Create Video Word Clouds with Quillionz Skimthru

 If you’ve read my QuickShout blog before then you probably already know a little about Quillionz and their awesome AI based app that analyses text and creates comprehension questions in minutes. Well now they have a new tool for us to enjoy.

Quillionz Skimthru is a word cloud creation tool with a difference. It actually analyses the closed captions from videos and creates word clouds that play in parallel to the video.

This is really simple to use, just register on the Quillionz Skimthru site, then copy the link from your video and paste it into the interface field.

Next add a title and select a domain for the video based on the type of content.

Then just click on proceed. Wait a few minutes and the word cloud will appear beside the video.

To skim through this video quickly, drag the dot on the progress bar of the Skimthru panel or video for a minute or more and release it.

I really like this combination of word cloud and video, and it seems like a nice bridge to helping students understand the content, without going all the way to subtitles.

If you make copies of the word clouds you can use them in a number of ways.

• You can pre-teach vocabulary from the word cloud.
• You can get students to predict content based on the word cloud.
• You can use the word clouds to prompt students' memory of the videos and help them to remember the content.
• Students can use the words from the word cloud to write summary statements about the video.

Here’s an example I created from a short animated poem 'The Peace of Wild Things'.

There are lots of useful videos on The Kids Should See This that you can use with students. They are very content rich and most have closed captions.

Quillionz Skimthru has some limitations:

• It only works with YouTube videos at present
• The videos need to have closed captions
• The quality of the word cloud depends on the quality of the captions (mistakes in the captions cause mistakes in the word cloud)

Quillionz Skimthru is an early release of a new tool, and it will be interesting to see how the company develops this.
It would be great to have a bit more control over which and how many words appear in the cloud and also when and how often it changes, but even without these features it’s a really useful tool for supporting students understanding of video content.

I hope you use and enjoy it with your students.

More Teacher Resources

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

To sign up for my free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers go to: http://eepurl.com/dtgL79

 

Check Out My Books:

• 10 Business English Lessons
• Hacking Creativity
• 10 Short Image Lessons
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media 

Best
Nik Peachey 

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

To sign up for my free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers go to: http://eepurl.com/dtgL79

 

Check Out My Books:

• 10 Business English Lessons
• Hacking Creativity
• 10 Short Image Lessons
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media 

Best
Nik Peachey 

Building Quizzes with Artificial Intelligence

Back in December 2018, I reviewed an excellent web-based application called Quillionz. The site was developed using AI to instantly produce a wide range of questions based on any text of 300 - 3000 words.

Since then the tool has been a great success and I've had some very positive reports from many English and subject-based teachers who have used it to save time and create instant reading comprehension tests based around authentic content.

Quillionz has now released a Pro version, which I've just tried. I have to say it's really impressive.

These are a few of the new features the pro version offers:

• Generate Wh questions
• View the context of a question
• Generate unlimited question sets per day
• Save unlimited question sets
• Input content as text and PDF
• Export question sets as a text file or QuilliQuiz

The new feature that I like best is QuilliQuiz. This is a feature that turns the questions into virtual quizzes. Here's an example of a QuilliQuiz abut a newspaper article on Brexit:https://app.quillionz.com/Quiz/Index?id=UIi9wC

So once students have read and done their comprehension exercises, you can use this feature to have a group class-quiz or students can use it individually to review and revise the content.
They simply look at the questions, try to remember the answer and then click the flashcard to see if they have it right.

Quillionz Pro is priced at just under $10 a month, so if you are creating lots of materials based around text then it can be a really economical way to save lots of time.

If that is expensive for you, you can still continue to use the free version and quickly create some great quizzes and content for your students.

I hope you enjoy using Quillionz with your students.

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

Sign up for my twice-monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/


Check Out My Books:

• Hacking Creativity
• 10 Short Image Lessons
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media 

Best
Nik Peachey

Create Reading Activities from Authentic Text in Minutes with Quillionz

As teachers, we are constantly hearing about the wonders of AI and how it will take over education and make all of our lives easier.

Well here finally is a genuine example of something we can use to save time and effort. Quillionz is an AI-powered question generator that can help you to take any text from anywhere and create a range of comprehension or test questions around it.

All you need to do to get Quillionz to generate your questions is register and the find the text you want to use.

You can copy-paste your text (anything between 300 and 3000 words) into the Quillionz editor, give it a title, select a domain (the domain is the area of study) from the drop-down menu and then click on ‘Proceed’.

It will then suggest some keywords from the text that you can choose from. Selecting these keywords will help to direct the focus of the questions towards the things that you think are most important from the text.

Then click on ‘Proceed’ again and the AI-powered platform will analyse the text and highlight any areas in the text where it could be improved for better clarity. 

Finally, click on ‘Get Question Ideas’ and the site will generate a large selection of possible questions for your text.

It can create three different types of questions:

• Short answer
• Multiple-choice 
• Recall

(Recall questions are ones with a sentence and a space that students have to complete.)

Once you have the question you can read through them, delete the ones you don’t want and edit any that aren’t quite right.

Then you can save it to your dashboard to use again and simply download it as a text file.

The text file comes complete with answers so you can keep that as your answer key and copy and paste the questions into a worksheet for students.

• Here you can see a Quillionz tutorial

Using Quillionz you can now find interesting and current texts and turn them into activities in minutes. This is another great step away from the ones size fits all textbook and a great tool for enabling teachers to create content that is suitable and relevant to their student's lives and interests. You could even get students to register and create reading tasks for each other.

I hope you enjoy using Quillionz with your students.

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

Sign up for my twice-monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/

My Books:

• 20 Tech-Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey