Nik's QuickShout: course book

Showing posts with label course book. Show all posts

Monday, 25 September 2017

Make PDF Texts into Interactive Online Activities for Blended Learning

This tool enables teachers to build onto more traditional course book based courses and add a blended learning element. Once you have created an account you can upload PDF documents, or buy in text books from publishers or book stores and add them to courses.

You then give your students a code to register on the course and they can access the texts, make notes and annotate the text and build discussions around them.

The site also generates a ‘confusion report’ which can show you where the students are struggling or having problems with the text, then you can deal with the problems in the next class.

When you register as a teacher you need to tell the site which school you teach at. You can try a live demo of a course to see how it works at: https://app.perusall.com/demo

Perusall is a useful tool for turning a face to face course into blended learning without too much extra work.

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: https://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

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

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Nik Peachey

Thursday, 21 April 2011

36 Tools to Digitise Coursebook Activities

Over the last few years, I have often heard teachers commenting that they would like to use more technology with their students, but they have to cover the materials in the coursebook. So, I started thinking about ways we could use technology to quickly and simply convert coursebook activities to something more interactive on the web.

I've created this document which shows 36 different ways we can use web based tools to enhance the things we do in the classroom and make students homework options more interesting and communicative. This document was used to support my presentation at IATEFL Brighton and you can see the presentation slides at: 36Tools for Digitising Your Coursebook

36 Tools for Digitising your ELT Course Book

I hope you find these useful and I hope to find the time soon to develop this document and add more detail and more examples. Until then please feel free to add comments and suggestions below and share ideas that you have for digitising coursebook materials.

Related links:

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Nik Peachey

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

Find Easy to Read Text for Lower Levels

I sometimes wonder why companies continue developing search engines when Google's dominance seems so complete, but every now and then I spot one that has a nice twist and that's the case with Twurdy.

Twurdy is actually based on Google, but it analyses Google results for readability, so it can help you to find more lower level texts for learners without you having to read through every result from Google to see if it's simple enough.

Just type in the topic of the text you need and click on your Twurdy type. You have a choice of three different Twurdy types. The differences are mainly speed (how fast you want your results) vs complexity (how thoroughly you want the results analysed) I would recommend choosing Twurdy with Pop as this will analyse the number of word on the page, length of sentences, number of syllables per word and also the popularity of the words in the text.

Getting more accurate results will save you time in the long run and even using Twurdy Pop isn't so slow.

The results will then be shown colour / shade coded and with a rating. Darker results are more complex texts and the lighter ones are easier. Then you just have to find one that your students will enjoy (or get them to find their own).

Twurdy is a great tool that can save you a lot of time if you are looking for authentic texts to use with lower level students. You could even let them find their own texts to replace the ones in your course book.

I hope it's useful for you.

Here you can find text based activities for EFL ESL students

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