Archive
Archive for the ‘e-learning’ Category
- The capability of increasing the size of the student thumbnails, to be able to easily read the MS-Word writing student exercises template that I had programmed for Sanako Lab 300 was sorely missed in version 1 and 2 of the Sanako Study 1200 software.
-
In version 5, the capability to adjust the size has been added. In Tutor.exe, Go to Menu:
tools / preferences / thumbnail-size.
- Now, however, the 20 licensed student seats we have, already fill up the entire Teacher software’s screen estate since the software window cannot be spanned across our multi-monitor setup (The Sanako software seems to have this single-screen limitation built-in. Our unusual asymmetric (1280 and 1024) dual-monitor system may have something to do with it).
- Fortunately, in the newest version 5.42 for of Sanako Study, scrollbars appear and allow for panning the classroom layout window if there are more student icons/thumbnails than will fit on the screen.
- Upgrading to a screen with a larger screen resolution on the teacher computer would be even better.
- We hope to teach up to 30 students (class sizes seem to be constantly increasing, but the LRC also caters to visits of merged class sections which may be even larger than 30 students) in this large classroom setup:
- View an
80-seconds screencast showing how a teacher can set up a student activity where students are only allowed to access on web site.
- In this example, the website is a common dictionary: http://www.dict.cc which the student will be allowed to access during an exam (in lieu of a paper dictionary policy).
- Never mind that the voiceover is partially in German – the video should be self-explanatory. If not, here is a written step-by-step on Sanako controlled webbrowsing.
- Moodle Kaltura facilitates making segments of video (created from e.g. source DVD with the video editor of your choice) available for film studies classes, within the bounds of Fair Use and the Teach Act, since it makes video
- easily available (streamed to anywhere where Adobe-Flash runs),
- but only to those who have an account in the Moodle installation and are registered for the course
- In addition, access to the video segments can be restricted further (by choosing from the management options that Moodle affords),
- only to the teacher, for display during face-to-face teaching)
- only during a time window, for timed assignments.
- Here is a (somewhat longwinded, but authentic) demonstration of how to make a Kaltura video resource available through a Moodle course.
- The demonstration includes the server-side encoding which happens only once during teacher upload – you do not have to wait for it to finish, just if you want to check immediately, like I do on the example whether your upload went through.
- Are all things Moodle Kaltura on Windows better than on iMacs?
- I don’t think so (Windows 7, IE9): Webcamera cannot be activated, hourglass. Looks like the Flash security dialogue does not make it into the foreground.
- PollEverywhere.com
- Sanako Study 1200
- Live Feedback
- Voting
- Exam (not currently installed)
- NetOp School: TBA
- Sanako Exam is an add-on at additional cost and not currently available in our setup.
- Sanako Exam teacher-created content is stored locally, file management beyond that is up to the user. This makes such polls less portable, but potentially sharing within a department might be easier.
- Student Results can be identified by student, and saved.
View here a screencast demo of how a Sanako Exam can be
- authored and
- deployed.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, documentation, e-learning, Institution-is-Aston-University, Presenter-Computer, proposals, Screencasts, Student-Computers, Study-program-is-any
Tags: Exam-Module, sanako-study-1200
- PollEverywhere.com allows teachers to set up polls with answer options that students choose by sending a number code as text message.
- Pro’s
- Freemium.
- Low- to No- university infrastructure requirements. Best-used in a non-computerized classroom or during startup time of students’ computers.
- Content can be managed online.
- Con’s
- Freemium:
- “You get what you pay for”. “You may be the business”. What happens with your data
- Not free for students unless you consider a phone plan that comes with unlimited texts free. With increasing use of other messaging options over SMS, that may be not a given even if you deal mostly with an affluent student population.
- Low- to No- university infrastructure requirements:
- you are relying on students providing the infrastructure. Are they better keeping their phones in service (on them, charged, turned on) than we are keeping our computer labs up and running?
- you are relying on mobile network operators, including the choices of operator that your students made.
- Anonymous: Not useful for assessment purposes.
- The number codes are long (6 digits, while 1 could be sufficient).
- Competitors
- The university has a clicker infrastructure which is partially outsourced to students (purchase and bring).
- The LRC has a Classroom Management system infrastructure which supports clicker-like activities.
- Sanako Study 1200 comes with Live Feedback and Voting.
- NetOp School comes with an examination/polling feature also.
(Images are from the Sanako documentation, screencasts my own) .- Sanako Study 1200 comes with Live Feedback.
- This is what it looks like:
- The teacher enables students to give Live Feedback from their student player interface by pressing the Live Feedback button.
- Live Feedback is designed for students sending basic information whether they are following or confused or neutral.
- These up to 3 answer options could possibly be repurposed, and the question displayed by separate means. Polls can only be anonymous, results cannot be saved.
- More importantly, the results are not anonymous, but appear on the student icons in the classroom layout so that the teacher can attend to those students that are confused or otherwise struggling.
- Sanako Study 1200 also comes with Voting.
- A brief demo screencast of Voting is here:
- The teacher enables students to give Voting from their student player interface by pressing the Voting button, entering questions, answer options, optionally marking one (and only one) answer as the right answer and clicking “send’ to the students,
- on whose computer a window with will pop up with question and answer option
- while the feedback voting results window pops up on the teacher from where the teacher can “send the correct answer” to the students once everybody has voted, and “create new” polls.
- Results can be viewed by the teacher and displayed to the class, but cannot be stored (there is no storing mechanism. One could however save a screenshot of the teacher voting result window).
- The Voting is also “live” insofar as no content can be archived and reloaded. Maybe this Live Voting can be both accelerated and extended through the use of a simple PowerPoint displayed on the classroom screen, by just using live Voting’s result aggregation features and forfeiting filling out/displaying the question and answer options within the live voting interface for the teacher/students.
- Not free, but less limited: Sanako Exam.
- http://teaching.uncc.edu/ctl-blog/centra-classroom-replace-wimba
- As this pertains to the LRC, more info will be posted here, as it becomes available, and issues and resolutions, as they come up.
- Clicking on the minus-icon next to aggregate columns will hide the assignments in this category; clicking the plus-icon will unhide:
- before (wide)
- after (narrow, better overview)
