Creating online learning with Riddle

On the surface Riddle is a great free tool for creating a variety of quizzes and polls that can have rich media embedded into them, but when you look below the surface it's actually a pretty sophisticated tool for quickly authoring engaging...

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Publishing 3.0 - A new model for independent educational publishing

My New Years resolution this year was to start work on a series of ebooks for iPads, e-readers and other digital devices. This has been my ambition since I published my first book Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers back in 2009, but I’ve never felt...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Create Image Books

I've always liked sites that take images and enable you to do something interesting with them. Pim Pam Pum seems to be a company that is remarkably good at helping us to make the most of Flickr images, and I particularly like this little tool...

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Microsoft's free Learning Content Development System

When Microsoft start giving stuff away for free, it always makes me curious, and when I spotted this free LCDS (Learning Content Development System) a while back I decided to download it and give it a try.If like me you've never had the patience...

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Interactive multiple choice activities

This is the third part in a series that I’m writing on how to use word processors to create computer-based materials. This one looks at how we can create interactive multiple choice activities using 'dropdown' menus.Multiple choice must be one of the most common question types in the history of education. I’m sure we all answered them when we were...

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Creating an interactive cloze text

This is the second part in a series of tutorials based around using word processors to create interactive and multimedia materials.This tutorial looks at how you can use a word processor to create a close text - also known as a 'gap fill'- that users can interact with on their computer.This is quite a common type of activity that we use in the classroom....

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Phonology can be fun and free

Phonetics Focus is a really wonderful new free resource produced by Cambridge English Online Ltd.Basically it is a collection of interactive multimedia Flash based games and resources that can be accessed through the CEO website at http://cambridgeenglishonline.com/Phonetics_Focus/What is it?In all there are almost 20 different interactive tools all...

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MS Word tutorial 1: Adding ‘comments’

This is the first in what I hope will become a series of tutorials on exploiting the teaching / learning potential of some of the more common desktop applications like MS Word. Like many people I’m a regular user of this application and it’s probably the one I use most, with the exception of my web browser.Despite the amount of time I have spent using...

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Interactive presentations

I’ve just been looking at a really interesting on line tool called Voicethread.What's Voicethread?Voice thread enables users to create online presentations using their own images. It also allows the creator to add audio or written text to the images and give access to other people to leave audio or text comments on the presentation. This is a really...

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