Technology for Educators: Free Web Tools for Teachers

Technology for Educators: Tools for Teachers

Sue Frantz of Highline CC gave a well-received webinar session on useful tools for teachers. Part of a weekly series of presentations and live office hours offered by the Washington State eLearning Community, the presenter of this workshop, Sue Frantz provided participants with a handout covering approximately 50 primarily web-based tools useful to educators divided into 16 categories. Specific tools demonstrated and discussed in this Elluminate Live recorded session:

• http://Dropbox.com File management between multiple computers & devices using the cloud. No more emailing files to yourself or deal with flash drive issues. Allows you to share files with other members of your department, or make a public link. Just like GoogleDocs keeps revisions to allow you to restore older versions of content items.
• http://videodropper.ep.io Videodropper lets you send YouTube videos directly to your Dropbox folder, so that you can watch or show them later (offline) at your leisure and you don’t have to be connected to the internet. You can also choose to optimize videos for viewing in an iPhone/iPod Touch.
• http://YouCanBook.Me Web scheduler allows folks to schedule appointments with you, can also synchronize with outlook and Google calendar. Students can book you, and that can sync through your Google calendar and/or Outlook with sync tool. Also this tools allows you to set a limit to the number of students who can book or sign-up for a particular appointment. While the default is one person per time slot, you can increase the allocation, if you wish to allow a group to have an appointment. Which means the appointment would continue to stay open for sign-ups, until the maximum number of people have signed up. You can also create a form, which will send reminders and allows the persons who made appointments to cancel using an email message. Also discusses Doodle appointments, and Google Calendar appointments.
• https://bitly.com Utility that allows users to shorten a long URL (web link), share it, and then track the resulting usage. Also allows you to create “bundles” of links on one page.
• http://m.socrative.com Turns any web-enabled device, including smartphones, into classroom clickers. No proprietary hardware needed! Also can create live quizzes with immediate feedback, then have it emailed to you as a spreadsheet.
• http://joinme.com Has conference calling abilities, and allows you to quickly and easily share your desktop inside a web browser.

Other web-based tool you may find useful (thanks to Scott Dennis for compiling these).

• http://www.picnik.com Free, web-based photo editor
• http://www.photoshop.com/ Free web-based photo editor
• http://www.slideshare.net/ A nice place to keep online presentations
• http://prezi.com Create “Game Changing” presentations using animation and on the fly graphics
• http://www.mindmeister.com/ Free mind mapping/flowcharting tool
• http://www.wikispaces.com/ Free powerful group collaboration tool
• http://www.scribd.com Millions of books and documents, or add your own
• http://voicethread.com Collaborative multi-media slideshows with collected and shared comments (text, audible, and video)
• http://grcode.kaywa.com Generate QR codes for URLs, Text, Phone numbers, and SMS
• http://visual.ly/about Find or create digital visualizations and info graphics
• http://www.diigo.com Bookmark, highlight, annotate – web information management tool
• http://zamzar.com Free file conversion tool, no download required. If you received student work in a file format you could not open, use Zamzar to point to a file you want converted. After conversion, you receive an email with a download link.
• http://www.filepigeon.com/ Send files that are too large to email. Free version allows up to 100 Mb files.
• http://doodle.com Free event scheduling polls (similar to youcanbook.me mentioned above), personal profile and connection with other calendars.
• http://goo.gl/LD0VO Create surveys with Google Forms. Collects the data automatically in a spreadsheet.
• http://www.symbaloo.com/ Your own personal web-based desktop

Adding Tegrity Link to your Angel home page

1. Make sure your course is enabled.
2. Go to one of your courses.
3. On your course home page, in the content area, click on the “Edit Page“ button in the top left corner.
   

   Edit Page link on course page

4. Then Click on the Add Components, find the “TegrityCampus” component, and check the box, then click on “Add selected”, then click Save.
5. It should now show the Tegrity Button at the bottom of your course home page.
6. Clicking the Tegrity Button should pop-up a new window, one empty window, and one pop-up window.
   

   Tegrity window

7. In order to view your other classes and the record button (instructors get the record button by default), click on the, “My Tegrity” link in the breadcrumb trail.

Backing up your Angel courses and exporting your gradebook

To reverse accidental deletions in your course, you will want to backup before you move and add a lot of new content, before you plan to delete a large portion of your course, or before you make a lot of grade changes. Either way, it is good to schedule it regularly, by using a calendar reminder, for example in Outlook. Below are the instructions for backing up a course in Angel 7.4, as well as instructions for backing up just the grade book. Having a copy of your grade book outside of Angel is essential.

Instructions for Backing Up a Course

To back up your course, select the Backup and Restore tool from the Data Management Menu under the Manage tab. Then click the create new backup link.

This process might take time, depending on the size of the course and the load on the system. However, you can browse through your course while it processes.

After a successful backup, either by the instructor or by the system administrators, other options become available: Restore Backup and Download Backup.

You might want to save the backup to another location, such as the hard drive on a computer, a flash/thumb drive, or a CD. If anything compromises the data on the server, you still have an intact backup.

To save the backup to another location, click the Download Backup button after the backup is complete.

A pop-up window displays, asking whether you want to open or save (or cancel) the backup file. Click the Save button.

This option requires you to designate where you want the file to be saved. It also allows you to rename the file if you want. In this case, you are saving it in the course folder on the C drive. After it is saved, it can be burned to a CD, stored as a DVD, or put in removable storage.

 Note: If you are using Firefox as a browser, it will default to saving the file to your desktop unless you have changed the settings to download it elsewhere.

 Note: The backup file can be used only to restore a course to the way that it was when the backup was created. You cannot make changes to any content within the backup file.

Exporting your Gradebook

The Export Grades option allows the course editor to export assignment grades for all students as a comma-delimited or tab-delimited file. The resulting delimited file can easily be viewed and modified in a standard spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel.

Click the Export Grades hyperlink in the Gradebook Setup section to display the Export Grades options.

To export assignment grades from the ANGEL Gradebook, do the following:

1.   Delimiter. Choose between comma- and tab-delimited options.

2.   Include. Choose to include averages or course ID.

3.   Output Format. Choose between percentage and points.

4.   Export. A File Download dialog box appears on the screen. Click the Save button to save the file. A Save As dialog box appears on the screen.

How to remove files in Syllabus area of your course home page

1. Click on your course Manage tab,
2. Click on the “Course Files Manager” under the Data Management component.
3. From within there you browse to the _syllabus folder, now just delete the files you no longer need.

Enable or Disable your course (allow or disallow students access to your course)

Enable or Disable courses

• In order to enable or disable (make available or unavailable) one of your courses in Angel, enter Angel and you will see your courses in the courses module or nugget.
  
  If your course is only viewable by editors, not viewable by students, you will see, “Disabled” underneath your course listing.
• To enable your course so it is viewable by all students, go into the course by clicking on it’s listing.
• Click on the Manage tab.
• Click on “General Course Settings” in the Course Settings nugget.
  
• On the next screen, select the “Access” tab.
• If it says “Editors only” for Member Access, it means only course editors have access.
• Using the drop-down menu, change this setting to, “All members” and click Save.
  
• You may get a pop-up that says, “Creating a course without specifying an instructor will cause the course creator to be assigned as the instructor. Click OK to continue or Cancel to specify an instructor login name.” Go ahead and click OK.
• You’ll now notice that the courses nugget or module no longer shows your course as being disabled. Go back here to disable it again at the end of the semester.

List of free image editors

This site contains a list and short reviews of 20 free online image editors.
http://mashable.com/2008/11/13/online-image-editors-2/

Note that some of these editors will let you do advanced editing for a small fee.

How to add multiple assessment questions from Word

If you plan on testing through Angel, and you already have all your test questions in a Word or text file,  you can paste them into Angel using the method described below. This can result in significant time savings. The trick is to follow the directions to the letter.

Adding or pasting new questions into a test

• Go to your course lessons area, find the folder in which you wish to deploy the test, and click on, “Add Content”.
• Select, “Assessment”, in order to create a new assessment.
• Fill in the settings you wish to use for your test and click, “Save”.
• On the next screen you click on, “Add Question”
• Underneath, “Select Questions from Other Sources”, select, “Copy and Paste Questions”.
• Now just start pasting in questions, making sure they conform to the guidelines described in more detail below.

So for example, with multiple choice questions, you will want to replace this sample text as shown below, with your questions and answers in exactly that order, and with the same capitalization.

Q: Each question should start with ‘Q:’ or be successively numbered.
A. If there are choices, the first choice should start with ‘A.’.
B. Each successive choice should start with the next letter and a period.
C. Each choice should be on a single line, but it is OK if it is longer than will fit in the text area and it wraps on its own.
ANSWER: B
POINTS: 2

Repeat for next question.

Further instructions:

Replace the sample text in the text box with the questions you want to import. You can also set the default choice question format, open-ended question format and point value for questions. The questions text should conform to the following specifications.

• Each question should begin on a new line.
• The first line of each question should start with ‘Q:’ or the question number followed by a period (’1.’, 2.’, ’3.’, etc.).
• If the question has choices the choices should immediately follow the question text.
• Each choice should be on a line by itself.
• Each choice should begin with a choice letter followed by a period (‘A.’, ‘B.’, ‘C.’, etc.).

The following optional settings may be added after the question and its choices. Each setting should be on a line by itself and follow the format SettingName: SettingValue.

• ANSWER: For choice questions enter the letter of each correct choice separated by commas. For open-ended questions enter the actual answer text.
• Fill in the blank(s) shared answers should have each answer on a separate line in the format of Answer:;Percentage: Example: Answer:Red;Percentage:25
• POINTS: The integer point value for the question. For Multiple Select questions this is the value of each correct choice.
• IMAGE: The URL of an image to display before the question text.
• FEEDBACK: Text to display after the user submits the quiz.
• TYPE: Identifies the specific question format to use.
  MC = Multiple Choice, TF = True/False, MS = Multiple Select, SA = Short Answer, FB = Fill in the blank(s), FM = Fill in the blank(s) shared answers, ES = Essay, OI = Off-line Item
• ANSWERBOXES: Valid for Fill in the blank shared answers only, indicates the number of answer input boxes to display to the user.

Enabling Access Tracking for a Content item in Angel

You can enable access tracking for a content item, in order to see who has accessed the item, and when they may have accessed it. Please use this feature sparingly, it adds a lot of data to Angel’s database, only use for those items for which you really need the extra information. For example, if you have podcasts in your course lessons, you can see which students accessed the item.

1. Go to the item under Lessons.
2. Click on Settings for that item.
   

   Content item settings

3. Select “Students Only”, or “everyone”, from the drop-down list next to User Tracking
   

   Access tracking

4. Click Save.
5. To view the access statistics (after it has been enabled, and students have accessed the content item), go back to the item, and click on, “Reports”.
   

   Reports

6. Then select either, “Activity Summary”, or, “Activity Detail” to view the details on who accessed your content item, and when it was accessed.
   

   Activity Summary

Adding Extra credit question to quiz

To add an extra credit question to a quiz:

1. Add the question, and make it worth 0 points.
2. Put setting to manually grade it.
3. Manually add the desired points.
4. Those students who do not earn 100% will get the extra points you manually issue.
5. Those students who already have 100% will get the 100+X score

There is no easy way to grade those extra credit questions, if not written as open-ended questions. You would then have to manually open each assignment to scroll down to that question/answer and manually issue points, save, and then do the same with the next submission, etc.

In sum, there is no easy way to do this, but any question can be tweaked to
work as extra credit, if you can score it manually.

Adding Extra Credit Assignment

In order to add extra credit, create an extra credit category (with the extra credit checkbox selected) and place the extra credit assignments (which do not have the extra credit checkbox selected) inside of it.

Uploading Multiple images in Angel

There are times when you may have a bunch of images you wish to display in your course, but you don’t want to upload them all one by one. Below you can see how to upload multiple images inside Angel lesson content:

• Create a folder, and save all the images in there. Be sure they are compressed and cropped, save as gif, for line drawing type pics, and compressed jpgs for photos.
• Once all the pics are in there, right click and zip the folder. (see screen shot below)

  

  Convert folder to zip file

• Go into Angel to the lesson location where you want to post the pics, click add content, and select the file upload.
• Browse to the zip file, and click upload file.
• Select, “Directory Listing”.
• Click Extract files.
• Angel now creates a link to the images directory listing. This is why giving the images descriptive names will be helpful, because the links to the images are the file names.

If you wanted to rename/move/copy/delete these images after the upload, you will need to click on the link to the images folder, then click on the utilities link. Then click on the “Associated File Manager” link. Then click on the images folder, after which you can see the files with edit functions. (You can’t rearrange the order though in this scenario).