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.



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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

Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps

I'm often getting asked what my criteria are for choosing the tools, apps and resources that I feature on my blogs and in my teaching and do be honest I don't really think about it that much. I look at so many sites and apps that I just get a feeling when I see something that I think will work.

As that isn't a very satisfactory answer to give people I decided to start exploring my own criteria for what influences my choice. I ran a workshop on this topic at IATEFL 2013 on looking at apps and how we can evaluate them.


I came up with a number of 'first impression' criteria that I think I apply before even thinking about 'how' I will use the app / tool.

Here is the presentation / workshop recording



You can download a copy of the presentation from here: Evaluating Web-based Tools

Please feel free to browse the list and add any 'pros' and 'cons' for anything you think I've missed.


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I hope you find these criteria useful as a starting point for your own reflections on why you choose to use certain apps and not others.

Related links

• My learning technology reading list
• My collection of tools for learners
• My Facebook page
• A Mural of my work online

Best

Nik Peachey

Mix Images and Animation on Your Mobile

A couple of years back I wrote about a really nice web based tool called Xtranormal and since then I've heard from so many teachers saying how useful their students have found it, so I was delighted yesterday to find that the same makes had now produced a free mobile / tablet app called Tellagami. The app runs on a mobile device and allows users to add animated speaking characters to a selection of backgrounds or to the users' own images. You can then either use text to speech to write a script for the character, or you can record your own voice and the app will lip-synch you text to the character. This is very quick and easy to do. Here's how.

Open the app an click on create.

Then choose your background, either from the ones provided, from your own image library or you can take a photograph of wherever you are at the time.

Then you can choose the character you want to use and customise their appearance.

Next you can select an emotion for your character.

Lastly, you can either type in your message or record it directly onto your device. You can record up to 30 seconds of spoken audio.

Once you animation is complete you can either send it by email, share it through various social networks or just save it onto your device to show it in class.

 You can complete the whole process in just a couple of minutes.

I think this is a great app to get students speaking either in the classroom, at home or while they are out and about in the world.

Some learning activities for students

• Ask the students to create 4 - 5 animated images explaining their route to school.
• Get students to create animated images of 4 - 5 of their favourite places around their town.
• Get students to take pictures of objects and create an animated video dictionary.
• Get students to talk about images of people in their family.
• Create some animated images of different steps in a process (making coffee, tea etc) and then get the students to watch and put them in the correct order.
• 
  
• Get students to create an animated image journal by adding one new image each day.
• Get students to take pictures of their favourite book covers or film posters and then record a review.
• Get students to create animated video cards on special occasions.

 I'm sure there are lots more activities you can think of.

What I like about Tellagami

• It's free and very easy to use.
• It encourages students to speak.
• It can be used effectively outside the classroom.
• Students can use it to pull some aspects of their own life and experience into the classroom.
• It produces very professional looking results.

Possible problems

• At present it's only available for iPhone / iPad so that limits who can use it.

 So if your students have iPads / iPhones and you ant to give them motivating speaking assignments for homework, Tellagami is a great tool to use for the job.

I hope you find it useful.

Related links

• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL  
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Drama project tools
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials
• Extending a Sentence

Best
Nik Peachey

Belated {Birthday} Visit Post

Well this post is a few months late - but what the heck I'm going to write it anyway.  Back in September, around my birthday, Don, De and Deanna came to visit me and see my new townhouse.  It was really great to see them and to be able to show them around my first real home.  They brought me a birthday card which was really sweet.  Here are some pictures from their visit.  They were on their way to an NC State football game, and I just got home from the gym - hence the sports-themed attire.  Go Pack!

{The gang's all here!}

{welcome, welcome, welcome}

{stairs slidgeage}

{Deanna insisted on cleaning my entire kitchen with a sponge. De looks amused.}

{whoa there! missed a spot...}

{now smile and say "Type-A!"}

{moving onto bigger and better things - like couch modeling}

{sweet little thing}

{a little monkeying around}

{Hawaiian Punch - my beverage of choice when Deanna was in the womb and now she loves it too!} 

Mobile Learning in ELT: Survey 2013

In 2010, after buying my first iPad I decided to do some research into how teachers were using mobile devices in their classrooms and their teaching. At this stage ‘smart’ phones were already starting to make an impact and tablet devices were just coming onto the market.  The research results from this first survey were published in the Guardian Online under the title ‘English language teachers connect to mobile learning’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/14/teachers-mobile-learning and the complete results and report can be downloaded from: http://technogogy.org.uk/mobile_survey.pdf

I followed this research up in 2011 using the same survey questions in an attempt to see how things had advanced with the intervening period and the results from that survey were  published in May 2011 on the DELTA Publishing blog under the title ‘mLearing and ELT: Are We Mobile Ready?’ http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/development/mlearing-and-elt-are-we-mobile-ready

One of the main observations from this survey was that many teachers were in fact ready and willing to embrace mobile learning and mobile devices, but that publishers seemed to be more reluctantly lagging behind.

Over the last 18 months since publishing the 2011 survey results, mobile learning seems to have made its way into the main stream of discourse surround the implementation of educational technology in our schools and universities, so I have decided once again, thanks to the support of the Bell Educational Services Teacher Training department,  to launch a more extensive survey building on the original one to try to discover the extent to which the ‘talk’ about mobile learning has had any genuine impact and realisation in our schools and classrooms over the past three to four years.

Whether you use technology, mobile learning or avoid it please find time to answer these 20 questions and share your ideas, opinions and reflections and I will once again publish the results for all to share.

• Mobile Learning in ELT 2013 Survey

Many thanks for your help and participation.

Related links:

• iPhone for Speaking Homework 
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Create Books for the iPad
• Getting Learning out of the Classroom with Augmented Reality  
•  Augmented Reality and Web 3.0
• Creating texting dialogues for students

Best


Nik Peachey

Two Contrasting Views of Educational Technology

I’d like to share a couple of videos with you that I have used recently in the courses I teach. I find these videos particularly interesting because they show such contrasting approaches to learning and in particular - for want of a better word - elearning.

This first one is from the early 1950’s and is about something called a ‘teaching machine’ which was created by behavioural psychologist B F Skinner.


As you see Skinner’s teaching machines, though not exactly iPads do look remarkably like  what we would recognise as computers. What’s also remarkable is the claims that he makes for them and the reasons why he believes they are effective are remarkably similar to those made by many producers of learning and especially language learning software today.

However, despite the extremely logical reasoning that Skinner expounds I’m sure if you were invited to sit down and use one of these machines for a period of time it wouldn’t hold your interest for very long and like me you probably watch those hard working children with a sense of pity.

Of course it’s easy to look at videos like this with the advantage of hindsight and with a shinny iPad sitting close by and wonder at how they could ever have believed these machines would be effective, but if we look closely at quite a lot of elearning being produced these days, it isn’t long before we realise how similar in many ways it is to the kind of learning materials used on Skinner’s teaching machines. Gapfills, Multiple Choice Questions, True false Questions, etc. but with some multimedia rolled in still seem to be the mainstay of much computer based instruction and even mobile apps, so I’m not surprised to find that many of the teachers who come onto the courses I teach want to know how to use and produce these kinds of materials and to be honest I can see that they do have their place, but I think we should be aiming to do so much more than that with the materials we produce.

Here’s the contrasting video that I like to use.


This clearly shows a completely different approach to the use of technology and for me a much more powerful one. It shifts the role of the computer from being a storage place for predefined information and transforms it into a conduit by which knowledge is shared and constructed through the interaction between people. I think this aspect of computer based learning is the one that most critics of educational technology most often fail to see, unfortunately it’s also this aspect and role of the computer that is most often feared and blocked by educational institutions around the globe, and ironically enough, by governments wishing to suppress the rights of their citizens.

These videos and the methods of education demonstrated within them also highlight some other important points.

In the first video knowledge is clearly seen as residing in the materials of the institution. The students have no part in the creation of the content nor do they have the chance to question the validity and accuracy of the content and the role of the students is simply to learn and remember the content.

They sit in rows obediently working hard with no communication between them and no discussion sharing or collaboration of what they learning.

The second of the videos is almost the opposite of this. The classroom and even the school has become almost unnecessary. The student creates and negotiates knowledge through interaction with multiple sources of information and using multiple channels of communication. The student acts independently and works autonomously much of the time.

In a time when critical thinking, creativity and the ability to evaluate and manage information have become so important, it’s clear to see which kind of student we should be creating within our schools and the way we design and apply out learning tasks and materials will be a key factor in this.

It’s true that the student in the second video isn’t a language student, and developing linguistic ability is about more than finding and applying knowledge, it also has to do with skills and the practice and development of those skills, but what better way to do this than from the kinds of authentic network building and knowledge building tasks that can help our students become life long learners of far more than language?

The final thing that strikes me about these two videos is how they reflect the kinds of societies that the system of education seeks to create. For me the first is a society of obedient unquestioning worker drones being spoon fed information that will enable them to fulfil their predefined roles. The second is a society in which individuals are encouraged to think, act and explore, to question and to create. I know which I would prefer to live in.

Related links

• How I use social media for my professional development 
• Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why
• Developing your digital study skills
• Temporary Bookmarking
• 10 Teacher Development Task for Web 2.0 Tools
• Creating a personal homepage
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• A Tick List of 21st Century Digital Skills for Teachers 

Best

Nik Peachey