Revista simpozionului Eficiență și calitate în educație - 19 mai 2017 Eficiență și calitate în educație | Page 23
simplified representations to deliver the message easily and clearly. They can easily be
used to transmit information to students, but what would be even more beneficial is to ask
students to break down complex information and find ways in which to connect the bits
and pieces into a coherent visual form.
The key competences the students will put to use are known as “content curation”
and “content production”. They need to exercise their critical thinking when doing research
and find reliable sources of information, select what is essential and what can be left out,
think about the background knowledge and expectations of their audience and construct
their message accordingly. Infographics and other visual representations can range from
showing a contrastive view of two somehow opposing items/ phenomena (trains vs
planes), to building a timeline of an event, showing progress or trends, to presenting
statistical information on various topics. What is undeniable is that they are a way for
teachers and students to present data in a memorable way and the ready-made product
can then be used as starting point for various speaking or writing activities, as interpreting
data shown in infographics can be equally challenging and versatile.
Here are some websites I recommend for creating visual organisers:
www.glogster.com www.thinglink.com, www.genial.ly, www.popplet.com – enable
the creation of posters and diagrams which can include audio and video materials,
as well as links to external websites;
www.canva.com – graphic design application that enables users to create
professional-looking posters, presentations, graphic elements for blogs;
https://www.draw.io/ – online software used for creating diagrams, spidergrams,
organigrams, interactive maps;
https://venngage.com/, https://piktochart.com/ – infographics apps, with a wide
variety of templates and suggestions for organizing statistical information and not
only.
3. Tests / interactive games
Testing is the activity students dread the most, because they see only its diagnostic
value and not the formative one. When the traditional multiple choice, tick and cross
exercises are completed using a mobile device and when the element of competition
comes into play, then they might look forward to such opportunities to test their knowledge
and speed of reaction in public. Teachers might find the activity of creating online tests and
quizzes time-consuming and challenging, but in fact new applications are so intuitive and
user-friendly that these obstacles are negligible.
What is even more rewarding is for the students to be involved in the activity of
creating the tests themselves. It empowers them, allowing them to take charge of their
learning process and helps them process the information much more responsibly. When
students are asked to devise multiple choice questions on topics of vocabulary or grammar
they will be faced not only with the task of creating a coherent context and of identifying
the right answer, but also with that of creating interesting distractors, that are neither too
obviously wrong, nor too close to the correct answer.
As online quizzes or tests can be completed both individually and in groups, the
competitive spirit as well as team work and cooperation can be fostered while playing the
game. What would otherwise be a tedious and dreaded activity can turn into an
entertaining class competition when using some of these apps:
https://getkahoot.com/ – allows the users to create and administer individual or
group tests / quizzes, the answers being recorded by students using mobile
devices;
https://plickers.com/ – allows the users to create and administer individual or group
tests / quizzes, the answers being expressed by students using individual printed
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