How to make an interactive reading activity (PART 1)

I'm back. After almost 2 years away from the blog, here I am again. 

I'd like to share a few tools you can use to make a reading text INTERACTIVE.

This post started with a genuine need. When I work with small groups (up to 30 people), I like creating reading activities on Google Docs and use the comments feature to have students answer questions and/or add their reflections (Click HERE for an example in Portuguese). However, this last year, I had to work with teachers all over Brazil and instead of 30 people interacting, I had more than 500 teachers in one asynchronous reading activity. The result was that despite instructing teacher/students to click on the comment in order to see the RESPONDER/REPLY box, more often than not they clicked RESOLVER/SOLVE deleting the original comment or question I had posted. Having said that, you can imagine the hassle to restore everything that had been deleted daily. 

This is an example of technology that works perfectly in one context, but not necessarily in another. As I didn't know other alternatives that could solve my problem, I asked my PLN (via Facebook) for help and they promptly came to my aid.

These are the tools they've recommended:

• https://activetextbook.com/ (Shelly Terrell)
• https://www.peardeck.com/ (Giselle Santos)
• https://www.bookwidgets.com/ (Shelly Terrell)
• https://nowcomment.com/ (Nik Peachey)
• https://edji.it/#/home  (Shelly Terrell, David Kapuler, David Deubelbeiss)
• https://padlet.com/dashboard  (Leo Moretti Barbosa)

During the next few weeks, I'll be posting my explorations with each of the tools.

Let's start with ...

ACTIVE TEXTBOOK - https://activetextbook.com/ 

So far, it's my favourite one for what I needed. Apart from COMMENT THREADS, you can add several features to your text, such as highlights, videos, songs, text, images and quizzes. With the free plan, you get 50 MB storage and unlimited access to library. 

FEATURES I'VE ADDED TO THE TEXT: comment threads, image, highlights and a video.

HANDS ON MOMENT 

Would you like to try it out with us?

Click HERE to go to this activity on Active Textbook and feel free to leave your contributions (look for the speech bubbles which I've added to the text). Then, I'd love to hear what you thought about the tool.

Before I finish, let me thank all teachers who have kindly contributed to this post with their wonderful ideas.

I'm truly happy to be see Life Feast come to life again and hope you are too.

P.S. I still love Google Docs.

Reading Collaboratively with Point

This post has the objective to share a tool I've learned about today: POINT.
http://www.getpoint.co/

Point is a Google Chrome Plugin which allows you to quickly share links to websites and videos with other people. And how does it work? You install the plugin to your Google browser, then every time you want to share a link with someone, press the key @ on your keyboard and a small box pops up prompting you to choose the person or email to share it with.

Check the video below with a demonstration.



What I liked about it is the possibility to work collaboratively. By sending the link to someone, whether they are online or not, we can use the chat box which pops up to develop a conversation and reflect together. You can highlight the parts of the text you find relevant and discuss about it as I did with a colleague, Juliana Gense, tonight (we are reading in English but discussing in Portuguese).

You can share and discuss about articles and blog posts:

You can share and discuss about Youtube videos:

And even share and discuss about pdf files which have been embedded to https://www.scribd.com/

Another amazing feature is the possibility to share the whole chat with someone else via email. And how to do that? After finishing a chat, you click the key @ again and type the email. This would be perfect for sharing a chat with the teacher. The screenshot below is an example of what the chat thread would look like after being sent by email.

How can we use Point with students?

Brainstorming uses with Juliana, we imagined some possibilities:

• Have a whole group of students discuss about an article synchronously or asynchronously.
• Divide EFL students in trios and have them get together synchronously to discuss about texts or explore new vocabulary in a text. Then, when they finish the task, the can send the whole chat to the teacher.
• Invite students to discuss about a video they watch together.
• Invite undergraduates or post graduates to analyze academic papers and discuss about the parts they find relevant, then email the chat to their professor or tutor .

A free online meeting platform: Fuze

This post is dedicated to a dear friend, Márcia Lima, who introduced me to FUZE, the webtool I'll be talking about today.

According to the website, Fuze is an online meeting platform for Mac, Windows, IOS and Androids, in other words, it's a device neutral platform which allows people to meet online (for free) and share content.

So you might say, "That's the same thing we can do with Skype, Google hangouts, Adobe Connect and Wiziq".

Well, not quite. As far as I know:
- With the free version of Skype, nowadays, you can't have more than two webcams working, no screen sharing and your meeting is not recorded.
- With Google hangouts, although you can share your screen and record your meeting, you have a limit of 10 webcams.
- Adobe Connect is perfect for webinars and online meetings, however (this is a big BUT), it is paid.
- Wiziq would be the best alternative here. The free version allows several webcams to work and you have the possibility to record some of your sessions.


To start my exploration, I watched some of their videos, such as this one:


Fuze Content Collaboration from Fuze on Vimeo.


With the FREE plan you can have:

As with all the webtools and apps I decide to use with my students, I wanted to try it out first. Márcia promptly accepted my invitation to give it a go on a Saturday Morning. Our trial video is in Portuguese, our mother tongue, but you can have an idea how our exploration happened.




What we liked about it:

• It's free.
• It runs on different devices and systems (Mac, Windows, IOS and Androids)
• You have a whiteboard to write on.
• You can share different files such as word, ppt, pdf, images and videos.
• You can share your screen.
• There is a chat box.
• You can have 25 people using their webcams (I haven't tried the quality of the session with many participants).
• It seems simple to use.
• It's very easy to start an instant meeting by creating a room and sharing the link with another person provided you have already downloaded Fuze.

What we didn't like about it:

• You can't record the meeting with the free version ( I used Quicktime on my Mac to record our meeting).
• The files I shared didn't work so well on the Ipad. The only file Márcia could see was the image I shared. However, when I started another meeting on my Ipad, the video worked just fine.
• You have to download the product before you join a meeting.

Group Communication Platform

• Want to send e-mails, text messages and voice messages to a group of friends?
• Want to set up chat rooms and conference calls for your group?
• Want to share files so that other group members can collaborate with you?

You can do all of this and more using WIGGIO. I've just learned about it via a tweet from @ShellTerrell and would love to start testing it. The possibilities are great for groups you can create for friends, family, co-workers, your students , all in one place.

Watch the TUTORIAL and learn more about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k63qSH5cwsk&feature=related 

TYPEWITHME: Live Text Document Collaboration

Another awesome tool to work with WRITING. http://typewith.me/

HOW DOES IT WORK?
You create a document and then invite others to co-edit it. Each author has a different colour and can collaborate all at the same time. There is also a chat box participants can use to exchange ideas. After the text is ready, you can save it as PDF or a word file.

This is my trial with @janetbianchini . We built a story together.

Another feature I liked was the TIME SLIDER button at the top. By clicking that, you can see how the text was built, word by word.

Free online screen recorder

As I wanted to try it out, I sent an invitation via twitter and in less than 3 minutes, Janet Bianchini and Marisa Constantinides joined me. Check out Marisa's contributions in pink. Txs, Janet and Marisa.

TRIBBIT.com - making a group card

Tribbit.com: Tribute a person, event, or something you love. via kwout

This is a site I found in the great blog "GO2WEB2.0" which helps us internet people celebrate someone´s birthday in a different way. You can write a card where different people can collaborate in different ways: text, images, audio, video. YOu start a card, customize the page and then send an invitation (by e-mail) to other people to collaborate. When the deadline comes, the card is sent to the recipient. I imagine I´d just love to receive a card like the one below.

http://www.tribbit.com/Birthday_for_Olivia