Week 8: Creating online exercises

Many of my colleagues have mentioned the importance of introducing test makers to students. If we teach them how to make exercises on their own, they will become involved in the learning process. In this way, students will become aware of the importance of their engagement and their new role in the classroom. Eventually, they will take control over their learning. The teacher will be there to guide them, facilitate the learning process or simply someone to lean on when problems arise.

In a comment to my previous post I mentioned an influential post by Doug Johnson from The Blue Skunk Blog: Creating Empowered Users where he says that instead of saying "Here's how you do it", we should ask the student "What have you tried?". By being LESS helpful, the teacher actually empowers the students to think independently, to rely on themselves and to become autonomous.

So far I have introduced my students to exercise-building on the ITESLJ website, where you can see some of their bilingual quizzes. However, what my students did, was to write the words in two languages and send them in an email to the site administrator who generated the quizzes. I believe that my students would enjoy going through all the stages of the quiz making process. Over the next school year I am going to make use of this weeks’ recommended websites and I am sure my students will benefit greatly from being involved in test making, be it only for practising purposes. Besides, I might use some of their creations for “real” test, which will make them more engaged and motivated.

Week 4: Is motivation an issue?

I'm going to integrate technology in my class of 27 16-year-old students, who I'll be teaching for second year in a row.

I already introduced technolgy enhanced learning in their class on two occasions last year: They described themselves briefly in a post on a social networking site, Ning, which I opened for this purpose. Students were extremely motivated to do this task, as their work was published on-line and read by their peers. However, as the Ning network was private and no students from other schools or countries joined us, they soon lost interest in pursuing it any longer. Having had other things to teach, I didn’t encourage them with the introduction of possible new topics, so that the network communication slowly died out.

The other computer assisted lesson was on Earth Day, when I pledged to go paperless, along with more than a thousand teachers worldwide. I introduced the topic of Earth Day to my students with an online quiz, followed by a video listening quiz on more environmental topics. After that I showed them a video on how to make Zimmertwins animated movies. Zimmertwins is a free tool for creating cartoons. Again, this activity sparked students’ interest which resulted in a number of lively animated movies. The activity, however, never gave rise to a series of cartoons created with no teacher incentive.

I don't believe that motivation will be an issue in my class next year, as we all know that students eagerly do what they like. The problem is how to keep them motivated.