The battle of the sites

After a weekend away in Prague with some truly inspirational people I decided to try and make my website in google sites. I have had my wikispace site for several years and it has been frustrating me that I cannot make it look how I want without paying for an upgrade. I had been avoiding google sites because I initially found it quite hard to work with but after seeing what some friends of mine have done with it I have decided to give it a go.

At the moment I am quite pleased with how it lets me break up the pages and change backgrounds etc. It also links nicely with this blog so it can act as a better professional work space than the wiki. Furthermore being able to build a site from scratch instead of modifying pages is a significant benefit, it is still a learning curve on a new platform but that in itself is a good way of expanding my knowledge of how to use different types of site for educational benefits.

In the process I have managed to get something which looks a bit like this...

... to something that looks like this.

The colours are a bit random, I will change those when  get a proper logo but I think it looks much more professional on the google site.

The magic code.

It has been my mission in life over the last couple of weeks to take an interactive game/exercise that, on paper, looks like this

and make an interactive exercise on screen that looks similar. Creating the game itself inside hot potatoes was not terribly difficult but my problem has been the colours. I had experimented in other types of exercise with adding pictures. This achieved the goal but it was time consuming and messy, furthermore, it is impossible to put pictures into the middle of a sentence. So I was left with a set of exercises, some of which were beautifully colour coded (the colours refer to the sub-list of the academic word list the vocab is from) and some which just had a number next to them to denote the sub-list. This irritated my sense of perfection so I set about trying to fix it.

Firstly I learnt that you can write directly into a hot-potato file in html code and it will be recognised. From there it was just a case of finding the right bit of code and applying it to the exercises I had already created.

The magic code can be found here and I can put this into any type of hot potato and it gives me something which looks like this

Pretty similar to the one at the top of the page don't you think?

If you look carefully you will see I changed the text slightly, I was forced to do this to make it fit on the page but other than that.... a resounding success.

Time to put the kettle on I think....

pexaso, pelmanism, memory, pairs....

... or however you want to name it. This project has been at the back of my mind for a while and seemed to have succeeded my search for a web based programme that will allow me to do it. It is by no means perfect but it is functional, it does animate one of my AWL games and it will (test pending) more than likely work on an IWB so it ticks all of the boxes.

I used this site  http://matchthememory.com/  which unfortunately looks a bit childish (it is designed for kids) but I can over look that for the time being.

I wanted to make a list of AWL vocabulary into a memory game whereby students would match a word from a given sub-list, in this case 1 and 2, with its opposite or antonym. I was largely successful in doing this. There were a few issues, the most cosmetic of which being that the font was slightly too large and some of the words didn't quite fit but for a 1st attempt I can deal with that.

The nature of the game is simply memory match two cards which are the same. This does not quite work if you want the matching cards to have opposites on them. To solve this I had to make the exercise a picture - word match. I did this by making the word list vocabulary into .jpg files and uploading them. This then has the residual benefit of giving me the colour coding that I have in the paper games that I have been struggling to get with hot-potatoes.

All in all a successful experiment!

Confusable words with images

So after my frustrations in the last post about the incorporation of images into hot-potatoes I have think I have worked out how to do it. I initially found the instructions for moodle and then adapted them for use in my wiki. In moodle you must upload all of the files in the same way as normal but it is important that you include the .jpg files in the same folder as the .htm files and the hot-potato files.

So to do this on the wiki using dropbox as the web host should be fairly simple (should!). As in moodle you need to put all the files, including the pictures, into dropbox. Then you need to open the hot-potato files and save the .htm files straight into dropbox. You can then put the public links into the i-frame script as before and it seems to work at least here!

I did discover some other things in the process. If you open files in dropbox on the web the images disappear. So my suggestion here is... don't open the files! If you open files containing images in moodle they are fine. From this I assume that if you have a proper web server it wouldn't be a problem.
With that in mind I have worked out a way for it not to matter a great deal. If you are using the images as part of a matching exercise at least (with images for other purposes it would not work so well)
What you need to do is this
When you upload the file into your potato file you simply change the alt text from example.jpg to simply example the if the images disappear for any reason you will be left with the words which will make the matching exercise functional if not quite so pretty.

AWL conjunctions

I have recently resurrected an old project and combined it with my hot potatoes project. The old project being to liven up the academic word list with games to help students learn the vocab so it lends itself quite well to being made interactive. My first attempt has been quite successful, superficially at least. There are a few things that didn't work as I wanted them to but that is just something to work on next time, realistically I did achieve a set of interactive exercises embedded into a single web page and looking quite nice!

The main thing to work on is incorporation of images, in my paper games for the AWL I have vocabulary colour co-ordinated by sub-list. I succeeded in doing this with some of the exercises by making the words into images with coloured backgrounds. Unfortunately when I uploaded them to dropbox I lost the images so in this set of exercises there are a lot of white boxes. My next challenge is colour!

Oh and mobile function... some of the exercises work on my smart-phone, some don't. I suspect that any of the exercises that involve moving blocks will be difficult to make really usable on a phone but equally I think they will be the best type of exercises for use on IWB's and tablets.

hot potatoes and wikispaces 2

.... and success

Dropbox recently stopped creating public folders with new accounts so my dropbox was somewhat bereft. This bereavement wouldn't be a problem for normal users but if you want one of your documents to be publicly accessible then it is quite useful. Fortunately it is possible to enable one in your new account

instructions here

once you have done that you can add the htm file from your hot potato quiz to your public folder, copy the public link (instructions for this are also in the page mentioned above) and put that link into the handy piece of code I mentioned in the last post. Just to prove it works I am going to try and add a quiz into this post...



If you see it then I was successful. Incidental, this is a quiz from my Life in the UK test project, section 2, how the UK is governed.

Hot potatoes and wikispaces

When I was working on my DTTLS I created a wikispaces page. At this point it is still not public because it is very much a work in progress. One of the things I wanted to do with it was be able to put interactive material into it. I have used hot potatoes a lot in moodle and today I set about trying to get a hot potatoes quiz into my wiki. I didn't necessarily think it was possible but, success!

Here is how I did it.

The best way to do this is probably by uploading your hot potato files onto hotpotatoes.net. This will allow you give students log in details to their own quizzes as well as giving you a teacher log-on where you can check scores etc. However it is not a free service and when in the testing stage, as I am,  it is hard to justify the cost. So I needed to find a free web host, while drop box is not exactly this it does hold files on the web.

Then using the lovely bit of script
From this wiki, you only need to put into your wiki page as 'other html' under the instert widget option. The there you have it. There is a hot potato in your wiki page.

Unfortunately there is a problem with this. The web page in dropbox is https:// so only works on my browser when logged in as me. So in a sense, this is successful but I need to go back to dropbox and work out how to make files public. 

to be continued...