#11 Bubblr

What is it? What does it do?

Bubblr by Pimpampum is a simple and effective photo-based tool which students could easily use to produce a comic-strip (slide-show) style presentation.  It uses the huge Yahoo owned image repository, Flickr, which boasts over 6 billion images.    
Not all the images are available, however, as it depends the Flickr user has opened up the photos with a non-commercial Creative Commons licence.  You can see exactly how many photos on Flickr have been offered the different types of CC licence usage here.  It's only a fraction of the 6 billion but still provides a wealth of material to use in Bubblr.  The image quality is consistently good as well.

To play with Bubblr I unearthed some photos from my trip to Tanzania and, in particular, a 5-day trek up Mount Kilimanjaro.  At first these did not show up when I searched using the tag 'Kilimanjaro'. Plenty of other photos did.  As I wanted to do a comic-strip using my own photos, I had to change the licence terms from 'All Rights Reserved' first.  In addition, to find only my photos I had to add a unique tag, 'Ashantikili'.  Although if you upload a newly-tagged set then a Bubblr search jusing any tag will probably bring up yours first.  Or you can search by User - I'm known as Teacher Phili, unsurprisingly.

It is very easy to drag and drop a selection of images onto your comic-strip, although can take a little longer if you are arranging photos in some kind of chronological sequence, which I needed to as I was 'showing' a narrative over 5 days.   Then you can add one of 3 kinds of text bubble to each image, which can then form the basis of a presentation or these can do all the 'talking' themselves.  There are no limit to the number of bubbles that can be added but too many might devalue the image.  Frames can be inserted before or after slides, but it takes a while to get used to not deleting images already added, which then need to be located again. 

 
Pimpampum also created Bookr, which is very similar to Bubblr, but presents the photos in a stylish, turnable book format.

Bubblr is very easy for students to use. You don't need to sign in or create an account. Finding relevant photos is straightforward if the user is not too fussy or specific.  Even without an existing Yahoo/Flickr account, students can find a wealth of images to form the basis of a descriptive presentation, tell a story or narrative an event in their lives.  Adding bubbles is a fun and interesting way to express opinion or invent dialogue - if the images show people.  

• It could be used in the classroom for:

• storytelling - students find images which build up a narrative which then has text added like a proper comic-strip. 
• personal backgrounds - about where a student is from, their hometown/country, local cusine etc. Great for earlier lessons when students have to introduce themselves to the class.
• caption competition - an extension of the idea of adding 'funny texts or dialogue to images, often involving people or animals.  The speech or thought bubbles could be used here.
• Correcting errors - student can view the Bubblr archive (of previously made strips) and  'recycle' one which has errors or needs improving/changing. 
• Presenting - more elaborate ideas could involve running the strip through screen capture software to add a voiceover.
• A strip could also be easily constructed at home as an out of class activity.  Published strips can be emailed or embedded into a blog when complete.

• Personally, I can see a number of limitations with this tool.  For starters, the photos accessible are only those with one of the six differnet versions of Creative Commons licence - around 220 million.   Non-copyrighted/all rights reserved/watermarked images are obviously excluded.
• Navigation is a little clumsy.  The 'After current' frame button doesn't appear clearly in my browser.  You have to be careful not to delete or replace photos accidentally.  Scrolling along the strip usually works but images can overshoot, which is an issue if you want to do a screen capture with it.
• The search terms are limited.  Unless a student uses a specific term/set of photos or uploads their own, they may struggle to get exactly the images they want.  Only 17 images are shown at once and in the order they have been uploaded onto Flickr (most recent first).
• The bubbles are too basic, and not particularly editable. Text can only be in one style, no bold or font types, for example.  Images might vary in size depending on original source.
• There is no option to add audio.
• It doesn't seem possible to delete a strip once published, presumably because then you could delete strips created by others.
• There are not many options or fancy variations for the strip.
• On several occasions the Adobe Flash plug-in crashed when using and I was initially unable to access my finished strip from the archive.  When I tried to embed the remixed version in the blog, it also crashed...

With patience and some effort - the version shown is the remixed Bubblr version which I published and then recycled (improved) - I did manage to get a strip together, recorded it with Jing (see #12) and added some instrumental music*, before publishing it with Camtasia and posting on YouTube. This, however, defeats the point of using Bubblr in the first place.

*This video, PHILI DOES KILI includes content that is licenced and sold by RECISIO and was purchased by this user before adding, unmodified to the finished video.  It is matched third-party content that is owned or licensed by UMPG Publishing, although this still enables it to be shown on YouTube.

#10 QuestGarden

WARNING: *CHILDREN NOT ALLOWED !

*unless also a teacher with a strong understanding of pedagogy.

What is it? What does it do?

QuestGarden is an online authoring tool, community and hosting service that is designed to make it easier and quicker to create a high quality WebQuest. No knowledge of web editing or uploading is required.

WebQuests are defined by its co-creator, Bernie Dodge (his original conception paper is here) as:  

'an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet ... [they] are designed to use learners' time well ... to focus on information, rather than looking for it and to support learners' thinking at the levels of *analysis, synthesis and evaluation.'

QuestGarden is the place to go for stimulating teachers' ideas for designing their own WebQuests, and there are a range of templates and step-by-step guidance to doing so.  Fully developed Quests can be accessed by co-authors privately or collaboratively using a group code and shared with the community.  Users are encouraged to comment on other work and to build new Quests onto existing designs.   This is importantant as teachers aim to adapt exisiting material to suit the needs of their learners.  Existing WebQuests can be searched in numerous ways and there is a recently-published section (all those completed in the last 14 days).

QuestGarden has a strict age policy. Children are excluded from participating on the site.  This is justified here.  A free 30-day trial of the lesson creation tools is available and a 2-year subscription that offers additional features costs only $20.  See more on this in limitations.

Relevance to language learning?

WebQuests have a specific relevant to ELT.   They take a constructivist approach to learning and an integrative approach to CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning).  They also fit the model of content and task-based learning.  Students don't just search for information, the principle use of 'Web 1.0'. Although we are now heavily into an established phase of 'Web 2.0', this tool is still a relevant idea for the classroom and still widely used by in ELT because of the task-based approach that they take.

WebQuests collate, organise and assess information under a specific goal that has been set by the tutor.   They draw on students' thinking at these three levels*:

•ANALYSIS breaking down into parts, forms

•SYNTHESIS combining elements into a pattern not clearly there before

•EVALUATION according to some set of criteria, and state why

 

There can be a high level of autonomy and creative production employed.  With proper guidance and 'scaffolding' techniques employed by the teacher more qualitative learning can take place amongst the students.   They are mini-projects in which much of the input comes from the Internet.  

They are based on some assumptions about effective learning.  Authentic tasks, with real data, are better than textbooks. Learning occurs more with Social interaction than working alone.  Higher-order thinking needs to be developed early.  Furthermore, uncertainty and doubt are instructionally useful.  Learners are given a problem which seems out of their reach, but with enough support they are shown that they can achieve outcomes.  Because there is a powerful underlying approach to pedagogy, however,children and novice teachers are actually disuaded by the site from designing their own.


WebQuests can:

• be engaging - students collaboratively learning and working towards a common goal.
• draw on the enhancement gained from social-interaction/working in groups.
• be a great use of Internet resources without needing specific technological know-how.
• be designed to aid communicative learning, the sharing of knowledge and discovering new things.
• be used more simply as a linguistic tool. 
• have an interdisciplinary feature, using task-based activities to discover about language and subject(s) simultaneously.
• encourage higher-order thinking skills. such as shown in Bloom's Taxonomy - cognitive, affective and psychomotor (three domains of educational objectives). 
• involve tasks that require self and peer-motivation.
• require or develop greater concentration and effort.

adapted from Gavin Dudeney, The Internet and The Language Classroom, CUP, 2007

Trying it for myself - with a WebQuest Partner

WebQuests are usually framed by four main sections:

• Introduction - overall theme established. Background information on the topic.  Key vocabulary and concepts which learners need to complete the tasks.
  
• Task/Assessment - Explains clearly what learners have to do at each stage. Needs to be highly motivating and intrinsically interesting for them.  Based on authentic situation.  Can use role-play scenario.
  
• Process - Guides learners through activities/research.  Web-based resources, reached via task doucment.  For language learning, this can focus on lexical items/grammar.  One or more 'products' need to be presented at the end of stage.
  
• Evaluation - A reflection, self-evaluation, comparing and contrasting phase.  Giving feedback, discussing what was learned.  Teacher evaluation with modeling/examples of good work.

The QuestGarden site actually remodels this outline and guides the creator through 5 stages (see right), setting up checkpoints on the way.  It recommends doing each stage in order, although any creator can go back and forth and modify things later. It uses a WYSIWYG layout, so clicking on Tools > Preview shows your WebQuest progress at any stage. It also has advice (tips) at each stage and intelligently gives stark 'alerts' if it thinks you might have gone wrong.

For my collaborative effort, with fellow student, 'Bua', from my ICT group, we established a fictional Summer School. We decided to use one of the suggested templates - 'On Trial' but modified the tasks and process for our imagined learners.

While I wrote an introduction, task outline and how the students would be evaluated, Bua worked through the step-by-step process guide for the students, pointing them in the direction of which websites would be good sources of material and kept a check on original sources for the credits section. 

At each stage of the 5 stages, there is a checkpoint to make sure you are completing the design of the WebQuest.  This is useful for keeping a focus on the pedagogy of ' analysis, synthesis, evaluation'.

There is also a constantly updated 'readability' grade. The site calculates an estimate of how difficult it will be for someone to read the text in the WebQuest. It does this by using a readability formula known as the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.  The higher the number, the higher the difficulty of reading the text, and isn't necessarily better.  Clearer instructions could lead to a lower, but better grading.  Our Quest finished up with a 4.5 grading, which seems about right for our students.

The process (stage 3) is the most important, the most time-consuming phase of all, because that functions as the explicit guide for the students.  Process involves students actively requiring an interdependency, so that it is not sufficient to discover information about their 'role' in isolation.  Although there are times when students are individually researching their role.  They need to share and discuss their role in relation to others.  This will be encouraged but also deliberately tested in a class debate about 'who has the most important role?' - this is a deliberately misleading question.  Some might think the 'judge' - but actually the jurors make the judgement as a group, a judge can only set up a possible verdict.

The resulting trial will only take place once a lot of discussion and practice has taken place, with writing tasks given out along the way, to test newly-acquired knowledge.



Our final shared, editable WebQuest draft is here: The Stolen Laptop

or click on the URL: http://questgarden.com/138/09/2/120127051123/

We would encourage comments and suggestions as to how it can be improved.  Please do so using the links above or comment directly after this blog entry.

What limitations are there?                                           QUALITY CONTROL ISSUE !

WebQuests can be a very time-consuming process for the teacher to prepare.  To do them well, requires a lot of planning, research and cross-referencing.  They can easily be left under developed, which could cause students to feel demotivated or unable to see the point.  Even adapting an existing WebQuest requires care.  It could easily be badly handled if rushed.  But done well, they can engage students and tap into higher-level thinking skills, collaborative working and take the positive benefits of learner-learner interaction, leading to task completion which can be greater than the sum of its parts.

QuestGarden, as a prominent resource, is unusual for employing an age-restricted policy.  It doesn't just put users off by a subscription (after one month free), it actively seeks to remove under-age and poorly conceived Quests. They even reserve the right to cancel membership for anyone under 18.

While it might be a notable effort to keep the quality of the material on the site higher than it would otherwise be, it is somewhat arbitrary to say that 18 is the point at which a well-designed Quest is more likely.  There are plenty of experienced and employable teachers who would still be unable to design a WebQuest with the strong underlying pedagogy that is encouraged. 

Furthermore, it is not beyond the possibilities of an '8th grader', as the site refers to, to be able to make one. Looking at some of the above-18 WebQuests, I would say that the quality control is not high and many of the Quests out there are simply poorly executed and not recommended at all.


More Information:

Watch an interview with Bernie Dodge from his office in San Diego, including an example WebQuest about The Berlin Wall:

More information on WebQuests at Bernie Dodge's original site - WebQuest.org

#9 Penzu

What is it? What does it do?

Ever felt like a student was producing some really good written work, except their handwriting is illegible? Well....

Penzu is a simple writing tool. It is the closest thing online to creating and maintaining a personal journal in the style of a regular paper journal. An email is all that is required to be able to save journal entries, which is the main purpose, I would guess, to using it.

Simply register for a free or you can upgrade to Pro for around $20 per year.  When I signed up I was bugged initially to go Pro but that's because I was accidentally trying to add another journal.  Penzu will remind you about your journal by sending an email at the frequency of your choosing.   You can choose from one of several fonts (more in Pro version).  

You can create your own entries by adding a title and some text.  Each entry is automatically dated and navigation is done using the tabs on the right-hand side.  Text can be modified in a similar way to standard word processing software. Pictures can be added from your computer or Flickr account using the camera tool. The picture will appear in the margin and can be moved vertically to position it the revelant text :

If you want a journal entry to be shared then press the 'mail' icon, and the entry can be emailed, anonymously if desired. Alternatively you can simply print the entry, which is useful for students who have been asked to do some writing using this tool and need to submit for checking.  Commenting has recently been improved so that comments can now be edited and deleted from other users on both shared and public entries!

Penzu's attraction is, like many of these tools being discussed, the simplicity.  In this case, the simple act of keeping writing neat and tidy and, for this reviewer especially, READABLE!

Relevance to language learning?

Any tool which helps learners to produce written work has got to be worth a look.  It would be naive to think that good quality handwriting is still essential when the majority of written communication nowadays, by all learners, is is typed.  While setting up and maintaining a blog takes a bit more effort, the simple act of getting something done on 'paper' can be increased by this tool.  Clearly, it can be used to set written homework task for students.  To be able to store written work, without it getting lost, stained with coffee marks or eaten by your pet dog must bring some advantage! 

 

How can it be used?

Penzu has many possibilities, both for the teacher and the students:

• Online materials, using text and images, can be created in advance.
• Model answers can be shown, demonstrating paragraph structure, cohesive devices, linking words, anaphoric/cataphoric referencing etc.
• Students can work with draft paragraphs and improve these together, sending electronically back to the teacher.  
• It can be used to take notes during a lecture, which can be added to later.
• A summary of the lesson can be shown or used to remind students of what was previously taught.
• Students can record what they learned from each lesson and shared.
• A narrative or presentation can be collobaratively worked on in students' own time.  Part of the idea of the connected classroom is that this 'home' work is not a separate, optional entity from the lesson, but very much part of it.
• Students can keep a journal of the academic year and be submitted as a marked assignment at the end of term. 
• It could be used by teachers as part of professional development, using it for observations, reflect on other's lessons and provide reflective practice.

What limitations are there?

Most of the best features come with the Pro version, and this is heavily advertised within the site.   Pro includes: Mobile Access · Encryption · Journaling via Email Themes · Exporting · Tagging · Hi-Res Photos & more.  The Pro option also enables entries to be locked with '256-bit AES military-grade encryption for ultimate security', which begs the question 'If I don't go Pro am I exposing my thoughts to anyone? Entries can have embossed custom backgrounds. You can also organize with tags, export your journals to multiple formats, and journal via email with Penzu Post.