Anvill

This week we had the opportunity of meeting Jeff Magoto, the director of the language center at the University of Oregon. It was a great idea to have access to Anvill developed by Jeff who explained to us how to use this course management system and the different tools it provides.

Here's a video about Anvill.

So I decided to open a teacher account and to create a course in Anvill. You don't need to request for membership. The course is called "Trying ANVILL: Materials Desing" (Group Registration Key: 2447) and  is open as you can see in the above screen shots.

 

 

Then I created a lesson plan based on a presentation by Nik Peachey delivered at IATEFL 2013. After watching the presentation, students have to complete certain tasks. As a follow up activities I created a voiceboard and a forum.

Edilim

Last year I got to know about Edilim and decided to try it out. It's a frees oftware that can be used to create different activities. It's user friendly, free and provides a variet of options.

 Last term, my students created a multimedia e-book in Edilim which included 3 activities. In this case, I want yo show an example.

Viviana Grieco designed 3 activities for 7 year-old-students. On the first activity, students have to solve a puzzle about pets. On the second page of the e- book, they have to solve a memory game and say the animals aloud whenever they find the pair. On the last page of the e-book, kids read and find the corresponding pictures.

 

 

Hot Potatoes

When I was a student at the Teacher Training College I was introduced to Hot Potatoes. We created activities and tried to customize them. We changed the background, the fonts, the colours and the feedback. That was in 2002. Nowdays, I teach students how to create activities in Hot Potato but they don't like it much due to the fact that its layout is not very attrative. Yet, it's free, you don't need internet connection and it's user friendly. You can create different types of  activities and even design a menu with links to them.

 

These are screen shots of a set of activities I created in Hot Potatoes. After reading "Chapter 2: A model for the design and development of multimedia projects" from the book Multimedia Projects in Education by Ivers & Baron, students will complete 4 activities.

The menu includes the four activities I created. 

1. Students complete a graphic organizer based on the DDD-E Model.
2. Students match concepts and definitions.
3. Students choose the correct option for each sentence.
4. Students put in order a paragraph.

Project Plan & Peer Assessment Checklist

This week we had to present the first draft of our final project. The good thing about it is that we've been working for 7 weeks on this project which means that we have to collect the information and reflect on what happened when implementing the project. I like the fact that the project was organized into different steps. We explored projects from former students, we had access to rubrics and a peer assessment checklist, we characterized the group and the setting, the problem and planed a possible solution.

In my case I worked with Olga. We both exchanged our project plans and completed a checklist.

Click here if you want to read my project plan

In my case I read Olga's project which was very interesting. Her learners are master students working on their theses. Wow! They're studying at university and improving their presentation skills. I completed the checklist and made some suggestions.