The StudyZone quiz tool

Staff from the Biosciences team have for the past few years used the StudyZone quiz tool to provide both formative and summative assessment to students.

The process involves creating a database of questions in StudyZone . You have a choice of 9 different question types including short answer questions, MCQ’s, fill in the blank, paragraph questions etc. The great thing about it is that once the questions have been created they can be reused over and over again on different StudyZone sites and from year to year. For those of you looking for a way to provide quick and easy feedback why not try using the StudyZone quiz tool?

Feedback from the tutors has been positive as per the comments below:

‘Online quizzes can dramatically cut down the time spent marking assessments, while also providing rapid feedback to students, and are particularly effective in this regards when the questions set can be multiple choice. However, with some effort it is also possible to set online quizzes to automatically mark short answer questions too.’ Lewis Halsey, Senior Lecturer Comparative and Eco Physiology

‘We regularly use on-line quizzes for first year Biosciences students. They allows us to test all aspects of the module (rather than only two or three areas), provide an insight into how well the students are taking up the material, and give the students instant feedback on their progress. In terms of administrative cost, once they are set up they offer an assessment with minimal maintenence and no marking, which is win-win from an instructor's standpoint.’ Todd Rae, Senior Lecturer , School of Human and Life Sciences (Biosciences & Anthropology)

Student use of TurningPoint voting systems

Recently 2 students approached the e-Learning department and asked to use the TurningPoint voting devices. I asked them to put together a quick overview of what they had done and why and their email is quoted below

Our objective was to produce a presentation about assessment and record keeping. We wanted to highlight to the group that there are many ways of assessment and that there are different that ways of assessing that we were taught to do in the first and second year in our block school placements. I remembered that during my placement the class teacher used the SMART response as a form of formative assessment that the children could take part in.

We used the turning point to illustrate the way in which we could involve children in their assessment process while involving the group in the presentation by asking them to ask questions around assessment.

This allowed us to demonstrate the effectiveness of using turning point for assessment as well as the contexts where these can be used.

Human Rights Wiki

Students became active creators of knowledge on a Human Rights field trip by contributing to a Historical Issues wiki.

Students were able to add photos, reflections and video commentaries which enabled them to show others what they had seen on their trip, what they learnt and what they felt.


Students seemed to enjoy this project because they were truly engaged in producing knowledge and reflecting critically in a creative, but convenient way.



This student spoke about the project enthusiastically at the LTEU conference earlier this year...

http://historicalissuesinhumanrights.pbworks.com/

Producing Reality Blog

The film department is experimenting with Blogger for a documentary film-making course. Students share ideas on interesting documentary films they have seen on a class blog and are able to embed video from youtube, add links and add comments to each others' postings. This informal method of learning appears to be a popular method amongst students for developing thoughts and ideas before they go on to create their own documentaries.

Consecutive Interpreting - Peer Review

On the 'Consecutive Interpreting' module, Jacqueline Page has been using an innovative method of providing feedback to her students. Each week, student interpretations are filmed by Jacqueline using a Flip video camera. Initial feedback is given to the student who has performed the interpretation during class. After class, students have the opportunity to review the clips of their peers in their individual blogs and then post constructive comments beneath them.

This method of peer review gives students further time to analyse their own and others' interpretations and to reflect on these in order to help them improve in future sessions. Both students and teacher have a convenient record of work done in class and a valuable learning tool.

Other staff in the modern languages and translation departments have quickly recognised the value of this as a means of providing feedback and now wish to explore its use elsewhere.

Postcrossing in primary schools - Geography education department

If you've not already heard of it, Postcrossing is a website that connects people through postcards.

The goal of the project is to allow people to receive postcards from all over the world, for free. Well, almost free! The main idea is that: if you send a postcard, you will receive at least one back from a random Postcrosser from somewhere in the world.

How does it work? The short version:

1. request an address from the website
2. mail the postcard to the address
3. wait to receive a postcard
4. register the received postcard in the system

After reading about a school using postcrossing as a class project, I thought I'd suggest it to the Geography education department as something to look into.

Using flickr geotagging to learn about geography

The geography education department have been working with GPS-enabled mobile phones for a while now, using the packaged educational software. One of the most important things about wildknowledge, that made is useful for geography education was the ability to geotag images.

Geotagging is adding geographical data to an object, for example marking where a photo was taken. By geotagging photos we can plot them on a map and build up a picture of where all the photos were taken.

Geotagging also works with other services, like Twitter, so show where users are broadcasting from, and this presents us with a whole host of possibilities.

The Geography department and the e-learning team are looking at ways to utilise flickr's geotagging in education. This project is looking to use flickr's native geotagging ability to recreate functions that may be prohibitively expensive for many schools.

This project is still in it's formative stages at present. Watch this post for further developments

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UPDATE - 26 November 2009
Been looking at imapflickr - this is a website that makes customised google maps from geotagged information on flickr. This could be useful