Paragrapher

I wrote this exercise because I wanted to give my students some in paragraphing. The idea was to produce an online version of the standard kind of exercise where students divide a piece of continuous text into different paragraphs. It’s pretty simple stuff – the user is told how many paragraphs there are and can make a paragraph by clicking at the end of a sentence. Choices can be changed and when the user is satisfied they can check their answers. They get overall feedback and can also get feedback about right or wrong choices at a click. They can continue the task until they are successful.

As this is an exercise type that is quite simple, but is also one I use quite a lot at certain times of the academic year, I am making an authoring tool for this which should be ready for beta testing at the beginning of march.

Multiple Choice Cloze 2.0

I have rewritten the code for the multiple choice cloze so that it avoids the use of pop-up windows. I have also made the code a little simpler. The tool is now more or less complete and I am planning to try writing an authoring program using Java. This may take me a little while as I have not used Java a great deal and my only real experience is with VB. Java, however, does have the advantage of being able to run on any platform.

Dialog Builder

I have finally got round to finishing the Dialog Builder. I wanted a tool that would allow students to do some work on situational dialogues before attending a class, to act as a sort of warmer. The student hears one part of a dialogue and then chooses from a list of possible responses. If they choose correctly they will hear the next part of the dialogue, until they complete the task.

The activity makes use of JavaScript to control audio being streamed with Real Player.

Phonemic Hangman

I have had a lot of useful feedback about my ‘Phonemic Hangman’ activity. As a result I have made some changes which I hope will make it easier to use.

First of all, I have included a short introduction to strategy for playing phonemic hangman. Phonemic Hangman is as simple to play as any conventional Hangman activity, but it does require a different playing strategy. The aim of this introduction is to get users to think about the most common sounds in English, so that they can make useful guesses.

I have also incorporated a hints button. This allows the player to get help for one phonemic symbol at a cost of one life, and a further symbol at a cost of two lives. I am not sure whether one or two hints is best.

I have also changed it so that the spelling of the word is shown as well as it’s phonemic transcription.

Hopefully these changes will make the activity easier to use without changing the overall goal of the activity. Please give it a try – I would be grateful for any feedback.

http://users.otenet.gr/~petermac/call/phonhang/phonhang.html

Phonemic Hangman

This is the last exercise type in my series of exercises designed to practice phonemic script. This exercise works like conventional hangman, with the difference that the words to be guessed need to be ’spelled’ using phonemic symbols, entered with the buttons in the web-page.

Phonemic hangman is a lot more difficult than the conventional version. The exercise allows seven wrong guesses, but this could be increased to make the task easier. All the words are connected with family relationships. Grouping words by theme means that this exercise can be used to recycle vocabulary. It also encourages the student to think, rather than just click randomly. Can you think of any other ways that the words could be grouped?

I have used numbers rather than the traditional gallows – I would like a better visual metaphor but have not been able to come up with one. Any suggestions?

The exercise is at:
http://users.otenet.gr/~petermac/call/phonhang/phonhang.html

I would appreciate your feedback – you can use the “Report” button to post feedback to this weblog. I am sure there are bugs which I have yet to find.