Nik's QuickShout: 01/10/2020

Friday 16 October 2020

Create Reading Comprehension Activities for the Remote Classroom with Quillionz

I first wrote about Quillionz back in 2018 and it’s great to see how far the product has come since then. At that time it was a free product that used AI to generate questions based around any text that you entered. You could then select and edit the questions you wanted to use and print these for the classroom.

These features are still available and there is still a lifetime free subscription available, but they have now added more features and developed some premium features that make this a product worth investing, especially if you need to create a lot of reading materials based around authentic text.

Just to recap, creating questions is very easy. You can just copy paste in your text, give it a title, select the educational domain it belongs to and then choose the keywords from the text that you want the reader to focus on. You can also bypass the keyword selection process and get Quillionz to choose for you if you choose.

Quillionz will then review your text for you and highlight any weaknesses in the writing, such as lengthy sentences, subjectivity or incomplete sentences.

Next Quillionz uses AI to analyse the text and generate sets of questions for you to choose from. Once the questions appear you can select and edit the ones you want to use with your text. Quillionz creates a number of different types of questions for you to use. This includes short answers, multiple choice and ‘recall’ questions (these are ones where they have to fill a gap in a sentence with the missing word from the text). The premium version Quillionz also includes WH questions and interpretive questions which push students to give more complex and open ended answers.

Once the questions have been created and you have chosen the ones you want to use, you have a number of ways of sharing them with students. You can either download them as a document by clicking on ‘Export’ or you can click on ‘Create Quillionz’. This option creates a sequence of flashcards that you can share with students. The students can then read the text and try to answer the questions and click on the flashcard to see the answer. You share the flashcards by using a link, so this will work really well in the remote classroom and it will allow students to each work at their own speed.

There is another option for exporting the questions to Raptivity. This is another product I’ve reviewed on this site. Raptivity enables you to turn the questions set in to a range of html5 interactive learning objects that can be deployed in online courses. So this can speed up the process of creating online courses considerably.

Another great new feature is that Quillionz will also produce summary notes of the text featuring the main points. Again you can edit this for accuracy before saving the notes.

All of the texts you use and the questions you create can be saved in the dashboard so it’s easy to retrieve texts and re-edit them for revision or for a different group of students.

One of the things that I really like about Quillionz is that you can quite quickly and easily teach students to use it and then they can create their own revision quizzes and create quizzes for each other. The summary notes will also be really useful for students.

You can click here to check the price of a premium subscription and compare packages.

I hope you enjoy using this tool and that it saves you some time when creating comprehension activities.

More Teacher Resources

You can find links to many more resources like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: https://payhip.com/peacheypublications

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Best
Nik Peachey

Friday 2 October 2020

Create blended and flipped learning materials on the fly with TeacherToolsDigital

With the rapid and sudden increase in remote teaching and learning many schools and teachers are finding it hard to manage the smaller class sizes that remote learning supports and still give students the hours of study and practice they need to move their learning forward.

Many schools have turned to blended learning to fill the gap, but soon discovered that creating high quality blended learning courses takes time, money and a specific set of skills which many of their teachers don’t completely cover.

Luckily there is a solution to this problem that will enable teachers to create pedagogically sound online tasks and activities that can be adapted to students’ needs with minimal time and effort. The solution is TeacherTools.Digital.

TeacherTools.Digital has a great collection of skills based language practice activities that can be quickly adapted and deployed to get students producing language outside of class time whether it’s in a flipped, blended, hybrid, or fully online learning approach.

The site has eight basic activity types and these range from the usual gap filling types exercises to ones that students can submit using voice, text or even their video webcam.

The easiest way to get started with TeacherTools.Digital is to try some of the ready made and then just adapt them and add your own content and ideas.

If you click on browse underneath each activity type you can scroll through a range of activities. When you select one you’ll see how it is structured and then you can easily change the various elements of the activity to suit your needs.

One of my favourite activity types is the one that enables students to submit a video response using their webcam. I think this is a great tool to help students work on their visual communications skills and with the move towards more remote working, this is becoming a vital work/life skill for many of our students.

The Read Aloud activity type is also really useful as it enables you to set speaking activities for students that they can do at home and they get instant feedback on their performance as they read each line. This can increase their speaking practice time and reduce your homework marking time.

When you have created an activity you get a link that you can share with students and all of their results are tracked into the TeacherTools.Digital LMS, so you know how your students are progressing and which ones are completing their homework assignments.

As I said, I think this is a great solution to increase the amount of meaningful practice students have with language and to reduce some of the workload being placed on teachers.

You can try TeacherTools.Digital for free for 30 days, after that you’ll need to pay $9.99 a month (See pricing). This can be really worth the amount of time it can save you. At present there is no price on the schools account, but it may be worth trying to get your school to enquire as substantial discounts are available when signing up multiple teachers from the same institution at the same time.

TeacherTools.Digital is also integrates with a wide range of LMS, so if your school already has a platform for building blended learning then it's quite easy to use TeacherTools.Digital to extend the range of activity types that you can offer.

As a special offer for readers of Nik's Quickshout. The good folks at TeacherTools.Digital are offering an additional 10% discount on top of the already discounted yearly rate of $99, bringing it down to only $89. What's more, your subscription will continue to renew at this price in subsequent years!

This offer is only available to the first 25 users to redeem the following coupon code: PEACHEY-YEARLY-2020.

I hope you enjoy using this great tool and that it helps to reduce your workload and increase your students’ learning.