Practice makes perfect?

This has been sitting in my drafts folder for about a year. If I don’t post it now, I’m not sure I ever will, so here goes. 

danna § curious tangles: words (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

March 2020

I recently tweeted this.

So I did this over the winter semester & did not renew my Textivate subscription. Planning to do a post comparing the two. pic.twitter.com/38GpMffihG

— Vedrana Vojković Estatiev (@Ven_VVE) March 1, 2020

It then occurred to me that the tweet could be construed as a promise of a blog post, so I thought I should do something about that.

I’ve previously written about H5P activities in our online course here, here and here. I like the versatility of the tool and the fact that it’s available as a Moodle plugin, so I can use it free of charge. There are many content types (activity types) you can use and so far I’ve only been able to test out a relatively small number: drag and drop, interactive video, audio recorder and course presentation.

I was pretty confident H5P would be useful for tasks more obviously associated with vocabulary learning (probably primarily because I’d noticed a content type called Fill in the blanks), so at some point I thought I should look into it as a possible substitute for Textivate. 

I’ve been using Textivate for several years now and really like it, but if you want to use it in combination with your own resources – to practice specific vocabulary, for instance – you have to get the paid version. Which I completely understand and *have* renewed my subscription a couple of times, but as I’m an adjunct and get paid comparatively little, I’m always on the lookout for free versions of apps and such. 

I decided to revamp our revision unit with the help of H5P content types and made the following changes.

1. User-defined gapfill (Textivate) ⇨ Fill in the blanks (H5P). For vocab revision. In the Textivate version, once you define the words students need to add to the text, they conveniently and automatically appear below the text and you drag them to where you think they should go. In the H5P version, you define where the missing words should go and get blank boxes where students need to type these words. It’s not incredibly flashy or exciting in Textivate either, but in H5P it’s really bland, so I decided to jazz it up a little by creating an image in Canva and adding the missing words to it. Then I added the image above the text. When you have a go at the activity in student mode, the image shows up as much smaller than it is, but you can click on it to enlarge it, which I thought could be convenient for practice. If a student was doing the activity for the first time, they could click on the image and view the words, but if they wanted to try it again, they could see if they recalled any of the words without first clicking on the image. Incidentally, you could also add a video instead of an image to the activity, which wasn’t suited to my purpose but could work well in other contexts. 

February 2021

So, here we are, back in the present. It’s a little more difficult now to identify the type of activity I used in Textivate because I can only make a guess based on what the activity looked like in earlier iterations of the course. I knew there was a reason I should have done this sooner. 

2. Shuffle? Multimatch? (Textivate) ⇨ Fill in the blanks (H5P) For joining sentences. The point here was to practice joining sentences in a highly controlled way, with relatively little creativity and thus few unexpected outcomes. (No, it’s not one of my favorite activities either, but it’s useful for exam practice.) When I used Shuffle, students were instructed to rewrite the sentences in a separate document (which is not the happiest of solutions and I’m doubtful whether anyone ever actually did this, especially if they revised half an hour before the exam) and then do the Shuffle activity where they matched the two sentence halves and checked if they corresponded (in terms of punctuation, etc.) with what the students thought was correct. I’m happier with how it works with Fill in the blanks (H5P) because you can add hints to the blank boxes. The students have to type out the sentences in order to check if they joined them correctly and if there’s anything you want them to watch out for (something that might cause them to slip up at the exam) you add it as a hint. Now, you might think well, maybe Shuffle/Multimatch wasn’t the best choice of activity for joining sentences and you’d be right, but as I already had a Textivate subscription I sometimes used it in ways that were not ideal. 
3. User-defined gapfill (Textivate) ⇨ Mark the words (H5P) For identifying parts of text that need alteration. This was a really convenient change because it made me break the activity up into two steps, which I think is easier to process. Again, in the Textivate version the students were instructed to type the changes they would make in another document and then drag and drop the suggested answers into the correct gap. If they skipped the first step, the activity was deceptively easy compared to what it would be like at the exam. With Mark the words (H5P), they first need to highlight the parts of the text that need to be changed (and can check if they were correct), then there is another Fill in the blanks with hints where they focus on making the actual changes. 

And that’s it as far as H5P in the revision unit goes. There are also a couple of Quizlet sets and Moodle quizzes, so the H5P activities are just part of what students have the opportunity to complete if this is how they wish to practice. The unit is entirely optional, although I sometimes think perhaps it shouldn’t be, but that is material for another post.

If you teach online (synchronously or asynchronously), do you have materials that your students can access in their own time and practice, say, for an exam? What (tools) have you used for this and are these activities optional?

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