Making lectures and lessons more interactive with mQlicker

As the traditional lecture has come increasingly under fire for being completely out of touch with modern teaching and learning methods, there has been a move by many teachers, conference presenters and lecturers to make their teaching techniques more modern and interactive. One of the key technologies for enabling this has been a range of audience response systems that provide real time responses to polls, questions and surveys while the speakers is actually presenting.

It’s great that many teachers are taking this step, but some of these response systems like mQlicker can deliver much more than a simple audience response, in fact you can use them to initiate debates, brainstorm ideas or even develop complete units of elearning which can help you to ‘flip’ your classroom and create motivating blended learning materials which encourage and keep track of student engagement.



mQlicker has a number of ways of encouraging interaction and displaying results. To see a live demo of how mQlicker look at: http://www.mqlicker.com/demo.html



Be sure to tab through the different questions types, enter data and use the settings tab to change the way the data displays. I particularly like the word cloud type data display for text and numerical entries.

To set up your mQlicker interactions you need to register and log in on the mQlicker site. This is free to do.



Once you have done this you see the admin user interface. This is much simpler to use than it looks at first glance and the initial field shows you the 6 step instructions for how to create your poll or questionnaire.

Once you have created your questionnaire and launched it, participants just need to go to: https://respond.cc/ enter a numerical code and then input their response.



Here are 3 short video tutorial which show you how to do that.



How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 1







How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 2



How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 3







Why I like mQlicker

• For a start mQlicker is cross platform compatible so as well as working an app on all the major mobile platforms it will also run in the browser on both mobile and desktop.


• It has a range of ways of displaying participants responses which you can choose from. I particularly like the one which shows responses to text input as a word cloud.


• I really like that you only need to set up one fixed URL https://respond.cc/ for responses and that respondents just enter a short digital code. This makes it pretty simple to get people to the right place at an event and they don’t have complex URLs to copy down or registration codes to handle.


• mQlicker is pretty simple and straight forward just to get started with, but it also comes with a complete manual http://resources.mqlicker.com/doc/manual.pdf that you can download to start digging into the more complex capabilities.


• You can embed mQlicker chart results into a presentation (PPT) and make it dynamic so that your presentation slide updates automatically when people vote.


• It’s easy to reuse questions or questionnaires with multiple classes as it collects questions together in a question bank.


• There are premium services if you want something that looks customized for your company or event.

Some tips for getting the best from audience response

• Don’t limit participation to the room. Why not send out surveys and polls for response through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook or through a back channel chatroom, then you can get a much wider variety of opinion and get the people in the room to respond to that.


• You can use the tool to brainstorm, especially with the word cloud data display. This would be great for brainstorming vocabulary based around topics, or words which collocate with ... etc.


• You can set up before and after votes for in class discussions, to see how many people can be persuaded to change their minds.


• You can create complete flipped interactive learning, by creating questionnaires with a video embedded into a slide at the beginning and then a variety of questions to get students exploring the video content. Then when you come to class students are prepared and you have some response data to get them working with and thinking and talking about in class. Using videos for flipped learning in this way when you are tracking the responses,  puts more pressure on students to actually do the work and watch the video as they know their responses are being tracked by the teacher.


• You can create questions based around images, so be sure to take advantage of this feature to help stimulate response from the students.


• You can allow students / participants to be anonymous, so this is a great tool for doing action research and to collect genuinely honest feedback on your teaching methods or content.


• You can use it to make your classroom more democratic, by setting up votes to find out which parts of the book or course students most want to study or what kinds of activities they want to do next.


• It’s great that mQlicker can enable open text input, so make the most of this feature. Participants are often frustrated wit questionnaires or polls that don’t really provide the answers that they want to give. Creating open text questions gives the respondent much more ability to express what they feel. This can though be more difficult for you to analyze statistically


• And last but not least you can use it for assessment and set micro tests as you class progresses. This can assure you that participants are following and understanding your message.

mQlicker is a great free tool for making your classroom, lecture or conference presentation more interactive. It would be great to see more tools like this being used at conferences and in classrooms, but of course you do need to make sure that your venue or classroom has good connectivity and get people into the habit of coming along ready with devices to participate, but as mobile and tablet penetration grows in the education sector and educational authorities realize that we have to stop banning these devices from classrooms and start exploiting them more fully.



I hope you find mQlicker useful



Related links:

• 3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations 
  


• Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students 


• Peer editing in digital and mobile environments


• The Web 2.0 School of the Present


• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution: Part 2


• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak


• Survey Creation Tool for Students


• Create Quick Online Polls


• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz


• Make your own chat room

Best



Nik Peachey

Create online learning with 123ContactForm

123ContactForm may not sound like the kind of tool that would be of interest to educators, but as I discovered when they asked me to review their online form creation tool, they offer quite a range of features that can solve many of the problems we have as 21st century teachers.

We can use it to:

• Create surveys to do research and action research


• We can create interactive materials based around multimedia objects


• We can eve use it to sell our materials or services online and take payments

The tool itself is browser based and so doesn't require any downloading or installation and that in itself can save a lot of hassle if you work in an institution that has very restrictive practices regarding the installation of software.



To get started you just need to go to the site and register at: http://www.123contactform.com/education-forms.htm



Once you have registered you get access to the dashboard and this is where you can start creating your forms. You just need to click on 'Create New Form'.

You will then get a choice of different types of form to create. It's a good idea to click on 'Other Forms' this takes you to the online educator forms.   If you have a look at some of the templates and educator forms that have already been created it will give you some idea of what the platform can do. There is an Education section with some ready made templates in.

When you are ready to create your own educator forms, you could start by clicking on 'Blank Form'. Call your form 'My first activity' and then save it and look at the different types of interactions you can create.

You will see the basic interactions you can add to the page. Clicking on them will add the interaction type to the page.

Then when you click on the interaction type you can edit its features.

Some of the advanced interaction types are particularly interesting, especially the html feature which enables you to embed interactive media objects such as videos or digital books into your forms and then build interactive activities around them.

You can also add social buttons to enable users to share your activities through social media channels. 123ContactForm does also have a Facebook app so once your activities are complete you can post them directly into Facebook pages or groups for users to do from there.



This video shows you how to use all the main features of the forms.







Once you have created your activities they are saved in the 'My Forms' section of the site and you can go there to edit them. Here you can get the code to publish your educator forms into your bog website or CMS, or get a link to email out to students.

You can also check to see who has submitted answers to the questions and see the record of what answers have been given in the 'Reports' section. This is one of the best features of the site as it turns it into a form of LMS (learning management system) where you can collect and analyse students responses and generate graphs of the results.



The site also allow users to add and customise the theme of the forms, so if you want them to blend into your site or blog, then customising the look and feel of the forms is quite easy and you can even add your own logo.



This video shows you how to customise your form.







So how can we use this with EFL / ESL students?

• We can create action research forms and get detailed and anonymous feedback on our teaching


• We can create multimedia materials for learning or assessment and track our students responses. This is particularly useful if we a creating homework assignments and we need to assess these and know that our students have done them.


• We can create learning objects to embed into online courses that track and assess students' performance.


• We can make fun engaging quizzes based around images.

As ELT professionals

• We can use the forms to create surveys for research.


• We can start selling materials, self published books, or private online classes and collect payment in a safe and secure way.

What I like about 123ContactForm

• It's a very versatile platform and really does enable a lot more than the name suggests. In fact it's a pretty sound way to create online learning materials with a built in LMS.


• It's a great tool for freelancers who want to start making money online by selling their own products and services in a user friendly way.


• It runs in the browser and is pretty simple to use.


• It's easy to produce something that looks very professional.


• I've said it already, but the tracking capabilities are great.


• The company runs on a freemium model, so although it is a free service, there is also a business model there to support the site so it's less likely to suddenly disappear or fold.

What I'm not so sure about

• As I said the company runs on a freemium model, so many of the best features are the ones they charge for.


• On the free subscription you can create 5 forms and collect up to 100 students' responses each month which is probably enough for the individual teacher to use it with a class, but it would be nice to have a few more of the premium features available to the Free subscriber, such as the html embed to enable the use of video and multimedia in the activities.


• You have to be on the Platinum account to be able to enable payments and that costs $29.95 per month, which for a company or school is not much, but for a teacher / freelancer who wants to test the waters with selling their own products or services, it might seem like quite a big risk when they are just getting started, but you can cancel your subscription if things don't go well and 123ContactForm does offer a 30day money back guarantee. It's also worth mentioning that if you are a teacher or teacher trainer and you get in contact with the company, they are offering a 35% educational discount, so that can help to reduce the risk and the cost.

On the whole I think this is a really good product, particularly for a small school that wants to venture into online teaching or blended learning, then a platinum account at $29.95 per month is quite a small risk. For a teacher thinking of going freelance it might be a good option if you are confident that you can make enough through online sales to justify the monthly outlay. As a teacher working in class, then it's a nice way to get started with creating some online learning with a degree of interactivity, but it would be much more attractive if the html embed functionality came as part of the free subscription.



123ContactForm has plenty of potential for the online educator or anyone wanting to create blended learning, so it's well worth checking out, and when I get my book finished I may well be using it myself. I hope you find it useful too.



Related links:

• Learning technology news portal


• Web Tools for Learners


• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak


• Survey Creation Tool for Students


• Create Quick Online Polls


• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz


• Make your own chat room

Best

Nik Peachey

10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses

Over the last few years I've done a lot of work developing writing and redeveloping online courses and course materials. In the initial rush to get learning online many organisations got themselves a Moodle platform and then attached a whole load of PDFs and .docs, added some forums and the odd video clip and called it an online course. It's no surprise then that drop out rates for online learning courses have been so high.

The advent of Web 2.0 though, brought a whole bunch of new tools that course designers could take advantage of to make content more social, interactive and engaging.



Here are some of the tools I've been using recently to embed a bit more interactivity into the courses I work on.

Storify - http://storify.com

Storify is a great tool for collecting together  a mixture of web based resources and references into a web based widget that you can then structure into a digital research paper. You can easily pull in comments from Facebook, Twitter or Google searches as well as a range of other social media sources. You then add blocks with your own commentary and reflections. The whole thing can then be embedded into a webpage. This is a great tool for developing digital literacy and referencing online sources.

• Here's an example of a Storify text designed to share information about Wordle.

Tricider - http://tricider.com

Tricider is a great tool for crowd sourcing opinion. You start with a single question problem and then you or your students can add possible solutions to the problem. Students can also add some pros and cons to the solutions and vote on the ones they prefer. These can be embedded into webpages and can give far more structure to online discussion than things like threaded forums which often become garbled and confusing.

• Here's an example discussing the pros and cons of Moodle (Feel free to participate)

Urtak - https://urtak.com

You can use Urtak to create simple social questionnaires for your courses. Although the responses are quite limited (Yes / No / Don't care) This can still be a useful tool for quick straw polls before developing deeper discussion through a forum. It also give students the chance to compare their opinions anonymously with those of classmates and also add their own questions to the questionnaire. The questionnaires can also be embedded into web pages and materials.

• Here's an example of a questionnaire about Education Today

Intervue.me - http://intervue.me

This is also a tool for creating questionnaires, but in the case of Intervue.me the questions can be open ended and the respondent leaves their answer verbally using a web cam. Intervue.me can't be embedded into pages , but you can link to your questionnaires and you can download the video clips of the answers as mp4 so you can then use these in materials you develop and as the basis for further discussion.

• Here is an example of a questionnaire asking teachers about their use of technology

VYou - http://vyou.com/

You can use Vyou embed a video booth that students can go at any time of day to ask you questions. The video booth gives the impression that you are always available and builds some presence on your course. The messages students send you are delivered to an inbox and you are notified so that you can answer them. Vyou also has a very handy mobile app so you can answer the questions where ever you are on your iPhone or other mobile device.

• Here's an example of my own Vyou Q & A page on this blog

Keek - http://www.keek.com/

It's a good idea to get students to keep a learning journal on any course they do. It can feel a bit dull though writing journal entries to yourself, so why not get student to create a video based learning journal using Keek. They can add entries each day just using a web cam and microphone and you can leave video comments on their entries. Students on your course can also be encouraged to 'follow' each other. Individual entries can also be embedded into web pages which can enable you to build pages that share insights from your course participants. Keek also has a free mobile app that allows you to up date from mobile devices such as iPhone.

• Here you can see some examples from Keek users

Bundlr - http://gobundlr.com/

This is a really useful tool for sharing theme based collections of bookmarks. It creates a very visual record of the book marked links which you can then embed into your course pages as widgets. This can be a really useful tool for setting research tasks based around a group of online resources.

• Here you can see a bundle of links relating to digital storytelling

Zooshia - http://zooshia.com/

Zooshia is a handy tool for creating widgets from social network sources that can be embedded into web pages. The widgets show a dynamic stream from whatever source we select. This can make suggestions for twitter or facebook people to follow much more informative and can also allow you to embed dynamic widgets from YouTube channels which will make your content much more dynamic too.

• Here is a widget I embedded into my blog showing the postings to my Facebook page

Present.Me - http://present.me/

Present.Me  can help you create online presentations from your PowerPoint slides. You can then add your talking head commentary to your slides and embed the whole thing into your online course. This works well as a lecture replacement and having a presenter that you can actually see along side your slides can help add to the engagement with your learners. You can embed this into your page and build a forum around it for follow up discussion.

• Here you can see a useful series of presentations showing you how to create a good presentation

Goanimate - http://goanimate.com

 

Online course content can become very dry and serious, so why not spice it up by creating a few animations using something like GoAnimate. It's a an easy tool for creating short animated dialogues that can be exported as video clips and embedded into your course. You can use these to introduce topics or raise issues for further debate.

• Here you can see a selection of channels that have been developed using animation

I hope these ten tools and the links from them have given you a few ideas into how you can spice up your online courses and make them more engaging and enjoyable and help you to retain students. Please leave a comment if you have suggestions for other free tools you have found useful for developing online content.



Related links:

• 10 Tech Tools for Teacher Training Courses


• 3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations


• Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students


• Create a Video Q&A Booth


• So Ask Me a Question


• Create Video Questionnaires


• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak


• Pros and Cons as Web Based Research Tasks

Best





Nik Peachey