Became a Wakelet Ambassador

 

Became Kahoot Academy Verified Creator

 

Loom vs Screencastify

 It's always interesting to watch these cut-throat competitions between app developers. For creating screen-recording videos using a Chrome extension, I started out with Screencastify. Later, I switched to Loom because Loom trumped Screencastify in terms of the length of the screen-recorded video that could be created. Just two months ago, I switched back to Screencastify, because Screencastify had a new function: inserting quiz questions into a screen-recorded video. 

Then, this morning, I received this update from Loom announcing an upcoming new function. Will I switch back to Loom? It depends on how useful the new function is. 

The bottomline: 

1. As an edtech user, I have no loyalty to any particular app. 

2. These apps are free. How do the developers make a living

Became a Formative Champion

 

Excelling as an online student

 There's now a plethera of web articles for educators on how to conduct effective online lessons. Interestingly, it was not until this morning when I came across this web article from Yale University on how to excel as an online student. I will show this article to my 60 Language Awareness students this evening (though most of them have already been following my online classes conscientiously). 

https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/7-Tips-for-Online-Learning

Padlet Map activity again

 So I tried this Padlet Map activity again this evening. This year, I have 50 students taking my Master's course in Computer Assisted Language Learning. After the second session, we had to switch to online classes abruptly. And I'd been wondering how scattered my 50 students were around Hong Kong,

This evening, because of the session topic, I had the chance to invite them to indicate their locations on a Padlet map. Below is the result. The result is not particularly surprising, except that one of them is living in Tai O!

Becoming MIE Trainer

 

Become Flocabulary Certified

 

Ditch the Zoom room

Just came across this short web article titled '5 easy tricks for successful online teaching', which begins with the attention-grabbing slogan 'Ditch the Zoom Room'. The writer, Eileen Kennedy, who was a Senior Research Associate based at UCL Knowledge Lab, was writing in the context of MOOC courses for teachers. She contends: 

"You don’t need to abandon video conferencing completely – but use its power wisely and infrequently. Live video conferencing can be stressful for educators and inconvenient for learners. ..."

These words resonate with me, as my online classes can be as long as 2.5 hours in duration. And sometimes I do sympathise with my students, who have to sit through such long sessions in front of the computer. 

One solution may be to cut down the length of each Zoom session, and present the rest of each lecture in the form of mini MOOC-like learning paths, for students to follow on their own. In fact, when I follow an online PD event myself, most of the time I prefer the MOOC format, or at least a self-paced learning path, to attending a live webinar. But of course, for busy course instructors, even designing a self-paced Nearpod lesson takes a lot of time (much more than live lecturing), not to mention MOOC-like learning units. 

https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2020/06/17/5-easy-tricks-for-successful-online-teaching/