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 we have as 21st century teachers.

We can use it to:

• Create surveys to do research and action research
• We can create interactive materials based around multimedia objects
• We can eve use it to sell our materials or services online and take payments

The tool itself is browser based and so doesn't require any downloading or installation and that in itself can save a lot of hassle if you work in an institution that has very restrictive practices regarding the installation of software.

To get started you just need to go to the site and register at: http://www.123contactform.com/education-forms.htm

Once you have registered you get access to the dashboard and this is where you can start creating your forms. You just need to click on 'Create New Form'.

You will then get a choice of different types of form to create. It's a good idea to click on 'Other Forms' this takes you to the online educator forms.   If you have a look at some of the templates and educator forms that have already been created it will give you some idea of what the platform can do. There is an Education section with some ready made templates in.

When you are ready to create your own educator forms, you could start by clicking on 'Blank Form'. Call your form 'My first activity' and then save it and look at the different types of interactions you can create.

You will see the basic interactions you can add to the page. Clicking on them will add the interaction type to the page.

Then when you click on the interaction type you can edit its features.

Some of the advanced interaction types are particularly interesting, especially the html feature which enables you to embed interactive media objects such as videos or digital books into your forms and then build interactive activities around them.

You can also add social buttons to enable users to share your activities through social media channels. 123ContactForm does also have a Facebook app so once your activities are complete you can post them directly into Facebook pages or groups for users to do from there.

This video shows you how to use all the main features of the forms.


Once you have created your activities they are saved in the 'My Forms' section of the site and you can go there to edit them. Here you can get the code to publish your educator forms into your bog website or CMS, or get a link to email out to students.

You can also check to see who has submitted answers to the questions and see the record of what answers have been given in the 'Reports' section. This is one of the best features of the site as it turns it into a form of LMS (learning management system) where you can collect and analyse students responses and generate graphs of the results.

The site also allow users to add and customise the theme of the forms, so if you want them to blend into your site or blog, then customising the look and feel of the forms is quite easy and you can even add your own logo.

This video shows you how to customise your form.


So how can we use this with EFL / ESL students?

• We can create action research forms and get detailed and anonymous feedback on our teaching
• We can create multimedia materials for learning or assessment and track our students responses. This is particularly useful if we a creating homework assignments and we need to assess these and know that our students have done them.
• We can create learning objects to embed into online courses that track and assess students' performance.
• We can make fun engaging quizzes based around images.

As ELT professionals

• We can use the forms to create surveys for research.
• We can start selling materials, self published books, or private online classes and collect payment in a safe and secure way.

What I like about 123ContactForm

• It's a very versatile platform and really does enable a lot more than the name suggests. In fact it's a pretty sound way to create online learning materials with a built in LMS.
• It's a great tool for freelancers who want to start making money online by selling their own products and services in a user friendly way.
• It runs in the browser and is pretty simple to use.
• It's easy to produce something that looks very professional.
• I've said it already, but the tracking capabilities are great.
• The company runs on a freemium model, so although it is a free service, there is also a business model there to support the site so it's less likely to suddenly disappear or fold.

What I'm not so sure about

• As I said the company runs on a freemium model, so many of the best features are the ones they charge for.
• On the free subscription you can create 5 forms and collect up to 100 students' responses each month which is probably enough for the individual teacher to use it with a class, but it would be nice to have a few more of the premium features available to the Free subscriber, such as the html embed to enable the use of video and multimedia in the activities.
• You have to be on the Platinum account to be able to enable payments and that costs $29.95 per month, which for a company or school is not much, but for a teacher / freelancer who wants to test the waters with selling their own products or services, it might seem like quite a big risk when they are just getting started, but you can cancel your subscription if things don't go well and 123ContactForm does offer a 30day money back guarantee. It's also worth mentioning that if you are a teacher or teacher trainer and you get in contact with the company, they are offering a 35% educational discount, so that can help to reduce the risk and the cost.

On the whole I think this is a really good product, particularly for a small school that wants to venture into online teaching or blended learning, then a platinum account at $29.95 per month is quite a small risk. For a teacher thinking of going freelance it might be a good option if you are confident that you can make enough through online sales to justify the monthly outlay. As a teacher working in class, then it's a nice way to get started with creating some online learning with a degree of interactivity, but it would be much more attractive if the html embed functionality came as part of the free subscription.

123ContactForm has plenty of potential for the online educator or anyone wanting to create blended learning, so it's well worth checking out, and when I get my book finished I may well be using it myself. I hope you find it useful too.

Related links:

• Learning technology news portal
• Web Tools for Learners
• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• Survey Creation Tool for Students
• Create Quick Online Polls
• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz
• Make your own chat room

Best
Nik Peachey

What are the qualities of a good educational technology trainer?

Whilst in the process of designing a unit of online learning I started thinking about the qualities and skills that a good educational technology trainer should have. After thinking of a few myself I decided to draw on the wisdom of my PLN and crowd-source a few more ideas.

Please feel free to add your ideas and to copy any of the ones you find here. I'd also like you to selectively vote for the ones you think are most important. You can also add some pros and cons to say why. You can add your ideas and comments without registering.



powered by tricider
Thank you for your help and participation. I hope you find this list useful.

Related links

• My learning technology reading list
• My collection of tools for learners
• My Facebook page
• A Mural of my work online
• 10 Tech Tools for Teacher Training Courses 
• 10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses  
• Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps

Best

Nik Peachey

Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students

Over the last few weeks I have been playing with a very simple brainstorming and voting website called tricider. The great thing about tricider is that it is incredibly quick and simple to use, and yet it enables users to collect information and opinions from all over the web in a very easily digestible and powerful way.

It's very easy to create a tricider topic or question and you don't even need to register, just type your topic or question into the field.


You can also add a bit more detail and instructions to guide your students.

After you have saved the description, you or your students can start adding solutions.

Once there are some solutions added it's easy to either vote for them or add arguments for or against, using the + or - symbols.


Once you have set up your page you can add your email so that you get notifications when ever anyone adds something new or votes. You can also get a URL to edit the page (in case anyone adds something offensive) and a separate URL to either share with your students or post to Twtter or Facebook.

Here are some examples that I have set up to crowdsource in formation from my PLN.

• What digital skills do students need for the 21st century?
• How do we encourage pedagogically sound exploitation of technology in language learning?
• What do you want from a digital coursebook for EFL / ESL?

So how can we use this with students?

• Set up some controversial statements and get students to vote for the ones they agree / disagree with and leave pro and con comments. You could assign groups of students to all think of pros and another group to think of cons and see which can come up with the most convincing arguments. Example: Controversial Issues
  
• Your statements could be about a particular book your students are studying and they could add arguments for or against. Example: Goldilocks and the 3 Bears
  
• Get students to brainstorm word or phrases based around a theme. Example: Computer Phrases
  
• Get students to vote on a list of topics they want to study. Example: Topics
  
• Put up a list of favourite films or books or bands and get students to vote and debate which is best. Example: Favourite films
  
• Get students to brainstorm, debate and share knowledge about any particular topic or even language point. Example: Present Continuous
  
• Set up true false questions to check comprehension of a text.
• Create action research questionnaires to get feedback on the things you do in class. Example: Things we do in Class
  
• Create needs analysis questionnaires for your students or other colleagues. Example: Needs Analysis
  
• Get students create their own questionnaires and circulate them online (through Twitter or Facebook) to collect opinions. You could also get the students to use this information as part of a written assignment.

What's so good about tricider?

• It's free and really quick and easy to use.
• It's allows people to interact and share opinions.
• It doesn't require any registration.
• It's very simple for students to add their arguments or just vote.
• It updates very quickly so you could use it live in class and just click refresh as students add opinions or vote.
• It's versatile.
• It can help students pull in opinions from outside their classroom and also share opinions beyond their school.
• It creates easily digestible information.

What's not so good?

• Well there's not much wrong, but a couple of nice extra features would be:
• An embed code to allow me to embed the page into a blog or wiki.
• An archive button to enable me to close some of the debates so they don't go on forever.
• The ability to export the results to pdf or csv.

Well I hope you find tricider a useful tool and please do share any ideas you have for using it in the comments below.

Related links:

• Create a Video Q&A Booth
• So Ask Me a Question
• Create Video Questionnaires
• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• Pros and Cons as Web Based Research Tasks

Best

Nik Peachey

Creating an Online Journal for CPD

The importance of careful thought and reflection on what we do as both teachers and learners can not be overestimated in terms of the learning process and retaining information in a way that we can actually use it and make it part of our experience and practice.


Keeping a teaching or learning journal can be a really important part of this process of reflection and writing entries can help us to reformulate what we have read or analyse our experiences and draw conclusions from them which we can later return to, share and reflect on again.

For me Penzu is a really good tool which can help me and my students or trainee teachers to do this.

How to create your learning journal

• Go to: https://penzu.com/ and click on ‘Sign up’.

• You will need to create a password and enter a username, email address and agree to the terms of use. Then you just click on ‘Submit’.



• You can then start creating your journal entries by adding a text and title. Each entry is dated automatically and you can move from one entry to another using the tabs on the right of the page.

• To add pictures, you simply click on the ‘Insert Photo’ icon at the top of the page and locate an image on your computer and upload it.

• Once you have uploaded your pictures you simply click to insert the ones you want to use.

• The picture will appear in the margin and you can then drag it up or down to line it up with the text. Users click on the images to enlarge them.

• To share journal entries you click on the share icon and this enables you to email your entry to someone else. You can either include your name and email along with a message or this can be done anonymously.

How we can use Penzu as a journal tool.

• We can write short summaries of articles we have read and make a note of what our personal main points of interest or learning were from the article.
• We can keep a journal of our teaching or training work and reflect on how classes went, compare these to our expectations and make notes of things we would like to try differently next time.
• We can use it as an action research journal recording what we do in each lesson and setting out our objectives for the action research project. We can also ask students to use it to keep a journal of their reflections on our teaching and we can ask them to send us entries anonymously so that we can get unbiased feedback from our students on our teaching.
• We can include it as part of a peer to peer development program and partner up teachers to watch each others classes, reflect on what they saw and send each other entries.
• We can use it as a simple record of what we did in the class and what we want to do to follow it up in the next class.
  

The vital thing with all of these activities is that we return to our entries and reflect on what we wrote some time later. Immediate responses to what happens in our classes can be very subjective and emotional. If we record those responses and then come back to them at a time when we can be more objective we are often able to gain much greater insights into what happened in the class. In this way the journal enables us to capture thoughts and feelings that would otherwise be lost.

What I like about Penzu

• It’s free and very simple to use.
• The entries are private, but be can be shared
• We can add images to make the entries more memorable
• It can be accessed from anywhere
• It’s quick and date stamps entries for us

What I’m not so sure about

• It would be nice to be able to add a few hyperlinks (I think this is possible in the ‘Pro’ paid for edition.
• It would be nice to have the option of having images in the text rather than just in the margin (again, probably available in the ‘Pro’ edition)

Well that’s about all I have to say about Penzu for now. I’ve focused on its uses as a tool for teacher development here, but it is also a great tool to use with students too. For more information on using Penzu with students check out my teaching manual Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers, which you can read or download for free.

Related links:

• A Complete EFL Teacher Training Course Online
• Using wikis for teacher development
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• Three Views of the Future of English Language Teaching
• Teachers' Stories
• ELT classroom videos
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution: Part 2
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• Creating an Online Classroom
• What are you Wanted for?

Best

Nik Perachey