Asking the question

I was preparing to share the delivery of a workshop entitled "Ask the audience". This has given me the opportunity to explore some different types of personal response systems that are available.

I decided to create one question and then see how it looked within each application.

This post is a discussion about the question that I used, what made it a good question and some limitations with the question.

The question

I created a map that included some of Europe. On that I placed arrows pointing to specific places with ABCD or E indicating the different places. One of the places that an arrow pointed to was Sochi in Russia. The question was: Where is Sochi?

What's a good question?

Let's take the Sochi example … what makes it good? Here are some points...

• The text is short
• It offers precise visual options
• The question can be used in other contexts as the arrows on it all pointed to real places, for example Moscow, Minsk
• It's current: I could add a prefix to that as "The Winter Olympics 2014"
• It doesn't offer too many options for response

What are the limitations of the question?

• Visual issue: I might need to explain where the pointers were without giving it away, for example, is it by the Black Sea? Is it as far north as Latvia? Is it in Belarus? And so on.
• Fortunately all of the response systems used images. However, one of them produced an image that was pretty small. In this case, I might present the image alone beforehand.
• It assumes that you know it's in Russia or thereabouts. I could have presented a map of the world and stood back to see where the answers went.

Response systems

Some response systems enable you to point to the location so I didn't even need to have put the letters A to E there. Others didn't enable the image to be resized; one in particular produced an image that took up less than a quarter of the screen.

Presenting - note!

Unless you wanted them to go to the Internet and to do a quick search the Sochi then and non-Internet system would be best to this.

Finally

The question that I delivered: where is Sochi is one that is a recall type of question, that is, one that tests knowledge. What I could have done was to ask people to apply the knowledge. Something that might ascertain their conceptual understanding or even a question that would test their knowledge and understanding. I could have asked them: if you were holding the Winter Olympics where would be the best location out of the 5 suggested?

I await comments from the workshop group….

(By the way, there follows a Creative Commons map that shows Sochi... it's one of the locations that is marked with a black dot!)

Why blog?

I think I should answer this question by speaking about why I create blog messages. 

I've used different types of blogs over the years. The ones which are the most successful for me are those that are easily accessible and where I can remember the password! If I don't remember the password, at least there should be a way of getting it quickly. I tend to think better onto paper, using pen and paper and (according to my old  school friend) this puts me into a certain age group!

Having said that, what I'm doing this occasion is using DragonDictate. This is the first time that I've used DragonDictate to create blog messages. But if I close my eyes,  hopefully the text isn't going to make too many mistakes. I've recently found that this software is better in recognising my voice than it used to be. 

I found that I need to close my eyes when I'm speaking, so that I'm not distracted by  the recognised text and all the text that starts to flow. Have you ever been in the situation where you've had an online conversation with somebody and you can hear your own voice on the system a fraction of a second after you have spoken? Well I think that it's very much like that. So closing my eyes helps with the flow of my thoughts.

listen to ‘Firemen, time difference, toaster technology’ on Audioboo

So I would suggest the first way that I recognise is the way that I can capture my thoughts quickly. so, in 2012, when I went over to Canada I had a little notebook that I wrote diary entries in and I felt again that things are better when I use a diary entry in writing. Then I had a little notebook with all these diary entries. Unfortunately my typing skills are such that I would not enjoy transcribing the information. Neither would I want just to take photographs of my diary entries because that's not very accessible. So I found Audioboo which was wonderful; it's like a voice version of Twitter. It's not taken off  so much as Twitter, and I would suggest that because of its ease of usage as well as the fact that people probably don't like listening to their recorded voices. So why aren't I using audio at this moment? One of the reasons is that I can adjust the paragraphs around having spoken into DragonDictate and is working with the text. Editing recorded speech is not the easiest thing to do. And I'm not typing at the moment very much because I want to give my shoulder a rest having damaged it recently. 

So… Going back to why I have created blogs in the past: where there has been a fixed amount of time in which to produce blogs for example enforced being in a certain location or as part of a course. In addition, I've used Twitter best during a conference, especially when I had been able to text for tweeting. However repeated texting by me who was not used to texting caused injury! 

I have also found that I've been successful when I've focused on the certain areas for my blogs. I don't intend my blogs to be read by hundreds of thousands of people, but there are very useful place to put things like my thoughts and also I've used them for responses to questions that I been asked, with the thought that I might be asked that question again and can refer people to that blog posting. 

I've also used a blog posting for putting resources for workshops or demonstrations that I have presented University-wide.

So, in conclusion, I would suggest the following:

How do you capture your thoughts the best? Dictate? Type? Pencil or pen?

Have you got an overall arching topic that you want to use for your blog posts? It helps if you do otherwise there's no aim!

And finally what's your own voice? If it's a blog it can be personal, so… it's your own voice! How do you speak? How do you explain something over a telephone to somebody in a telephone conversation? Your blogs can be as formal or as informal as you wish! 

It's up to you…

(And this is informal. I just thought of this out of my own head! So there aren't any references.)

Quizzes in Moodle

… is there any learning resource on how to set-up Online Test or Quiz on Moodle?

There is a lot of help within Moodle for using quizzes.

When you start to set up a quiz, you would turn the editing on and then from the Add an activity or resource option, click quiz. When you've clicked quiz, you'll see a list of useful information about the quiz activity. At the bottom of that list you'll see an information link that says more help. When you click this you go through to Moodle documents. This will automatically take you to the correct version of Moodle documents which is now 2.5 at Coventry University. Here you will find some information about how to set up a quiz in Moodle.  Here's the link anyway:
http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/mod/quiz/view

Gavin Henrick provides a useful introduction to Moodle quiz in his presentation on Slideshare. Note that some of the later slides show some hints and tips for the settings.
http://www.slideshare.net/ghenrick/moodle-quiz-presentation

In addition to that information, you will find several useful YouTube videos. Here are two examples:

The quiz activity by Moodle is actually part of the Learn Moodle 2013 series using Moodle 2.5 and it was recorded by Mary Cooch, who is known as Moodle fairy. It talks you through different types of questions and again is a great introduction to the quiz:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kziLSNK4MzQ


Creating a quiz in Moodle 2.5 by Japan Eric is very useful because it talks you through a lot of the settings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h1Gzm7Rh44

Tools for a Flipped Classroom - the basics

What is a Flipped Classroom?

Very basically, it's an alternative method of learning and teaching, where the classroom time is replaced from being a lecture and what might have previously been allocated as "homework" resembles that which is done in classroom time.

Here's some information that I've collated if you want to know more about the Flipped Classroom.

The result of this thinking is that tutors are creating resources to deliver in advance to their students.  Such resources might include podcasts, YouTube videos and collections of information.

However, what if you don't yet want to create your own materials? There are plenty of resources out there.

In the true spirit of flipped learning, this blog post gives you information about where you can look and some things you need to be aware of when searching the internet for materials. I would on request, be able to provide a workshop for Coventry University tutors who wish to explore this further.

Searching for resources - guidelines

So you want to search the internet for resources but need to be aware of some of the procedure and possible snags? This JISC tutorial, Internet Audio Resources is an excellent place to start. Similar tutorials are also available in the Virtual Training Suite.

If you want to know more about the copyright aspects of audio-visual use, here's some help from JISC Digital Media.

(Coventry University: you can ask your subject librarian. Note that CU has a licence to record some TV and Radio programmes too).

Open resources

Open resources are available for you to find. As well as examples listed in the JISC tutorials, take a look at inspirational words in TED Talks, Khan Academy for learning resources and, instead of YouTube, try TeacherTube. 

Coventry University Open Collection

CURVE digital repository has an open collection of digital resources (as well as an internal collection where staff can view and add items).

Creative Commons

You can find and use Creative Commons resources according to the licence. For more information, here's a wonderful resource from tagseoblog that tells you "What means Creative Commons"

Creative Commons Search - DIY resource

Finally, here's a YouTube video (quick and dirty, but complete with transcript) about how to search for a Creative Commons image and use its attribution.

Start it and stop it to see the captions options and settings. It's best viewed full screen and Settings - Quality in 1080 high density.


I prefer to do videos without scripts and in one take.

It was created using Snagit; Camtasia was used to add the additional labels.

Finally, the captions were automatically created within YouTube.  I only needed to perform some minor edits on it. It was excellent in working out what I said.