Archive

Archive for the ‘Classroom-technology’ Category

Clicker-like exercises: A comparison what the LRC has to offer

2012/03/01 Leave a comment
  1. PollEverywhere.com
  2. Sanako Study 1200
    1. Live Feedback
    2. Voting
    3. Exam (not currently installed)
  3. NetOp School: TBA
Categories: audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, e-learning, Student-response-systems-AKA-clickers Tags:

Face-to-face-teaching exam using Sanako Study 1200

2012/03/01 Leave a comment
  1. Sanako Exam is an add-on at additional cost and not currently available in our setup.
    1. 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.
    2. Student Results can be identified by student, and saved.
  2. View here a screencast demo of how a Sanako Exam can be
    1. authored and
    2. 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: ,

Replace clickers with students’ phones using PollEverywhere.com

2012/02/29 Leave a comment
  1. polleverywhere-with-sms
  2. PollEverywhere.com allows teachers to set up polls with answer options that students choose by sending a number code as text message.
  3. Pro’s
    1. Freemium.
    2. Low- to No- university infrastructure requirements. Best-used in a non-computerized classroom or during startup time of students’ computers.
    3. Content can be managed online.
  4. Con’s
    1. Freemium:
      1. “You get what you pay for”. “You may be the business”. What happens with your data
      2. 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.
    2. Low- to No- university infrastructure requirements:
      1. 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?
      2. you are relying on mobile network operators, including the choices of operator that your students made.
    3. Anonymous: Not useful for assessment purposes.
    4. The number codes are long (6 digits, while 1 could be sufficient).
  5. Competitors
    1. The university has a clicker infrastructure which is partially outsourced to students (purchase and bring).
    2. The LRC has a Classroom Management system infrastructure which supports clicker-like activities.
      1. Sanako Study 1200 comes with Live Feedback and Voting.
      2. NetOp School comes with an examination/polling feature also.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-learning, mobile-phones, Screencasts, Student-response-systems-AKA-clickers, Study-program-is-any, websites

Live Feedback and Voting for clicker-like activities in Sanako Study 1200

2012/02/29 Leave a comment
  1. study1200-buttons-live-voting-live-feedback (Images are from the Sanako documentation, screencasts my own) .
  2. Sanako Study 1200 comes with Live Feedback.
    1. This is what it looks like: study-1200-live-feedback
    2. The teacher enables students to give Live Feedback from their student player interface by pressing the Live Feedback button.
    3. Live Feedback is designed for students sending basic information whether they are following or confused or neutral.
      1. 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.
      2. 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.
  3. Sanako Study 1200 also comes with Voting.
    1. A brief demo screencast of Voting is here:
    2. 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, voting-teacher-gui
    3. on whose computer a window with will pop up with question and answer option voting-student-gui
    4. 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. voting-teacher-gui-results
    5. 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).
    6. 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.
  4. Not free, but less limited: Sanako Exam.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, e-learning, Presenter-Computer, Student-Computers, Student-response-systems-AKA-clickers Tags: , , , , ,

How to restrict student in-class web browsing activity with Sanako Study 1200

2012/02/25 Leave a comment
  1. In the Group pane, from the Activity dropdown selector, choose web browsing.
  2. if your students
    1. do an open-ended web quest, choose radio button: open policy to be able to provide a list of non-allowable websites (e.g. YouTube.com may be useful for your students’ online research activity, but Facebook.com not)
    2. take a well-defined and –confined assessment like an online quiz, choose radio button: strict policy to be able to provide the list of allowable websites
    3. either way, put just the site address (e.g. http://www.dict.cc), without the protocol (NOT: http://www.dict.cc), or else…
  3. the web browsing activity,
    1. prevents any other browser from being opened by the student but IE
    2. begins with opening for the student the table of contents page in IE, listing the allowable websites; whenever the students closes the IE, Sanako reopens it on the table of contents page .
    3. each web activity of your student will be verified against your allow list: sanako-webbrowsing-strict-policy
  4. Note that
    1. there are some caveats, errors&glitches.
    2. the Respondus Lockdown browser (see screencast at min 18:00) installed in the LRC also can also be used to prevent students from accessing non-web-based programs on the computer they are working on; but can not be restricted to a number of web pages, nor can students receive a Table of Contents of the web pages they are allowed to go to .
Categories: audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, Presenter-Computer, Student-Computers Tags: ,

How to override a Projector control out of synch with the Classroom projector

2011/12/10 Leave a comment
  1. When the projector control system is “out of synch”with the projector.
  2. Symptom: “System off” does not turn the projector off, but also “System on”  does not turn.
  3. Workaround: From the control panel Home screen, access soft button “system tools”CIMG0002 
  4. Here you can manually turn the projector on/off  (and the close the screens)CIMG0001
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-teachers, Classroom-technology, e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors, hardware, Presenter-Computer, Projectors Tags:

Protected: How to conduct an easy oral exam with Sanako1200 (Model imitation/Question Response) – Part II: Implementation/instruction of examined students

2011/05/04 Enter your password to view comments.

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Categories: all-languages, Arabic, assessments, audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hindi, Institution-is-Aston-University, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, learning-materials, learning-usage-samples, Mandarin, multimedia-recording, Polish, Portuguese, Presenter-Computer, Russian, Spanish, Speaking, Student-Computers, Swahili, Videos, Yoruba Tags: , , ,

Virtual Whiteboard in Computerized Classrooms

2010/10/22 Leave a comment

To virtualize/digitize your classroom scripts/textbooks/etc. – with all the obvious benefits (single familiar, control interface for multimedia, audio and video) and hidden benefits, like being able to link to offline (e.g. MS–Proofing Tools, MS-Text-to-Speech API) and online language learning tool (e.g. dictionaries, image libraries), use the already installed and supported hardware and software tools in computerized classrooms.

Hardware:

  1. Teacher Computer
  2. LCD Projector
  3. LCD Projector Screen
  4. Classroom Speakers
  5. Wireless keyboard/mouse

Software/Content:

  1. Textbook Scans as images – common nuisance: as ingle exercise (or a rule explanation and its practice exercise) gets spread over 2 pages that won’t fit on document camera –> right-click, open with, “Paint”, use rectangle selection, edit/cut, file/new, edit/paste to combine).
  2. my template Teacher.Dot (and additional downloaded or saved files, copyright permitting) with lookup menu:
  3. MS-Remote desktop: default enabled on all office PCs; on classroom teacher computer, click “start”-button, type “mstsc”, click “OK”, type the IP address of your office computer once, if logged in a yourself on the teacher computer, it will remember it, (you only need to access the advanced options of MSTSC if you encounter compatibility problems, like with screen resolution
  4. MS-ZoomIt:  on file server, allows you to zoom, draw + type on frozen images of your screen (access advanced options if you want to change the font settings and behavior of the mouse  scroll wheel)
  5. Blackboard: Content System <—Web folder <—> Email

Time saving benefits:

  1. Class time: prep in office; slow writing on blackboard, handling of document camera (switching, drawing), internet access
  2. Teacher time: separate steps to & handling email (<—> close file with class and be done)
  3. Student: slow note-taking (not all is mnemonic), handling email (still need to access Blackboard)
  4. More benefits could be had if students had hardware/software to share the screen. If a fully computerized classroom freaks you out, consider MS multi mouse, especially designed for resource challenged educational environments (India originally)
Categories: e-learning, Projectors