In an earlier post I talked about analysing text content with Tagul, which is an alternative to Wordle
I recently presented this presentation on using twitter to analyse what your students pick up in your lectures in real time using twitter.
Since then, I've discovered a site that can do this automatically at eduserve - http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/
Using delicious.com and netvibes.com to create a personalised resource portal for Spanish students
In the Spanish department, Sabela and the team had been collecting many many weblinks for students to learn Spanish. However, the links were very difficult to keep track of, and students confronted with this unsorted link list would have probably turned round and found their own, thus making it pointless for the staff to have found them at all.
They needed a way to store and categorise the links. The best way to store links online is using a social bookmarking site, and after taking some advice from the e-learning department, they chose to use delicious.
Delicious has one feature that makes it perfect for this job. When you save a bookmark you can tag it with any number of keywords which makes the links you save much more easy to find. Specifically, if you search for a tag in your delicious stream, delicious filters out all the links tagged with that word, AND allows you to output an RSS stream of that query in a very logical sense.
For example, if you want to filter the myroespanish delicious links for all the resources for learning about the "pasado" tense, just click the "pasado" tag and the URL changes to http://delicious.com/myroespanish/pasado
Look at the URL and you can see that it's very easy to understand. It's the subset of myroespanish and below that the subset of pasado tags. Simple!
On every search page, delicious gives you the option to output an RSS of the search term
By outputting this and feeding it into customised feedreaders at Netvibes.com/myroespanish Sabela created a customised link portal for the students which lets them search for pre-pricked links by topic
Content analysis with Tagul
I used Tagul to analyse the output of tweets from the recent Moodlemoot, which happened last week.
Here's a tag cloud of the keynote speech at #RULT10. This was made halfway through the speech and I wasn't even in the room. Gives you an idea of what they are talking about, visually!
Here's the tag cloud from the end of my session at #RULT10
Here's a tag cloud of the keynote speech at #RULT10. This was made halfway through the speech and I wasn't even in the room. Gives you an idea of what they are talking about, visually!
Here's the tag cloud from the end of my session at #RULT10
Facebook groups for publicity of events
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| From Blogger Pictures |
Pathik Pathak in Crucible has recently been running a series of session entitled "Talking Allowed", which are in the format of a panel discussion on current issues. He chose to use Twitter and facebook to publicise the event and one of the most important elements of this strategy was the facebook group.
Students are informed of upcoming events and, with the Students Union helping to spread the word too, the reach of this event and it's audience vastly increased with minimal investment through word of mouth.
Linoit for group brainstorming
Linoit is an online noteboard, which allows multiple users to post virtual post-it notes at the same time. It's free to use and once you have your account any number of people can write on your noteboard, either as logged-in users or as guests.
Andy Hoang has been using Linoit in class as a way to encourage students to talk about their experience with using interactive whiteboards. It has been really useful specifically because it appears to be informal and allows people to express their ability anonymously but in real time, thus allowing for frank discussion in class.
To set up a Linoit board like the one above
- go to www.linoit.com and make an account. It's free to make and as far as I know it comes with no adverts.
- Start a new board
- Set the settings to allow students to post as guests - this way they won't have to make accounts
- send the address of the board to your students. In this case, as the address is quite long, I used the URL shortening service http://tr.im to shorten the address. I can then customise the shortened address too
I've also used this to collect opinions anonymously at a distance in preparation for meetings.
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.
