Showing posts with label homework. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homework. Show all posts

Friday, 30 November 2018

Epigrammar - Making assignment marking quick and collaborative

If you have a lot of student assignments to mark, and especially if many of them have been handed in on paper, then Epigrammar is going to be a great tool for you.

Epigrammar has been designed to take a lot of the sweat and monotonous repetition out of homework marking. Basically, what Epigrammar does is enable you to create classes for your students where you or they can upload their homework assignments and you can add comments to them. That doesn’t sound so unusual, but Epigrammar can also allow you to create a bank of comments that you can reuse so that you aren’t having to write the same thing over.
Another great feature of Epigrammar is that it isn’t restricted to text type documents, so if your student has done their homework on paper or even if their homework is a sketch or painting, you or they can take a picture of it, upload it to the platform and then you can add comments and marks.

Another nice feature of Epigrammar is that you can make some assignments ‘shared’ so that students can see what their peers have uploaded and even add their own comments and suggestions.

The other great time saver though is that at the end of the term or semester when it’s time to write up a report about your students’ work, Epigrammar can automatically generate suggestions for these based on the comments you have made on their written work. Then all you have to do is drag and drop in the ones you want to use and edit them.

To get started, you just need to register and then set up a homeroom. Once your homeroom is created you can generate an invitation code and students can then use this to register on the site. This code adds them to your class.

You can then either share documents for them to comment on, or they can upload their work to the site for you or their peers to comment on.

Comments are added by dropping coloured pins on the document and then writing in and saving to the right of the screen.

All of these comments then become visible to the student(s) on the left of the screen.

Here’s a link to a video tutorial that goes into more depth on the process of generating reports: https://epigrammar-1.wistia.com/medias/xrw1lvexa7

It’s clear that the more you use Epigrammar the more time it is likely to save you and the more efficient the whole process will become. A bonus feature of the site is that you and your students will also be creating a form of e-portfolio that will enable you and students to look back over their work and assess progress.

Epigrammar has a free subscription which should enable you to test it out with a group of students, but to be useable at scale you will need to subscribe. The price though seems very reasonable when comparing to the value of your time and the amount of it you are likely to save by using the platform for all your marking.

I hope you and your students enjoy using Epigrammar and that it doesn't just save you time, but also increases the overall impact of your marking.

You can find more tools like this and advice on how to train teacher to use them in my ebook.


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I hope you find it useful.

Best

Nik Peachey





Wednesday, 16 August 2017

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.



Click on a new line and look for the icons to add a video or an image to the worksheet. You can either upload an image from your hard-drive or add a link to a video and then click on ‘Enter’ on your keyboard and the video will appear in the worksheet.

Then just click on ‘Publish’ and you have your worksheet online. Be sure to save the link to the document. You can then either go back and edit it later or just share it with your students. There is no login or registration required. The worksheet can only be edited in the same browser you created it in.

I hope you enjoy using Telegra.ph. You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://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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 Best

Nik Peachey

Wednesday, 10 June 2009

When Twitter isn't Enough

I know that everybody loves Twitter at the moment and microblogging and other 'micro genre' are generally growing in popularity, but there are times when 140 characters or 12 Seconds aren't enough, and that can be pretty frustrating, so Write4net looks like a pretty handy tool for anyone who doesn't want to compromise on what they have to say, but still wants to deliver the message to their Twitter following.

It looks quite simple to use and you don't need to register, though you do need to put in your Twitter information (or be logged in to your Twitter account) so that it can post to your Twitter feed.

You just add a title, write your text and add some hash tags if you feel the need. Then start writing your text. You can format the text, add images, have external links and embedded video etc too if you want to go that far.


Then when you are ready, just click to publish it and broadcast it to your following.

Write4net creates a page for your posting and then your Twitter followers can click through to it. The page gives you some interesting stats too about how many people click through to the page and view your posting. Always handy to know this kind of thing.


Write4net sells itself as being an alternative to a blog, and in the end it looks a lot like a blog, but it is really quick and simple and allows you to get a good degree of media rich information out to your Twitter following, though do be sure to add a good instructive title so that people know whether they want to click through or not. This is how my test posting appeared.

If you are hooked on Twitter and use it a lot with students or get your students to use it a lot, this could be a really useful way of giving a bit more depth and scope to your interactions. It is really quick and easy.

You could start using it to deliver media rich assignments with images and video, without having to go to very much trouble. Your students could also leave comments on the text (the comments will also be tweeted) , so there are some nice simple features here.

On the whole I think this is a pretty useful tool, but I don't think it will be replacing my blogs quite yet. I hope you enjoy it.

Related links:Best

Nik Peachey

Wednesday, 27 August 2008

Ready Made Authentic Video materials For ESL EFL

If you like using authentic video materials with your students but don't have the time to put together the materials then this could be the site for you.

Yolango has a huge collection of short video clips from a whole range of sources and they come complete with transcription and a range of language learning activities for each clip.

Anybody visiting the site can watch the clips and read the transcriptions, but if you register and log in you can also get access to 'fill in the blank', comprehension questions and vocabulary definition type exercises. Students are graded on these exercises and get the results on a scoreboard.

This is a great way to set motivating homework for your EFL ESL students and make sure that they do it and see how well they do it.

The collection of clips available is very varied and there are many that would be ideal for Business English students too.


When I first checked this site out a few months back there were some clips that were of a more adult nature, but I can't see these anymore. All the same be careful with less mature students. Certainly a great site for adult learners though.

Related postings:


Best

Nik Peachey