Moodle friendly: friendly moodle

In an earlier post I was pondering how to make classroom materials moodle friendly so that an IELTS course could be delivered through the platform as a distance course. I believe I have been largely successful in that task although time and students will be the judge of that. However a piece of feedback from one of the initial students to use the course was that the course was unsuitable because it was missing certain elements. Elements which I had put into the course because as the student quite rightly pointed out they are quite important for the study of IELTS. It can them be assumed that the problem is not the course content but moodle navigation. After some discussions with colleagues it seems the problem is the inverse to the initial one of making moodle friendly courses in as much as we need to make moodle courses friendly to the user.

I have not yet worked out how to do this but my first step has been to put a link with pictures to the teacher profiles so it is clear how to contact them with an additional skype button so students are made aware that it is, not only ok but, encouraged to use skype as a means of communication. To me this is just a cosmetic difference but may indeed make students feel more welcome on the site the larger task will be to make the site easily navigable for students whose native language is not English. Perhaps in this case the tab settings to reduce scroll of death are not helpful and should be removed to make way for visible (and larger) icons.

… to be continued

I took three weeks off of e-tech to go travelling in China to visit some former students. Don't worry I am not about to blog about my holidays, there is educational relevance. I was given an amazing opportunity while staying in provincial China, with a school teacher, to visit schools in her small city and I feel that as an English teacher visiting students learning English I must make some comment. First of all the reception I was given from my friends students (middle school kids) gave me a little bit of an insight into how it might feel to be Justin Beiber. I was terrified. In an informal setting they were all squeals and excitement but when it came to being allowed to ask questions and speak to me in English they were instantly very shy. Understandable I guess, most of them will have never had the opportunity to speak with a native speaker. From what I gather from talking to their teachers there is very little focus on speaking the language, they must pass exams and that is that, on top of that a lot of the kids view English as less important than their other subjects because it is not relevant to their lives at all. They are very lucky to have a teacher who speaks very very good English, many kids are not so lucky the language and pronunciation skills of a lot of the teachers I met were not that great. I can only hope that meeting me inspires at least one or two of these kids to see that learning a language can be a way out and a great opportunity for them to travel and that this will make them try harder with their own language learning.

I am trying not to judge the Chinese school system, it is very different from ours and while I find it hard to stomach a system which has kids in school from 7 am to 7 pm and then piles on the homework I am quite sure that people from around the world also think our school system is ridiculous. Although you would never see kids in an English classroom sitting so still and quiet for such long periods of time, or English parents suggesting that the teachers use more physical methods of punishment. I cannot say is this is good or bad, just different.

I also got a chance to visit another school on some kind of open day where the kids were all doing other activities such as art and music. Again I was struck by how much like a university physics lecture they all resembled. Expert at the front talking, kids sat in silence listening or practising. I did get to have a go at paper cutting.... terrible at it.. such a bad student. I would never fit in at a Chinese school (I only got the giggles once).

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.