagues to start up their own Moodle courses now. Time will tell!

:-) CoffeeAddict(ed) Moodle-freak …

My First Web 2.0 Presentation

Posted on by • Posted in Tried & Tested • Tagged • 9 Comments
I have to admit I didn’t really know what Web 2.0 Tools were 6 months ago.  Now, one semester, a blogathon and an IATEFL conference later, I’ve been asked to lead a “mini-workshop” about them! Good Grief!
 
Luckily, the audience is ”only” going to be the other teachers in my department (we’re about 20 altogether) plus a few admin probably, so I’m not too nervous about it. (Ha! Who am I kidding?!?)
            
Anyway, I do think I’ve finally arrived at a killer top ten list of tools to dazzle any crowd, – but if you know of one that deserves a spot on my list, please let me know! My criteria were that the tools be free, simple to use (suitable for Elementary School EFL students) and fun! 
 
Here’s the front page of the Power Point Presentation:
My 10 Favorites

My 10 Favorites

and here’s a link to a Pdf of the presentation: My Favorite Web 2 – PD Presentation. 
                      
As you can see, I’ve chosen vocaroo, mailvu, voki, EnglishCentral, eslvideo, wordle/tagxedo, GoAnimate, Glogster, Animoto/photopeach, makebeliefscomix/bitstrips and wallwisher. In addition to the little descriptions next to the links in the presentation, I am of course planning to explain/demonstrate how the tools can be used in our EFL lessons. All have been quite successfully tested out on my grade 8s this term so I really feel I can recommend them to the teachers in my department. 
                                
I don’t think the presentation itself will take more than about 20 – 30 minutes, so my colleagues will have plenty of time to complete the “challenge” I’ve set up for them at the end; to choose at least one of the tools – experiment with it for a while and post their products and/or comments to a wallwisher-wall created for the occasion. (I’ll be presenting in the computer lab so we’ll have instant access to plenty of computers). I think it’ll be fun for everybody not only to “do one” of the tools themselves but also have a look at what your friends came up with. (Obviously it’s not going to be super-fun for me if the comments are less than supportive but oh well…)
                 
In addition to the Pdf I also want to supply my colleagues with a list of links to excellent blogs and websites that deal with Web 2.0 tools. After all, there are literally hundreds of tools out there – some of which may be more suitable for some of my colleagues’ needs than the ten I chose. Nik Peachy’s Learning Technologies Blog, Richard Byrne’s Free Technology for Teachers, the Box of Tricks Lists,  Özge Karaoğlu’s A-Z Lists, Larry Ferlazzo’s Blog , Amanda Wilson & Susan Depsey, Russel Stannard’s TeacherTraining Videos as well as Janet Bianchini immediately come to mind… Who else? Help please!
                        
Indeed I need all the help I can get, so I’ll be shopping for rabbits’ feet and horse-shoes and also make sure I’m carrying plenty of evil-eye repellent “nazars”… Wish me luck, will you?
               
:-) CoffeeAddict 

Crash & Burn

Posted on by • Posted in Tried & Tested • Tagged , • 4 Comments

I give up (bag it, bail out, leave high and dry, opt out, quit, surrender…) on one of the Moodle Challenges – the Mos Solo authoring software.not a Moodle friend ...

It’s really very sad because it seemed so promising! MosSolo is every bit as sexy as MyUdutu and much easier to get a grip on, it was simple as pie to create the cutest looking little quizzes and learning activities (should have known something was wrong – it was too easy) but … as it turns out – the activities are incompatible with Moodle because they are SCORM 2004 (which apparently is not supported) rather than SCORM 2.1 (which is supported) … So, why did they even list Mos Solo as an option at Moodle.org?

If you’re looking for activities to add to a blog or website you share with students, Mos Solo is probably IT. Look no further. However, if you’re a Mortal Moodler – it’s a dead end. Sorry.

:-( CoffeeAddict

It’s a Hot Potato

Posted on by • Posted in Tried & Tested • Tagged , , • 1 Comment

Are you tired of searching high and low for that “perfect” exercise for your students to do online? Do you find that although there’s a lot of good stuff out there – there’s nothing that exactly fits the needs of your particular mix of students at this particular time in their learning?

Well, since you know your students, your curriculum and what they need better than anyone else – I think you should be creating those online exercises yourself!

hot1

It is incredibly easy. Really. I swear on my Starbucks mug – so you know I really mean it.

If you’ve read my earlier blogs, you may remember me mentioning that I use Moodle extensively with my grade 8 students. Now I’d like to share with you how increadibly easy it is to fill your Moodle or “virtual classroom”, with your own professional looking interactive crosswords, matching, cloze and multiple choice quizzes by using a freeware program called Hot Potatoes.

By the way, you don’t have to have a Moodle site to use Hot Potatoes – Hot Potatoes is a program that you download to your computer and use to create exercises that you then save in a file on your computer. You then upload those files to your Moodle or website and then direct your students there to enjoy them.

The program really is so user-friendly, and there are so many good tutorials on the net too (the one I provide a link to below is the best one, I think), that I can almost promise you that if you start now, you’ll have your very first interactive exercises up and running for your students to enjoy in only a couple of hours.

As with everything in life, the first time is the hardest and then it just gets easier and easier.

Once you get the hang of it you can start adding all sorts of interesting “extras” to your exercises. You can for instance easily add a reading text, an audiofile, an image, an animation or a video that you want the students to have a look at before attempting the exercise.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Download and install Hot Potatoes on your computer

 2. Work through the following tutorial

3. Create & upload your exercises to your website or Moodle

4. Write me a note and tell me what you think ;-)

Good Luck!

:-) CoffeeAddict

MyUdutu – very Useful!

Posted on by • Posted in Tried & Tested • Tagged , • 2 Comments
I hereby happily cross “MyUdutu” off my list of challenges and declare that it is indeed an excellent program for creating very attractive learning content and quiz type activities (in SCORM format) for Moodle (and other platforms – including Facebook!). Here’s a taste of what my grade 8s were presented with today in their Moodle lesson:

 

One of the pages from my MyUdutu activity. Students are to drag and drop the vocabulary words into the slots below the photos.

One of the pages from my MyUdutu activity. Students are to drag and drop the vocabulary words into the slots below the photos.

Another page from the MyUdutu activity. This is a cloze where students are meant to drag and drop the vocabulary words next to the sentences they belong in.

Another page from the MyUdutu activity. This is a cloze where students are meant to drag and drop the vocabulary words next to the sentences they belong in.

If you would like to see (and experience) the whole activity the way my students did, click here. Click on “launch course” once you get there. (It looks and works exactly the same way from within Moodle – sans the watermark). Hope you like it!
.
So, how did I manage this miracle? Well, with a lot of help from my friends, most notably from Guido (Twitter: @europeaantje). He saved me when I was about to give up trying to make MyUdutu work in Moodle and pack up the whole #$**grr!!! challenge… Thank you Guido!
 
Here are the two steps I followed and what I learnt from the experience:
 
The first step was registering with MyUdutu, browsing through the manuals and tutorials on offer and creating a simple quiz type activity. I chose the topic I’m working on right now with my grade 8s, a short-story by Yoshiko Uchida called “The Bracelet”. The quiz is meant as a follow-up activity to practice vocabulary and demonstrate understanding of the story. This step was easy as pie. MyUdutu really is very userfriendly and intuitive – although a certain amount of “playing around” with the program is of course required.
 
Step two was uploading the activity to Moodle and testing it on my Grade 8s. I was under the impression that I first needed a “MyUdutu Plugin” to do that. So, I tried to download the plugin from www.moodle.org, and install it but failed miserably – every time…This is when Guido came to my rescue and told me to just upload the zipped MyUdutu activity to my Moodle files, consider it a SCORM and otherwise treat it as I would a HotPotatoes activity I’d just uploaded. That did the trick and my grade 8s loved the activity! It did take a little bit long to load though, but I guess that’s to be expected when 15 kids are trying to do the activity at the same time.
 
One note though, Moodle (without the MyUdutu plugin installed) considers each Udutu-slide an entity and in the grading treats them equally. Therefore, if you want your activity to be graded (and the grades listed in the gradebook), you should only include  “assessment screens” in your activity. If you include “basic screens” as well then the grading will be off. For instance, the first quiz I created had 2 basic screens (a front “welcoming” page and an end “congratulatory” page) in addition to 7 assessment screens. When I took the quiz I got a score of 86% even though I hadn’t made any mistakes! Once I deleted my basic screens the problem was solved. Perhaps this only happens when you don’t have the plugin installed?
.
Overall, the whole experiment didn’t take long and it was an enjoyable one. Although there isn’t much you can do with MyUdutu that you cannot also do within Moodle (by using Moodle’s own ”Quiz” or “Lesson” modules), the end product looks much more colorful, attractive and “professional”. I really enjoyed the little “extras”, like the sound effects you can add for correct/incorrect feedback, your own logo to the template (I used my school’s logo) and also how easy it was to add multiple audio and image files yet have no problem uploading it all in one go to Moodle in no-time. Yes! I like.
:-) CoffeeAddict
PS.
After creating a couple more of the Udutu activities and uploading them to Moodle, I have met with the following problem: Mid-activity the computers sometimes ”freeze” and the kids have to re-start their browsers (and re-enter Moodle) and then try again. I have no idea why this happens (or why it doesn’t happen most of the time) but just to make sure my kids don’t “suffer” too much I’ve set all the Udutu activities to “unlimited attempts” and “highest grade”.   
 

Glogster Experiments

Posted on by • Posted in Tried & Tested • Tagged , , , , • 3 Comments
Click on this picture to get the full interactive version.

Click on this picture to get the full interactive version.

Inspired by my blogger friends, most recently Eva who wrote a post about using a glog as a pre-reading exercise , I decided to have a look at what Glogster and Glogs were all about. I had been told it was “great for creating interactive posters” and that “you can get an edu-account and manage the students on the site as well” so I set the following tasks for myself:

1. Create my own interactive poster to use with my students.

2. Get an edu-account and have my students use it to create their own posters.

Step one is hereby accomplished. It wasn’t difficult at all! I got the hang of it almost immediately and that tells me that my techno-savvy grade 8 kids will have no problems with it. I created a glog about Paris because I’ll be travelling there next week to visit a school and (I hope) sight-see around town as well. The visit is part of a Comenius project that my school is involved in.

My plan for the Paris Glog is to embed it into a Moodle Module Quiz. The students will have to explore the Glog, i.e. watch the videos, take the virtual tour and check out the links to be able to answer the questions on the quiz correctly. Putting the questions in Moodle means the program will mark the student attempts and the kids will get instant feedback on their work.  That will keep them on task even without me in the room! You see, I want this activity to be assigned to the kids by their sub-teacher while I’m away in Paris.

If I didn’t have a Moodle I could of course have supplied the students with a traditional worksheet to go with the Paris glog, but then I’d have had to collect the sheets afterwards and either marked them or gone over the answers later. That would have been less fun :-) – especially for me! Now all I’ll have to do is have a nice conversation with the kids about Paris when I arrive from France – and what they’ve learnt from the Glog-Activity will probably make for a more fun and informed discussion. Don’t you think?

Task 2 will have to wait until I come back from Paris. In the mean time – do any of you glogsters out there have any experience with using Glogster for Educators that you could share with me? Pretty Please?

:-) CoffeeAddict 

GoAnimate Animated All!

Posted on by • Posted in Tried & Tested • Tagged , , , • Leave a comment

I have just had a couple of super successful lessons with my grade 8 students and I owe it all to a wonderful Web2 tool called GoAnimate. My students and I had been working on the story “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros (From “Discovering Fiction 1” Cambridge University Press) and I wanted to make sure that they had understood the story. “Normally” I would have had them write summaries or dialogues but this time I asked them to retell the story by turning it into a cartoon. GoAnimate makes this ridiculously easy to do. So easy, in fact, that my kids (in pairs) were able to create super animations in only 1 lesson! Here’s a link to one of the animations they created: ELEVEN Great or what?!?

I was so impressed by the students’ work and the joy with which they completed this task that I registered as an educator and got an account 4schools! Next week I intend to have the student accounts ready there and I will ask them to watch the following “instructional video” which will introduce next week’s animation assignment. Well be reading a story about a grandfather and his grandson first so that’s why the topic is Grandparents.

GoAnimate4Schools.com: assignment: animation by Karin Tirasin

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate4Schools. It’s free and fun!

What do you think? Do you have any experiences with GoAnimate4Schools to share with me?

:-) CoffeeAddict