Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Plickers

Plickers: student response system using 'paper clickers'

Plickers is a fantastic free tool that can be used to collect and store student responses quickly and easily using a a Smartphone's camera and a free app (available on both Android and iOS).

Students simply hold up a unique QR code that can be orientated in four different ways to convey responses A,B,C or D

Have a look at Plickers in action at WGSB - using the same password as that needed on our Teaching and Learning webiste, or watch this 2-minute guide:

Student responses can be easily reviewed using the 'Reports' feature but unfortunately cannot currently be exported to a spreadsheet or external mark book

Plickers remains an excellent alternative to more traditional student response systems (thumbs, number of fingers, coloured cards etc.) for a number of reasons:

  • Students must all participate as those who do not can be easily identified
  • Responses are gathered very quickly
  • Different responses are counted automatically
  • Students can see when their response has been recorded
  • Responses of individual students can be stored indefinitely for later review
  • Responses can be easily shared with the class instantly

The Plickers Website has plenty of information, including a detailed Getting Started guide, as well as the cards you need to get going, why not try it out?

Wednesday, 16 July 2014

Purposegames - Easy to make image-based quizzes

Previously I emailed around about a useful site for creating image-based labelling quizzes: purposegames.com. This site is excellent for subjects like Biology, Geography and PE and I'm sure can be useful to any subject area with creative use!

There are many good quizzes already available to use and it is very easy to create your own - particular the 'Dot quizzes'. Games can be collected into playlists or included in Tournaments to get a competitive aspect.

The screenshot shows an example of how the quizzes are presented:

You can check out the playlist I have created for AS Applied Science, including the example above: HERE. This playlist consists of Dot quizzes created by me or found in the existing library.

Here are some examples of the other types of game you can find or create:

Drillster: an interactive learning and test application

Drillster is one of my favourite eLearning tools - it is essentially a flash-card type of learning or revision resource that has an adaptive aspect by use of an alogrithm to monitor progress - for full details see the Drillster info page.

Drillster is incredibly easy to use when creating Drills and can include text, images or both. Drillster is ideal for learning names and definitions and would work well for any vocabulary learning in any subject. Drills work well on mobile devices and tablets (at least on my Android devices).

Drills can be embedded into a web page, or you can just provide a weblink to the Drill itself. A free account is required to create Drills (although you can login using a Google or Facebook account) but no account is necessary for students to use a Drill. If students do set up an account Drills become far more effective by monitoring their progress over time and the algorithm will act to 'top-up' their learning more effectively.

Examples I have created are included below and there are many more available on the 'Drill Store' although a number are foreign-language.

Monday, 31 March 2014

Creating 'interactive worksheets'

Here is the exemplar from my session on using QR codes in learning resources, creating 'interactive worksheets'.