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How teachers can use MS-Word Mail merge with filtering and if-then-else to quickly provide personalized feedback based to students depending on grade
- Intelligence is adaptation to feedback. Providing personalized feedback to students depending on their performance could make student development much more successful.
- Intelligence is expensive. How can the teacher provide personalized feedback time-efficiently? Likely by blending artificial intelligence with her own.
- Sounds like Sci-fi? A great practical example, using existing familiar IT infrastructure, you can find here: MS-Word’s (2010; 2007 works the same) mail merge feature, on the basis of a downloaded Moodle gradebook with student results, can customize semi-automatically your reusable feedback email message template to individual recipient’s performance and needs:
- Step-by-step instructions: http://teaching.uncc.edu/moodle/grade-book/how-to/using-mail-merge-grade-book.
- Screencast of the webinar instruction: http://mt202.sabameeting.com/SiteRoots/main/User/GuestAttend.jhtml?pb=true&s_guid=0000018151460000013a0a22cfb39443&domain=/Customers/uncc&domain=/
How to stay up to date by receiving RSS like email newsletters in MS-Outlook– explained in a single screenshot
How to start YouTube videos from the middle
- To avoid having to manually find a segment of a YouTube video clip during presentations, or worse, downloading the video clips from YouTube before the presentation, to edit them into shape,
- try using the “&t=”(for “time(line)”, I presume) query parameter, followed by “#m” (for minutes) and "##s” (for seconds) where the segment you want to show starts.
- Example links that you can try inserting into your PowerPoint Slide deck:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDngRk5vImU starts the movie clip Aicha part 1/10 from the beginning;
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDngRk5vImU&t=1m10s starts Aicha at 1 minute and 10 seconds;
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDngRk5vImU&t=5m10s starts Aicha at 5 minutes and 10 seconds.
Sanako Study 1200 Homework step-by-step
1. In the Sanako student player window, in the upper left of your screen, above the red “homework” tab, an MS-Word file will show in the list.
2. Click on this MS-Word file in the Sanako student player list.
3. A window will open that asks you to save the word file. Use the default, your Desktop. Click “OK” to save. The file will be added to your desktop.
4. Do whatever other activities your teacher assigned. Once the teacher aks you to do so, open the MS-Word file from the desktop.
5. Write in the MS-Word file what it asks you to do.
6. When done, close the MS-Word file.
7. MS-Word will ask you whether you want to save. Click “yes” (and do NOT “save as”, or change the file name or file format).
8. The file on your desktop will look the same, but it will have been updated with your input.
9. The teacher will open a window titled “homework” on your desktop.
10. Drag and drop the MS-Word file into this window.
11. If the file in the homework” window does not automatically say it was “delivered” to the teacher, click the lower right button: “Send”.
12. Once the file says “delivered”, you can go to the next task or log out.
13. If in doubt, ask for help. Use the Sanako student player button:“Call” to get into the queue. Somebody will connect to your headsets and screen ASAP.
Video quizzes on Youtube.com in Beta
Video Questions Editor lets channel owners display multiple-choice questions on top of their videos as they play (I see only a “start” in the timeline), offer hints, get results on your feedback page.
But if it supports only summaries, not usernames, it is more a poll than a quiz, which limits it usefulness in foreign language classes as much as that you apparently are limited to your own uploads, and cannot link your questions to the wealth of foreign language video uploaded by others…
How to take roll in class using Sanako Study 1200
- Today:
- I had to work on getting my Sanako classroom layouts back up after a network cutover on the first day of the academic year.
- I could observe a teacher new to the Sanako lab taking roll on paper, reading out each student’s name and finding the student in the classroom . This is a known good way to learn to put a face to a students’ name. Once that is done (and maybe could be done also faster using student thumbnails in university computer systems like the LMS), one can save teaching time taking roll doing the following :
- At the beginning of each of your class meetings:
- You cannot start a sanako class before your students have logged in and their sanako student clients have started up – that is the first I always ask my students to do.
- In the initial Sanako tutor startup dialogue, open an empty class.
- Wait for the “corridor” to be fully populated, then select all.
- Have the sanako tutor populate the classroom layout.
- Choose menu file / save classroom layout as, and save in your tutor folder with the date as the filename.
- (Load your familiar class layout to actually begin your class – this will take little extra time, for Sanako tutor does not need to wait again for the Sanako student clients to start up).
- After the last day of classes:
- load each saved file into MS-Excel (as an XML table),
- first column will be class date, hide all columns in between that and your student login name,
- select and copy these 2 columns into an attendance spreadsheet (if you find a way to strip the xml wrapper, you can merge the files on the command line – after all, the classroom layout files are just plain text),
- in the attendance spreadsheet, calculate attendance
- either sort first by date, then by login name, and count attendance manually using the dates;
- or have Excel count for you with an array formula pasted into a third column that checks for and counts identical dates.
- Final thoughts: Your mileage may vary if you don’t teach all your classes in a Sanako lab – I used to and have come to appreciate an institutionally provided and maintained lab infrastructure which is stable – compared with complaints I have heard about having to rely on your students not forgetting their clickers if you want to use technology rather than class time for taking roll outside of a stable infrastructure.
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