Category: tools

Quia

    Quia is an online tool for creating quizzes and activities housed on the web. Students can access them at any time; scores are stored for easy review by teachers. Here is the list of things you can do with Quia (from their quick tutorial):

quia

  • Templates for creating 16 types of online activities, including flash cards, word search, battleship, challenge board, and cloze exercises. Quia activities are designed with different learning styles in mind to suit the needs of all your students.
  • Complete online testing tools that allow you to create quizzes, grade them with computer assistance, and receive detailed reports on student performance.
  • Access to over 3 million online activities and quizzes in 300 categories. All of the shared activities have been created by teachers from around the world.
  • A schoolwide network that allows effortless collaboration with your fellow teachers.
  • An easy, centralized classroom management system including a master student list, archive of student results, and the tools to conduct schoolwide proficiency testing.
  • A class Web page creator that includes a course calendar and an easy way to post your Quia activities for students and parents.
  • Online surveys for gathering student and teacher feedback.

I signed up for a 30-day free account; a subscription costs $49/yr. (there are also discounted packages for groups). While actually inputting the material for the activities can be a bit time-consuming, it’s worth it because you only have to do it once. There are a lot of really fun activities – battleship with quiz questions, Who Wants to be a Millionaire-style game, concentration (the memory game) – as well as more traditional cloze and flashcard activities. Another feature which is great for me is the compatibility with Russian script. The only activity that doesn’t work so well with Russian is hangman, because there isn’t a Russian keyboard that can be placed under the hangman (odd, since there are keyboards for dozens of other languages, including Esperanto!?!). One other nice feature – you can add images and audio files to make quizzes and activities more interactive.

As far as quiz programs go, Quia, from what I’ve heard, is the most popular. It’s easier to use, more attractive, and more versatile than Hot Potatoes, for example. The main downside is that it isn’t free!

Fun With AutoHotKey

Are you defessus of selecting text and copying the text and opening your browser and clicking onto the Google search window and pasting what you copyed into it and hitting the enter key in order to find out what a word or concept is? I bet right now you are doing that with the word defessus…if not maybe you should (maybe you already know what it means idk). Lucky for us AutoHotKey can help automatize this process. Only drawback is that this program is PC only…sory Mac 🙁 

First I downloaded AutoHotkey here by clicking on Autohotkey Installer. After the insatall was complete I set up a folder/file on my computer where I could save the hotkeys that I created or use. After that I went here to find out how to make an AutoHotKey script and use them. This should get you started, happy hotkeying 🙂

Note: In the Creating a Script section the first instruction says “1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to a folder of your choice.” what this means is: Open the folder/file that you set up where you want to save your Autohotkeys.

This is the Script I used to make a Hot key for finding English word definitions (you can just copy and past it into the new AutoHotKey you started):

 

 

#NoTrayIcon

#InstallKeybdHook

 

#Persistent

#HotkeyInterval,100

SetKeyDelay, -1

^+w::

 

{

Send, ^c

Sleep 50

Run, http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=%clipboard%

Return

}

 

 

 

 

 

PBwiki

I helped a professor set up a wiki the other day using PBwiki. PBwiki is easy to use and offers business, academic, and personal wiki platforms. Starting a wiki is free and quick (under 90 seconds, the website claims, which is about right).

One great resource on the PBwiki is this directory of example wikis that people have created, including education-related wikis. You can access those links here. This is an excellent place to get some ideas about how to structure your own wiki.

Google Apps

Google Apps can provide you with many options on making your life more efficient and fun. Google apps can help you collaborate, organize, and get and use information. One of the major collaboration tools Google offers is Google docs. Google docs allows you to work with others on ONE document, presentation, or spreadsheets. Having One document that many people are working on is an important component of Google docs this is concept is explained magnificently in this ==> video. Check out more awesome Google Apps here ==> Apps

ReadTheWords.com

  1. Are you tired of reading hundreds of pages and chapters in your program?
  2. Or you simply can’t manage all the readings that your professor has assigned for today?
  3. Are you afraid of straining your eyesight a tad too much?

Upload your WORD or PDF files to http://readthewords.com, just relax, and have it read by an avatar. Or download the reading to your ipod and go for a walk or swim. The quality is almost human-like, and the maximum upload size is huge: 80’000 words! I just uploaded a chapter with 43 pages and am now listening to one of the male avatar’s reading. It’s amazing.

Lingt

Lingt is a web based language learning tool for teachers. It is being beta tested, so there are a few bugs. Lingt allows you to make assignments that incorporate voice, video, images, and text. Students can then complete the assignments (oral and/or written); the teacher can then review student responses.

I signed up to demo Lingt and created a listening assignment and a speaking assignment, both in Russian, here. The editor is easy to use, but doesn’t allow for much flexibility in formatting. Recording audio prompts is simple as well, but there is no sound editor, so I had to record my prompts over and over many times until I was satisfied. The assignment editor allows you to embed YouTube videos, which is great for listening exercises. The text editor leaves much to be desired; font, text size and other formatting options can’t be changed from the default. Also, it would be nice if there were more response options besides just writing and voice (e.g., multiple choice).

Still, Lingt is a better tool for creating speaking exercises than anything I’ve seen. Here are some of the possibilities beyond what I explored in my example assignments, given in the Lingt FAQ:

  • Dialogs: Follow your voice recordings with voice prompts to simulate dialogs that you invent yourself or that you take from your textbook.
  • Pronunciation: Record your pronunciation of key vocabulary or phrases and prompt students to repeat what they hear. Encourage them to listen to their recording and compare with your own.
  • Dictation: Record your voice and prompt students to type what they hear.
  • Video commentary: Have students react to a video in real-time to approximate real immersion.
  • Translation: Prompt students to translate to or from the foreign language. Use any combination of text and voice to have students speak their translations or type out a translation to your inserted text.
  • Reading: Insert a short story or primary source and prompt students to read it.
  • Culture exercises: Use maps, menus, signs, or other primary sources in the foreign language and prompt students to interpret and give their opinion. Insert videos to introduce students to songs, commercials, or TV shows from a foreign country.
  • Visual interaction: Present images and videos to students and prompt them to interpret or describe what they see and hear.

To open a demo account, sign up on the Lingt homepage; I received my login information within a week.