Nik's QuickShout: reading skills

Showing posts with label reading skills. Show all posts

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

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:

Best
Nik Peachey

Friday, 28 February 2020

Actively Learn - A Huge Resource of Ready-Made Interactive Learning for English Language Learners

Actively Learn isn’t just a great source of learning content for grades 6 through to 12, though if you are teaching adult learners much of the grade 12 content would still be appropriate. It’s also an LMS that enables you to create and track the use of learning materials across your classes, and a teacher development tool that enables you to train teachers in aspects of materials development and instructional design.

Ready-Made Content for ELA

Actively Learn already has a really substantial amount of readymade interactive learning content when you log in. The content is easy to browse or search, initially by subject (ELA, Science or Social Studies) and then by a range of different parameters, from grade to topic to theme or genre.

Once you have found some interesting looking content for your students you can click through to see the activities that have been designed for it and the guidance notes for the teacher. There is also a brief introduction to the text. The questions that you can see as you scroll through the text are interactive and when the text is assigned to the student their responses will be tracked into the reporting part of the site.

If you want to change some of the questions or add cultural notes or word definitions through the text you can also do this, just click on the ‘Customize’ button at the top of the screen.

To add notes, questions or definitions to words, just highlight them and you will see a menu appear.

Once you have your text and all of the tasks ready, just click on ‘Assign’ and the text will be sent to the class that you choose.

Creating Classes and Measuring Learning

Setting up classes is simple. Just click on ‘Add new class’ on the main menu and you’ll be able to give the class a name and select the grade of the students. You get a simple code to give to students that enables them to enroll in your class. Once the students start to interact with the content you’ll be able to track their work through the Gradebook and Student data. You can also get an overall view of the class data.

Creating and Customizing Content

Actively Learn isn’t just for the development of reading skills though, you can also access or create your own content based around online video. Just select ‘Video’ on the ‘Genre’ tab and you’ll see the selection of ready-made video content. When you select a video you’ll see that it has question marks beneath the video play bar. When the students get to this point in the video it will pause and show them a question. By clicking on ‘Customize’ and then clicking on the play bar you can either edit or add new questions to the video.

If you decide you want to add your own content, then click on ‘Import’ and select the type of content you want to add. You can then start to add interactions and questions to it before assigning it to a class.

Actively Learn for Teacher Development

As I said at the beginning of this article, Actively Learn is also a tool for teacher development and has some really well-structured learning activities for teachers that will help them use the platform more successfully. To find these materials click on ‘Professional Learning’ in the menu.

The Professional Learning section starts with a research paper that teachers can read and comment on. The interactions around this paper will be shared with other teachers who are registered at the same school. The platform then has a collection of sequenced activities that teachers can work through to develop different aspects of their professional knowledge whilst helping them to use the platform more effectively with some ‘hands-on tasks’.

Actively Learn Plans

Actively Learn is a pretty impressive platform with a great and constantly growing bank of materials. As a teacher you can sign up for an individual account and use Actively Learn for free, but for the real power of the platform, along with API integrations into Google Classrooms, SIS or another LMS, you’ll need a premium plan. These plans are negotiated with schools according to what elements of the platform and integration they need and the number of students involved. At the school level, it’s clear to see how Actively Learn could have really clear and measurable benefits that could have genuine impact on students’ learning.

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:

Tuesday, 21 May 2019

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:

Best
Nik Peachey

Thursday, 30 August 2018

WordBooster - For Creating Learning Around Authentic Text

When technology first came along we were all told that it would save us time and make our lives easier, and yet here we are many years later working harder than ever.

Well at least there is WordBooster that really does live up to the hype, save time and deliver excellent results.You can convert an article into a learning activity with glossary and vocabulary building tasks in less than five minutes.

WordBooster is the ideal tool if you want to use authentic materials to build your students’ reading skills and vocabulary. It enables you to quickly generate a glossary and some vocabulary building activities based around your choice of words from the text.

How to create a vocabulary building worksheet

To create your activity, register (for free) and then paste either the text or the URL into field and click on ‘GO'.

Wait a few moments and you will be able to format and edit the text.

When you’re happy that the text looks good and is ready print, click ‘GO' again and you’ll see some suggested words and expressions to include in your activities.

Click on the word or phrase you want to include in your activity and you’ll get some options for the definitions of the word you include.
Click on the correct definition then click on ‘Accept' and the word and definition will be added to your worksheet.

Once you have all the words you want to include, click on ‘Done’. You can then download the text as PDF.
Click on 'VOCAB LIST' and you will see and be able to download the glossary.
Finally, click on ‘QUIZ' and you’ll be able to configure the types of questions you include in your vocabulary quiz. You can easily change the types of question. Then click on ‘Create Quiz as PDF' and you will be able to download the quiz and answer key.

All the the texts you use are stored in your profile so it’s easy to go back and reuse them or create new versions for different classes or revision for the original class.

All the worksheets also include a short link and QR code that takes students to the original article online, so if you want students to do their reading from the screen while they work on the activities, that’s also easy to do.

WordBooster really is a great tool for saving teachers time and effort and creating professional looking materials. It’s especially good for anyone working in the CLIL classroom who needs to use topic specific texts and great for authentic reading materials for higher levels.

What’s not to like?

You can find more tools like this and advice on how to train teacher to use them in my ebook - Digital Tools for Teacher - Trainers' Edition.

Buy Now

I hope you find it useful.

Best

Nik Peachey

Tuesday, 26 September 2017

Free Reading and Language Development Lessons from DreamReader

DreamReader site was designed specifically for English language learners and has a range of reading texts at different levels.

Each text also has an interactive online quiz and an audio recording of the text. The lessons often focus on particular gramatical features, but have also been classified as:

The materials can also be downloaded as pdf and printed for use in the classroom. Each one also has a downloadable version of the audio file.

Here are a few nice examples:

These materials are great for homework reading assignments or for use in the classroom.

DreamReader is a really useful free resource which is constantly being up-dated with new materials. The site doesn't require any kind of registeration from either students or teachers and only carries a minimum of advertising, so it's a real gem of a site for hard up teachers and certainly something we should share. Thanks to Neil Millington for producing it.

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/

My eBooks:

Best
Nik Peachey

Friday, 22 September 2017

Free Reading Passages and Progress Tracking Tools

This site was designed to help grade K5 - K12 native speaker students develop their reading and comprehension skills, but can also be really useful for second language development.

Students can choose from a range of graded texts and get a wide range of interactive activities and reading support. Teachers can also register on the site and assign specific texts to their students.

The reading support tools combine text-dependent comprehension questions and discussion type questions to focus students’ attention as well as text-to-speech and dictionary / glossary type vocabulary support. Students and teachers can also download the text as a pdf file.

CommonLit is great for getting students to work more autonomously on their reading skills.

You can find more tools and activities like these in my ebook 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom.

The book is available on iOS or as PDF for other devices.

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

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Monday, 11 September 2017

A Tool for Creating Interactive Fiction with Students

Inklewriter is a tool for creating interactive narrative or what I used to call reading mazes. These are stories that present the reader with various options through the story and allow the reader to choose how the plot progresses as they read through.

To start writing your own story just click on ‘Start Writing’, then give your story a title and add the first paragraph. You can then add the options for your reader.

The site tracks your options as you build the story and you can also see an overview map of the different connections as you write.

To find our more watch the very clear tutorial.

Before using this with students it’s a good idea to get them to read one of the stories so they understand the concept. This might be a useful one to get your students started - ‘The Sand and the Scarab’ by Cian Gill

To use this with students you could create a story yourself or choose one of the stories featured on their blog and build comprehension tasks or just let students read and then compare their journeys through the story.

You can also get your students to write a story collaboratively and take it in turns to add the different options at the end of each paragraph.

Inklewriter is a great tool to get students writing and makes the process of creating this kind of branching interactive narrative much easier to manage.

You can find more tools and activities like these in my ebook 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom.

Best

Nik Peachey

Tuesday, 5 September 2017

A Great Tool for Collecting Digital Research

This is a really useful Google Chrome plugin and iOS app that students can use to save quotes, links, screen shots or images from websites as they do online research.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Once the plugin has been installed, they just highlight parts of the webpage they want to save and click on the yellow icon.

The information is saved into their account. The 'notes' are saved as cards and these can then be added to collections (Storylines).

All information that is saved is linked back to the original source and students can add notes about the information and why they saved it. They can also organise and re-arrange the information they save to make it more accessible.

Lumio is a great study tool for doing digital research and a great way to build students’ digital literacy skills.

You can find more tools and activities for developing critical thinking and digital literacies in my ebook - Thinking Critically through Digital Media

Best

Nik Peachey

Monday, 4 September 2017

10 Free Apps to Enhance your Students' Learning

In this post I'd like to take a quick look back at ten of the most popular posts I wrote from last month. These posts cover a host of free apps, games and resources sites that you can use to create engaging digital learning for your students.

Create Vocabulary Activities from Authentic Text in Minutes

WordBooster is a real time saver for anyone creating courses using authentic materials.

The site generates word lists and vocabulary quizzes from authentic texts and includes definitions of the words and a range of activities to help students understand and remember the word.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/create-vocabulary-activities-from.html

Get Teens Writing with Gamified Writing Activities

Story Wars is a great gamified way to make writing creative and competitive.

Students read short chapters of the beginnings of stories and then have to submit the next chapter for the story.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/get-teens-writing-with-gamified-writing.html

Give Young Learners Structured Writing Practice with WritingSparks

WritingSparks is a great site for giving structure and adding an element of fun to writing activities, especially if you have a data projector so that students can see the prompts on the screen.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/give-young-learners-structured-writing.html

Create Texting Fiction to Keep Your Teens Engaged

Texting fiction is a new emergent genre of fiction writing that is becoming very popular among teens and I have to say when I started reading a few of these creations I can see why.

Basically the narrative is structured as a phone based text conversation and can include images and videos as well as text and audio message

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/create-texting-fiction-to-keep-your.html

6 Useful Resources for Exploiting the News in the English Language Classroom

In this article I'm sharing a collection of resources that you can use with your students to help them understand news stories in English.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/6-useful-resources-for-exploiting-news.html

Create Animated Speaking Activities with Toontastic

Toontastic provides the kind of activity that could be used to get younger students speaking and it gives them the opportunity to play out different roles and to listen and reflect on their own speaking before they save and share.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/create-animated-speaking-activities.html

Build Your 3D Virtual Reality Classroom Today

This is a great tool for running online group classes or social events for online students.

There is also now the capability to build course materials and launch commercial courses through: . You can also take free courses that can help you use the platform.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/build-your-3d-virtual-reality-classroom.html

Using Computer Games to Raise Awareness of Global Issues

In this post I'd like to introduce a few games that you can use with students as a springboard for discussion on what can be some difficult issues for teachers to address in the classroom.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/using-computer-games-to-raise-global.html

Get Students Creating Video Summaries with Lumen5

This is a great tool for quickly creating video summaries. You can use it to write a short summary or just put in the URL of an online article or blog posting and then pick the parts of the text you want to include in the video.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/get-students-creating-video-summaries.html

I hope you enjoy these resources and make good use of them with your students over the coming year.

You can find more tools and activities like these in my ebook 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom.

Best

Nik Peachey

Tuesday, 29 August 2017

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.

As you click through the images you can find out about the story and photographer behind it.Many of the images also have video clips about the content which range from short 2 - 3 minute clips to longer documentaries.

Many of these are very powerful images and stories, so this isn't suitable for younger learners, but if your students are more mature, these images and stories could provide really interesting reading and discussion materials about a range of issues.

You could let students choose an image each to do further research on and then get them to prepare a short presentation about it.

They could discuss which of the images they find most powerful or which they think is still most relevant today.

This is a great collection of images that have had huge influence on modern politics and society so well worth spending a few lessons with these.

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/

My eBooks:

Best
Nik Peachey

Tuesday, 22 August 2017

Create Texting Fiction to Keep Your Teens Engaged

Texting fiction is a new emergent genre of fiction writing that is becoming very popular among teens and I have to say when I started reading a few of these creations I can see why.

Basically the narrative is structured as a phone based text conversation and can include images and videos as well as text and audio messages.

The reader taps their way through the messages as a kind of voyeur, following the interaction between the two people to build their understanding of the story.

The most popular platforms at present for marketing this type of genre are:

These apps are freemium and allow you to download and read through the narrative, but if you are on a free version you may have to wait a few hours for the next part of the story or in some cases you don't get some of the rich media elements of the story.

This is a great format for language learning as the texts are very similar to spoken conversations and the chunks are short and easy for students to read.

Creating Texting Fiction

There are a couple of tools we can use do build this kind of narrative for our students.

Russell Tarr of ClassTools has developed a the SMS Generator that enables you to create single screen, short text exchanges that you can save and embed into a webpage.

Alternatively Chat Story Maker is a free app that enables you to create a longer more complex interaction and include images. The dialogues can then be downloaded as a video clips for students to watch. (I found this one on Larry Ferlazzo's blog).

We can also get our students creating this kind of narrative by giving them images of two characters and a scenario and then asking them to write the script. They can take turns writing a part each. I hope you and your students enjoy these useful tools and create some engaging texts.

You can find more tools and activities like these in my ebook 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom.

Best

Nik Peachey

Pages

Friday, 16 October 2020

Friday, 28 February 2020

Ready-Made Content for ELA

Creating Classes and Measuring Learning

Creating and Customizing Content

Actively Learn for Teacher Development

Actively Learn Plans

Tuesday, 21 May 2019

Thursday, 30 August 2018

How to create a vocabulary building worksheet

Tuesday, 26 September 2017

Friday, 22 September 2017

Monday, 11 September 2017

Tuesday, 5 September 2017

Monday, 4 September 2017

Tuesday, 29 August 2017

Tuesday, 22 August 2017

Creating Texting Fiction