I’m an Experimenter!
I decided to practice a tool that I have just recently learned in order to record a video for this activity. The tool I used is called Adobe Spark. I wrote my script, developed the slides, recorded my voice to the slides, downloaded the mp3 file, and then uploaded it to YouTube.
In order to grow as an effective educator in online learning environments, I must step outside of my comfort zone and try new interactive-technologies that will engage my student learners. There are so many interactive tools that educators can use to engage their students in a meaningful way during online learning. The three tools that I experimented with included the H5P, Poll Everywhere, and Screencast-O-Matic.
First, I used the eCampusOntario H5P Studio to create an interactive Image Hotspot activity around the stages of Human-Centered Design Thinking for Changemaking. I plan to use this in my upcoming courses as an introduction to what Human-Centered Design Thinking is, along with what each stage is comprised of. This is the first time I used H5P for an Image Hotspots activity. I really enjoyed this, and I found it very user friendly.
I learned that H5P is easier to use than I originally thought. I have only used it for developing practice quizzes, but I realize now that it offers a wide array of interactive activities that I could apply to my online courses, and I can even embed these activities right into Blackboard.
Second, I used Poll Everywhere to create a survey for educators that focused on the ways to use technology-enabled activities in online learning environments. I have used Poll Everywhere in the past, and I find it very user friendly; however, the only thing I would recommend to the platform administrator is to allow for more than one poll to be active at once.
I learned that when developing a survey, you can use a variety of ways in which the user can answer each question (word clouds, open-ended questions, multiple choice, and so on). I could incorporate the survey tool into the beginning of my courses as a diagnostic assessment, in the middle of the course as a formative assessment tool, and at the end of the courses as a summative assessment.
https://bank.ecampusontario.ca/response/poll-everywhere-for-surveying-educators/
Link to my survey: https://PollEv.com/surveys/PDaH1yAU7xmitbqirmsQU/respond
Finally, I designed an introductory PowerPoint for my first year ECE students. This PowerPoint discussed what they would expect in their online placement. Using Screencast-O-Matic, I was able to record a video for the students to watch. I find this application very easy to use, and I have also used it in the past for asynchronous recordings of class session material.
In the future, I could use this tool as a storytelling tool with my students.
Link to video clip: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crhQceVfjLC
The experimenter activity that I developed on my iPhone X was my Poll Everywhere survey. One advantage of Poll Everywhere is that I now know that I can design an activity from anywhere, as I can design it on my phone. The challenge I found of designing this activity on my phone is that it was not as easy as it is on a laptop, as my fingers kept hitting the incorrect letter when I was typing. I tested out my survey, and I found that using Poll Everywhere on my iPhone X was fairly easy, but again, not as easy as it is when using a computer, because I found the same issues of selecting the incorrect letters when typing the open-ended responses. If I were to plan for an upcoming assignment to be completed on a tablet or a smartphone, I would probably stick to multiple choice questions so that it is easy to click on the answer to select it. Explain the steps you might take in making access to these devices available to all students.
When designing learning experiences in the future, I plan to continue to test new tools to engage my learners. I will use the H5P as a tool to test knowledge by developing practice quizzes for my students, Image hotspots, and the drag and drop function. I will use Poll Everywhere to engage learners in collaborative synchronous and asynchronous activities by using embedded word clouds, polls, and open-ended questions into my Blackboard course shell, and finally I will continue to use screencast-o-matic for asynchronous class recordings, student presentations, and narrated PowerPoints that I can then embed into blackboard.
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https://youtu.be/DOJdHbSUmDs
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