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 8: Tools for enhancing learning

This week we have been given a great list of test makers that I am looking forward to trying out.

Besides HotPotatoes, I have used the following quiz generators that I can recommend:

ESL Videos – teachers open an account, embed a YouTube video and create a multiple choice quiz. After the quiz is done, you can copy the embed code of the quiz and paste it into your blog, wiki or website. Otherwise, you can leave the quiz on the ESL Video website.

Scroll down to do my latest video listening quiz: All Summer Long by Kid Rock. In this quiz students are given a list of three synoynms to choose from.

Shakira’s Waka Waka is also a quiz on synonyms, while Mungo Jerry’s Summertime and Robbie Williams’s How do you rate the morning sun is a quiz for practising confusing words – homophones.

While listening to Mika’s Rain students students can practise phrasal words.