Tuesday 19 September 2017

10 Great Apps and Games for Enhancing Learning

In this post I'd like to do a quick round up of some of the great apps and games I wrote about during August.

There are some really useful tools, applications and resources here that cover a wide range of functions that can help us to enhance the way our students learn and their levels of engagement.



Make Your Worksheets Digital in Minutes
Telegra.ph is a simple to use tool that can enable you to turn your Word worksheets into online multimedia documents in just a few moments.
Go to the site and add a title, your name and the text of your worksheet. Highlight the text to get formatting options for making the text more attractive or adding links.

Build Professional Level Online and Blended Courses with this Free Plugin
H5P is a tool for building complete courses with a wide variety of interactive task types. The tool works as a plug in with a range of platforms including Moodle, Drupal and Wordpress (all of which have free versions available) .
It’s very easy to install the plug in (took me less than 5 mins with Wordpress) and once this is done you can choose any of the interactive elements to add to your pages.

Create Blended Learning with Video Based Discussions
Using Flipgrid you can create a number of grids based around top level themes and then build 'topics' into these that explore specific areas of the overall theme. When you build a topic you can add various video based resources and then students can respond by recording short video clips giving their opinion on the topic.

Create Virtual Reality Comprehension Tasks
Story Spheres is a great free app for creating immersive narrative experiences. It enables you to take the 360 degree panoramic images from your mobile device and covert them into an interactive virtual reality experience.

Create Elearning Worksheets for Comprehension & Speaking Homework
This is a great site for building digital interactive worksheets with a whole range of different interactions. You can embed video, images, text or audio into the worksheets and then build a wide range of interactions into them.With some of the activity types, like the open text one, students have the option to write or use voice input in the worksheets.

Learn English While Saving the Planet with this Great Online Game
Tyto is a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) based around the scenario of a team of students and scientists trying to save humanity by setting up life on a new planet.

Improve Listening Skills with Audio Transcription Software
This is a great tool if you have a lot of transcription work to do, but also a great tool to develop students' listening. You can give them and audio file to transcribe and they can upload it and then check and correct the transcription. Once it's complete they can download and send it to you or peer check each others work.

From Image to Story - Motivating Reading Tasks on Powerful Issues
Time 100 is an amaxing feature from Time Magazine. It's a collection of 100 images that have had the power to change the world. The images are displayed on a time line and you can scroll through and click on each image.
 
Convert Your Chrome Browser into a Language Lab for Speaking Practice
Fluency Tutor is a really interesting concept. It is a Chrome plugin that converts a computer into a kind of language lab.
If you sign up as a teacher you can then assign texts to students and they can record themselves reading the text and send it to you for feedback.

Creating Dynamic Learning Objects with Genial.ly
This has become one of my favourite tools for creating not just infographics but all kinds of digital content from reading mazes, infograhics and interactive images to video based tasks. Once you have built your learning objects you can either get a link to them or embed them into webpages or blogs.
 
 
 

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