Road Maps from Canva for showing the progress of a lesson

 In a TP lesson observation today, the teacher used a road map at the beginning of the lesson to give Ss an overview of the lesson. Then at different points of the lesson, she showed the road map again so students could see their progress. She showed the road map again at the end of the lesson as a recap of the journey that the students had completed. 

After the lesson, I asked her the source of the road map. She said 'Canva', which I had totally forgotten about!

I immediately went to Canva, and searched for 'road map.' There were dozens of results: 

Of course, the road map can be further enhanced with Thinglink and Genial.ly. 

Will look for an opportunity to use one of these road maps in my teaching. 

Converting a WORD outline file to an Eddrawmind mindmap

 Step 1: Prepare the Outline in a WORD DOCUMENT in Outline format (in View tab)

Step 2: Open Eddrawmind Desktop app. 

Step 3: Click on Create on left pane: 

Step 4: Click IMPORT

The WORD import option will appear: 

After the Import has finished, a new Mindmap will appear immediately on the screen. 

diagrams.net

 https://app.diagrams.net/

Just found this web app which is very easy to use, for creating graphic organizers. And it's always free, unlike Lucidchart and Miro. 

Presenting a PPT in a window instead of in full screen mode

 Just found a solution to presenting a PPT in a window instead of in full screen mode: 

https://www.csusm.edu/iits/iitsforyou/zoom/zoom-screenmanagement/index.html#:~:text=Get%20PowerPoint%20Out%20of%20Full%20Screen%20Mode&text=Click%20on%20the%20Set%20Up,by%20and%20individual%20(window).

When presenting, just resize the PPT Window. You can then still see the tabs on the opened browser. To switch between the PPT presentation and the browser, press Alt+Tab.   

Learner's Audio-recording function in Bookwidgets

 It looks like now that Bookwidgets is the only interactive app (similar ones are Wordwall, Learningapps.org) that allow students to respond to a task/question by recording their own voice. 

Bookwidgets vs Wordwall and Learningapps.org in terms of audio input

 Wordwall and Learningapps.org have the 'Text to Speech' function for converting words inserted into audio's. However, you can't record your own voice. 

My own view is that speech samples created are not really that good, especially when very careful listening for discriminating between speech sounds is concerned. 

Bookwidgets, on the other hand, is the opposite. It doesn't have the 'text to speech' function. But you can record you own voice as input. All the widget formats allow you to do that. 

Importing a Word document into MS Forms to create a poll

Just found out how to import a Word file into MS Forms to create a poll. This is quite a useful function. 

I'm now resorting to MS Forms more and more than I use Google Forms. 

Padlet's CUSTOM-AI function

I then tried the Custom-AI function of Padlet. I asked it to give me 12 activities for raising junior secondary students to signs, symbols, and icons found in public places in their daily life. (And of course I had multimodal literacy in mind when I was writing the prompt.) The results are really impressive, in that the activity ideas are really useful and interesting, and they are contextualised in Hong Kong!

https://padlet.com/szepaul/signs-symbols-and-icons-in-public-places-npl2ysiaai3xsyje

PADLET for generating an Assessment Poll

 As you may know already, Padlet has jumped on the GenAI bandwagon: there are now 8 types of content/padlet formats that it can generate for you from a prompt. 

I have tried all the 8 types of content that it can generate. The 'Lesson Plan', the 'Classroom Activity List', and 'Reading List' results are not that useful. I quite like the 'historical timeline', and the AI-generated map functions. The Assessment Poll turns out to be a pleasant surprise. I typed in 'the phonemes of British English' as the prompt; in less than a minute, it gave me a Padlet board consisting of 8 poll (MC) questions, which ARE relevant to the topic. 

The generated Assessment Poll Padlet, thus, can be used at the beginning of a lesson for a quick recap of previous learning. It can also be used as a whole-class 'exit ticket' to round off a lesson! (Of course the limitation is that the prompt topic you type in has to be a general one, unless you actually input a content summary of a lesson.)

https://padlet.com/szepaul/linguistics-assessment-polls-on-british-english-phonemes-oqmbjiqs4uf9dr4m?fbclid=IwAR2RWTezWnurhI1FIQefUe_rIOhXaVTCRWpxQlak0bo90dvga0qqqvITB3M_aem_AasByokIAjSE--od-MrygXvufS8BZobklNlr5MkyAzGR7FUk5IVlIKShB2oh_pVnOou1aIQJ5rNB5lhmDUgbcTb0

Runway: An GenAI platform

 Runway is a GenAI platform that can do a variety of things

https://app.runwayml.com/

Training your image Gen-AI tool

 Found out that on top of writing a prompt, we can train the app to give us an image which more accurately meets our needs. 

https://youtu.be/f6ApBqlF1j4

Padlet's new poll function

 Have tried Padlet's new Poll function, and created the following Padlet: (a) Students will view each TSA reading aloud video, and (b) grade the performance via the Poll.

The Poll is easy to use. One minus is that the poll choices are confined to 4 only. 

https://padlet.com/szepaul/tsa-reading-aloud-performances-73u14i6xkmms2pmn

Learning about a school's work in AI in Education

 收獲滿滿的早上，探訪AI in Education 走得超前的沈中，謝謝Spike Ho 和Suzanne Suen 犧牲假期回校向我介紹沈中在STEAM 和English Language Education 引入AI的最新發展，真是大開眼界。認識這些既passionate 又creative的educator,使我也不敢怠惰。

A Microsoft Forms Practice Quiz that I have created

 Upon learning about Microsoft Forms' new "Practice Mode", I created the Practice Quiz below, which I tried out yesterday evening with my Language Awareness course participants. My purpose was threefold: (1) to guide them to grasp the correct usage (in terms of language form) of the verb 'suggest', which is tricky to use in a sentence; (2) to use the practice quiz as one example of a grammaring (Diane Larsen-Freeman) task, and (3) to illustrate how to use the Practice Mode of Microsoft Forms as one example strategy for nurturing students as self-directed learners. 

If you're interested, you might give the following practice quiz a go. (It doesn't collect respondent information.) After answering a question, click Submit, and see whether you have got it right or not. If not, you can then either 'skip', or retry the question. When you have finished the whole practice quiz, click on 'Recap Questions'. You will then see an overview summary of your performance. This summary is useful for respondents to deduce,  in this particular example, the correct usages of 'suggest'.  (And feel free to share your artifacts with me if you have other ingenious ways to use Microsoft Forms' practice quiz function.)

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=gTdBhKa7s0W74E8XxpDaauAvgCsoRCxKscTBnjrnFX1UNEtTS1o2NklBRjNBQkNKVzY1Wlo2QTVSSy4u

A Microsoft Forms Quiz I created for Practice: How to use 'suggest' in a sentence

 Here is my practice quiz: 

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=gTdBhKa7s0W74E8XxpDaauAvgCsoRCxKscTBnjrnFX1UNEtTS1o2NklBRjNBQkNKVzY1Wlo2QTVSSy4u

New Quiz Mode in Microsoft Forms

Quizzes created with Microsoft Forms can now be assigned in the Practice Mode, as opposed to the previous 'Test only' mode. 

This is useful for creating practice tasks, and for promoting SDL.