LEARNINGAPPS AND MULTIMODALITY APPS

Good morning!

We started the day yesterday taking a look to learningapps.org and exploring it a little bit. This website allows you to create interactive activities for your students. Valerie, the teacher, provided us with an account so we can take a look how it works. We started with a link to a text talking about Malta’s food tradition. After reading the text, we had like a hang-man game, with the vocabulary we had learned from the text.

Next activity is about Maltese language. This comes from Arabic but it’s not exactly Arabic. We learnt some important facts about Maltese people with a YouTube video and then answered a small quiz with questions regarding the video. Last activity in this platform consists on a brief timeline about Maltese history. We had to match some important events with the years they happened.

After the exploring, we went into create new apps for our own use. We needed to create an account different from the students’ account the teacher provided, so we can deal as teachers with the website and invite our own students (this functionality is not allowed as a student) The variety of apps we can create is huge. You have near 50 types of activities, including: Matching pairs, Group assignment, Number line, Simple order, Free text input, Matching pairs on images, Multiple-choice Quiz, Cloze test, etc…they will be very useful for me during the school year.

After lesson we visited the three cities. It was very nice to know this area because it’s not so full of tourism and you can feel real Maltese city. We walked around Birgu and Kalkara and had a bath in a sandy beach called Rinella. Sunset was beautiful from here.

Next day (Thursday), we have started the lesson taking a look to multimodality apps. We try some webs regarding these multimodality apps. This approach can be a powerful motivator. It adds variety and interactive tools to engage students. The one we spend more time in is called Voki. It has different features and avatars to present the information to students. Unluckily this app is not completely free. You can use a few features in the free version, but to access full functionality, you need to pay a fee. Basically these avatars can talk whatever text you insert them. Their slogan is “Educate, enjoy, engage”

We spend some time trying Voki. We discovered as well some tool windows has called snipping tool, useful to copy images from websites and apps. After that we move on to different useful apps, like Imgur (Social App with a lot of funny images and memes), Hexatar (creating pictures with avatars), 

Wordart (this app help you creating word clouds, very useful). We spend time trying all the features these apps offer us.  

After the break we continue discovering more useful apps for teachers:

Google drawing. Good for diagrams and drawings

Go Conqur. This App allows you to create a lot of different visual help: diagrams, Mind Maps, notes, quizzes …

We are going to finish the lesson exploring the Go Conqur features and adobe spark. After that, will spend some time working with all the new apps and trying to create useful material for our Webquest Unit so it can get very interactive. After the lesson, we plan to visit Mdina, a very old medieval city in Malta. Goodbye!

After today’s lesson, we are going to go to visit Mdina, a beautiful medieval city in Malta. It used to be the capital until Valletta grew and took its place. I will tell you more about this trip tomorrow. Facing our last lesson, and last days in Malta! Goodbye