On... ITC in the classroom: Go!Animate

Looking for something fun as teaching draws to an end and assignment hell descends upon us, I thought that I would try out Go!Animate. The idea of the service is that you can quickly and easily make an animation, you choose characters from a number of presets (or build them yourself) and give them voices by typing in a script which is converted by the built in text to speech app. This works pretty well and includes a reasonable selection of accents (including British), and you also have the option of recording a soundtrack yourself and uploading it. There is a basic free service, and a number of paid options. I will return to this later.

The scope for the use of animation in education is wide: introductions to topics, revision, light-hearted ways to get tricky points across, even collaborative or individual video production by learners is feasible.  I was impressed by the ease of use: going from first visiting the webpage to registering, looking at the tutorials and making a test video took less than half and hour. I think that with a bit of practice you could easily turn out a thirty second video in around than five minutes. This is an important point; I had intended to trial Prezi this week however in the hour I allotted to learn and test it I did not manage to produce a finished product. This was partly down to the site not importing a pre-prepared PowerPoint presentation (not figured out why yet) and partly to my wanting to tweak too much to get things just right. As such, Prezi might not meet all my requirements for ITC solutions: they have to be easy to learn and practical and quick to use (I have not given up on Prezzi by the way and hope to revisit it soon).

So, Go!Animate passes my ease of use tests. So far, so good, but what about the downside? Well, the free service is rather restricted, Go!Animate really want you to pay them a monthly subscription. Fair enough, they are a commercial company, but I am looking for free teacher resources here. With the free basic account you are limited to videos of no more than two minutes in length; this is not a great problem, keep them short and snappy is a good maxim. You could also do several short linked videos and use the breaks for discussion. The next restriction is more of a problem: limited sharing options with no downloads. You get a url you can paste into a worksheet or a presentation, or an embed code, but that is it. You cannot download the video to edit yourself, and you cannot post it to YouTube without forking out some cash. You are therefore slightly at the mercy of their continued largess, I am a bit reluctant to invest too much time into creating resources on a service that (potentially) could deny me access to that work at some point in the future. Not likely to happen, but it is a nagging doubt and a disincentive.

Learner reaction so far has been very positive. I will leave experimenting with getting them try to make videos on their own until next academic year: this could be useful as an alternative and additional method of assessment.

So, will I be using Go!Animate regularly in the future? Probably yes. It is so quick and easy that I see it as a good way to make rapid but effective recaps of previous lessons, especially dealing with points learners found difficult. The free version is limited, but good enough to be useful. Not one to deploy every week perhaps, but as part of a suite of ITC applications it has the potential to be a handy addition to my teaching toolkit.

http://goanimate.com/

On... how to embed a Twitter feed into Blogger

Fairly easy once you know how, but this was initially a bit trickier than I had imagined, mainly because most of the “how to” guides on the web are out of date. So with the caveat that this worked in May 2013 but will probably not if you are reading it next year, this is what you need to do:

Stage 1: Twitter

• log on to Twitter and go to settings
• in “Create and manage your Widgets” select New

  

• a settings page will come up but the defaults work fine
• press create widget
• some code will appear (highlighted) in a box above where is says “Copy and paste the code into the HTML of your site” (a copy of the code for your new Widget will be stored on the Widgets page for future use) copy this code, and move on to stage 2

Stage 2: Blogger

• log in to Blogger (the overview page), and select the layout option
• an outline of your blog will appear, with various spaces marked “add a gadget” select one of these (probably best to choose one down the right hand side).
• A box will pop up: in the basics tab, scroll down to find and select “HTML/Javascript” and press the + button

 

 

• add a title such as “my Twitter feed”
• paste the code from Twitter into the “content” box and then press save

done!

#Twitter #Blogger #embed #guide #HowTo #Widget #Gadget #feed

On... IT in the Classroom: Socrative

Following last week’s trial of Google Forms to run quizzes, this week I tried Socrative which takes a different approach to achieve the same result. Socrative is an online service available at http://socrative.com that according to the website “empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.” The teacher creates an account at http://m.socrative.com/lecturer/#lecturerLogin and is given a ‘room’ number, and can then make and save a quiz either on the webpage or via a dedicated app on a smartphone or tablet. During the class the teacher logs on and makes the quiz “live” and the students access it via a slightly different address: http://m.socrative.com/student/#joinRoom - this has to be done on different devices to that being used by the teacher.

The website  takes you through the various options in an easy to understand way. The whole process of setting up is fairly painless, it only took me a few minutes to produce a test quiz. You can choose either multiple choice or text based answers; with multiple choice you can choose to display the correct answer to the student after the question if you wish, and there is also an option to randomize the order of the choices for each answer so that students do not all get the answers in the same order.

Quizzes can be run either at student pace (start it off and let them get on with it) or at teacher pace (you send them the questions one at a time, keeping the class all together and allowing discussion of the answers between questions). With the latter option combined with multiple choice questions you can display a live graph of the incoming answers on an interactive whiteboard, this proved popular with my students however some of the cannier ones waited to see what the popular answers from others were before submitting their own, so this feature is perhaps used with caution. Like Google forms there is the option of downloading a spreadsheet of results, useful for tracking progression.

So which is best; Socrative or Google Forms?

Socrative is slightly more visually appealing than Google Forms and feedback from my students (all aged 16-19) was positive, with a slight preference shown over Google Forms. However I think that the two systems are best used in slightly different situations. Socrative is really designed to be used ‘live’ in the class (some of my colleagues use it for ‘votes’ on verbal questions), you start and stop the activity and only one quiz can be running on your account at the time. Google Forms is better if you are setting homework as you can have multiple live hyperlinks to different forms, so different classes can use the system for different quizzes at the same time, or different learners in the same class (for example with different abilities) can access different versions of a quiz in the same class at the the same time, useful for differentiation.

Summing up Socrative

As usual, I would advise having a quick practice run-through of all of your quizzes before delivering them to students, just to be sure they behave as expected. For this you will need to have two devices though, not always possible. I certainly liked the ease of use and, like Google forms, will be using Socrative again in future.

But I do have one caveat; buried deep in the FAQs  when I checked on Friday (under Teacher web-based solution) it says that:

“Socrative provides a free student response service for everyone, with no restrictions as part of our beta product launch. There is no registration fee, usage fee and no credit card details are required and no hidden catches.

Since we truly believe in customer collaboration we are here first to gather your thoughts, requirements, comments while we are working day and night to launch our turnkey product.

Don't miss this amazing opportunity to enjoy our product while they are free of charge!”

This implies that they do plan to charge to use the service  in the future.

Socrative video