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How the technology was used and what happened

 

I first had to study how to work with HP apps, and get acquainted with some specific tools. As mentioned earlier, I chose the option which automatically creates a crossword grid after my entering words down and across into the app. Then I continued with, in my opinion, the most important step - entering word descriptions or clues. The purpose of this task is that students practice vocabulary and understand the meaning of the words by matching the meaning with a respective word.

 

Another option is to use synonyms as clues. Students then need to find the matching word with the same meaning. That led me to think about making two crosswords with the same solution one based on synonyms the other on word descriptions. This is one intriguing idea to carry out.

 

Next, I played with settings where colors (background, letters, etc.), headings, instructions, time, buttons etc. can be set to make the outlook pleasant and useful until I was completely satisfied. Though I am pretty sure some adaptations will be necessary in the future, depending on the feedback of the students.

 

Another app I tried was JQuiz which offers even more inventiveness and enables creating question-based quizzes. Questions can be of four different types, including multiple-choice and short-answer. Specific feedback can be provided both for right answers and predicted wrong answers or distractors. In short-answer questions, the student's guess is intelligently parsed. Helpful feedback is shown as to which part of a guess is right and which part is wrong. The student can ask for a hint in the form of a "free letter" from the answer. What is more, questions and answers can be shuffled. Questions are listed in different order whenever the quiz is attempted and so are the answers to respective questions.

 

Also, score can be shown after each question or at the end so that students see how well they have done on the task. Then all questions or a single question can be displayed on one page. In short-answer questions, the students have to type the answer into a text box on the page, and press Check button to see if it is correct. The page then tries to match the student's answer to a list of correct or incorrect answers I define. If a match is found, the feedback for that answer is shown. If not, then the page tries to find the nearest match among the specified correct answers, and signals to the student which parts of their answer is right and which parts is wrong. The score for each question is based on the number of attempts the student makes before getting the correct answer. I also included a Hint button, which gave the student one letter of the answer; using the Hint button incurred a penalty on the score.

 

Next, a hybrid question is a combination of a multiple-choice and a short-answer question. In this type of question, the student is first presented with a text box and asked to type the answer. However, if the student fails to get the answer right after a specified number of tries, the question changes to a multiple-choice question to make it easier.



 

4.4. My thoughts and students’ reactions

 

Students’ reactions were no different from what I had expected. Teaching methods should bring novelty, engagement, raise interest and initiative of the class and that again proved true with the introduction of this creative tool.

 

When I presented the problem (lack of vocabulary knowledge and ways of acquiring it) they supported the idea of getting additional tasks and doing more practice online. Students engaged in a discussion on the differences between learning words from ready-made lists, doing workbook exercises and online exercises. They agreed that learning online is “cool”, and presumed they would benefit from using key business words in different tasks.

 

So what at first seemed to be a challenge for the students turned into their unanimous support. The first impression in class was very positive and they welcomed the idea of vocabulary recycling. Intuitiveness of Hot Potatoes tool needed no thorough explanation and when I showed them a few task samples their comprehension of how to go about them was immediate.

 


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 958


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