Week 8 : ANVILL
Hectic and tightly scheduled as it is, week 8 has still brought some surprises and too much learning. It was a pleasure to welcome and learn from Jeff. The newly introduced ANVILL system obviously needed much time and team work to be established as it is today. In addition to the information that Jeff included in Monday's post, I browsed the OU webpage for more and I recommend my mates to do the same.
Opposite to many other online course systems (CMS) or learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn, ANVILL tends to cater to teachers in traditional face-to-face contexts and those doing hybrid courses alike. To be more practical I created my ANVILL account and enabled my teacher account so it can be possible for me to add lessons to my own dashboard. This is an opportunity for me to add audio or portfolio lessons as I am presently not teaching but by the time the next semester begins I will have already stored a handful of useful materials and lessons.
I think you found ANVILL very useful. Since I teach reading passages alone, the tool was out of my option to try. Considering that the tool might help me improve my English speaking skills, I had access to ANVILL with the user name and password provided by Jeff. Like you mentioned, ANVILL seems to be recommendable. I found that it allows teachers to easily create multimedia lessons and quizzes so that students can practice their speaking and listening skills. Someday when I teach speaking, the tool will be one of my choices.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of teaching reading skills, did you try the software Hot Potatoes? I consider it very valuable in making fun, motivating puzzles. With the software Hot Potatoes, I created exercises – a crossword puzzle, gap-filling, matching, scrambled sentence, multiple-choice exercises - posted on the class wiki in the “Week 8 Resources” section. The program is downloadable and consists of JCross, JMatch, JMix, JCloze, and JQuiz. JCross. Each tool is used to make different puzzles. Try it if you haven’t.
Best regards,
Kumwu