Bring Ideas to Life with Wolfram Demonstrations Project

New Semester

How is the new semester going? We hope that you are enjoying teaching the new student cohorts this semester. Have you ever seen them using a search engine called WolframAlpha other than Google? It is quite interesting as when searching for academic knowledge, it gives a set of related contents with equations and diagrams if applicable. It is quite handy and is popular among college students.

Wolfram Demonstrations Projects

The same company developed WolframApha and the famous Mathematica also created the Wolfram Demonstration Project to bring ideas to life. The project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.

The following video is a demo of the daylight calculator in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. With this demonstration, teachers can use it to explain the concepts in a much more visualised approach. It also allows students to play with it to have a better understanding of the concept and master the calculation.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It brings ideas to life with its interactive and visualised features. 
2. Now it has 11317 interactive demonstrations covering topics over math, physical sciences, life science, business & social system, system & model, engineering & technology,  arts & humanities, and kids & gaming.
3. It is an open source system and hundreds if not thousands of authors have contributed to the demonstrations project.
4. It is free for any teacher or student to use.
5. You can embed that into your Moodle unit

Hey, it sounds really good. How about taking a look and playing with some examples by yourselves? Download and install the free Wolfram CDF Player. Try Consumer Choice: Income, Taste, and Prices or Radial Engine with the Internet Explorer (When we tested it, it had issues when running in more popular Chrome and Firefox)

What is not so good?

It works quite nice independently with the desktop application. It also means that it could be difficult to integrate the demonstrations into LMS or Powerpoint. Even though it works fine with Internet Explorer when we tested it, it had issues when running in more popular Chrome and Firefox.

What's in it for us?

Using the interactive visualisation of the concepts in nearly any topic in the business school. As the teacher or the student move a Demonstration's control, they can see a change in its output that helps the students to understand the concepts.

And the good thing is that we don't need to do anything but just find one Demonstration to use. You can either browse the categories to explore topics or simply search the concepts. There are plenty of Demonstrations waiting for you to explore.

 

If you are interested, give it a try. We think that it could be quite useful if it happens that someone has contributed the Demonstrations that we are planning to use in our teaching. It can be a good learning experience for the students. You can find the frequently asked questions on this page.

Starting YouTube videos from a point in time

Do you ever want a YouTube video that you are using as part of a lecture or embedded in a presentation to start at particular time? It's easy to do: find the point on the video from which you want the playback to begin (3:43 in our example), then click Share, and check the check-box that says Start at. You will see that the start time has been added to your shareable url. Easy!

How Much Should We Assign? Estimate Student Workload in the New Semester

Break

Finally, the marking is finished. Now we are taking a break between two semesters. You might be in the conference/research/holiday modes. However, you are supposed to submit the unit guides for S2 in just a couple of weeks and then prepare for the unit contents. We know that and we hope this Course Workload Estimator can help you to estimate the student workload when planning for the new semester.

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Course Workload Estimator

Planning your readings, assignments, and exams for your units can be challenging. And you will have to consider student workload for those learning activities. How much should we assign to the students?

We know that university has its recommendation based on the unit credit. An average study time of 24-36 hours a week is a reasonable expectation for our students. However, the research shows that the average college student in America only spends 12-15 hours per week studying.

The Course Workload Estimator developed by the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University can help you to estimate the student workload based on the designs of your reading assignments, writing assignments, other assignments, and exams. We hope that the estimated results can assist you to plan your reading and writing tasks.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It is a tool to fill the blank. We have not seen any similar estimator for student workload.
2. It is easy to use and it takes only two mins to estimate student weekly study hours.
3. It is free.

What is not so good?

The question might be: is it really accurate? We do not know the answer, unfortunately. However, we can give it a try and see how it works in the next semester.

What's in it for us?

Students take much longer to complete a task than you do that. Even though it is not possible to estimate the workload without getting into the assignment details, you can still use this estimator to evaluate the assignment design. Then based on the results, you can change the structure, number, size, or expectations for the assignments.

It is a simple tool to use. We can spend two minutes to input the information with the designed reading materials, writing and other assignments, and exams. The web page generates the estimated student workload in the format of out of class hours per week.

And if you would like to change the design of assessments in your unit, you can just change the input and the system will calculate the workload again automatically.

If you are interested in the research of student workload and the tool, you can find more information in this further reading article.

Get Started with Loom

We are interested

Since we posted the last introduction blog post of Loom, we have received some inquiries of this tool. As our academics are interested in using Loom for creating video materials for teaching, TaLT has prepared a user guide for you.

Get started

1. Open Google Chrome
2. Go to the web page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions
3. Enter "loom" and then press Enter key in the search box Search the store
4. Find Loom – Video Recorder: Screen, Webcam and Mic, and click the ADD TO CHROME button next to it
5. Click Add extension. Then the Loom icon appears on the top right of the browser:

6. Click the Loom icon and then click Continue with Google to sign in with your Monash account
7. Click Allow if Loom ask the permission to use your cameras and mics
8. Then you will see the Loom menu and a camera screen on your browser:

9. Click Camera icon to choose the camera that you would like to use
10. Click Mic icon to choose the mic that you would like to use
11. Click Capture to expand the recording menu:

Current Tab mode allows you to record the browser tab contents with the audio from the tab. Cam Only mode allows you to record the video signal from the camera as well as the audio from the mic. Desktop mode can do a full-screen capture. We will use Desktop mode as an example.

12. Click Start Recording
13. You can choose to record a full monitor screen or just an open software programme. Then click Share
14. When the recording is completed, click Stop sharing button on the bottom of the screen
15. The video is now opened in a new tab. You can edit the video name and add comment to the video. Click the Download icon to download the video to your computer as an MP4 file.

Please make sure that you download the video to your computer as the free version will not allow you to access the online video after a certain period of time.

Create Webcam and Screen Recording Video with Loom

Exam season

Welcome to the exam season. We hope that the life is getting easier until it hits the point that we have to start marking the exams. If you are interested in preparing your units for the next semester, this month's video creation tool Loom can be very helpful.

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Loom

Loom is a cloud-based screen recorder and video creator. Videos are widely used as teaching resources, and recently more and more teachers are trying to give video feedback to the student assignments. Screenshot of the student assignments in the video has been proven quite useful when providing feedback comment to the student submissions.

Now this entire process is made easier with Loom. The platform brings a great simplicity to the screen recording space, by allowing you to instantly record, edit and share your video.

It is integrated with Gmail. It will be so easy for you to create a multimedia email as well.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. Well designed and it is SO EASY to use.
2. High-quality video
3. Integrated with Google Chrome and it supports both PCs and Apple computers.
4. Linked with your Google account. You can bring it to any new computer.
5. Screen recording function
6. Unlimited online storage for the premium version
7. Download as MP4 files
8. Free for the basic version

What is not so good?

The basic free version can only create videos up to 10 minutes. However, we don't think that it is a big problem as students won't watch long videos anyway.

It needs Google Chrome. Therefore if you are not a Chrome person, you will have to use it to enable Loom.

For the basic free version, you can only access the videos online for 7 days. You might need to download the files before that or you can refer the tool to two others to get the unlimited access.

What's in it for us?

The easiest tool so far to make webcam or screen capture videos for teaching resource or video feedback. We have run two workshops for using this tool in Monash Malaysia and the academics there absolutely loved it.

We have posted a user guide for using Loom. Take a look.

If you would like to learn to how to use the tool, please watch the following video instruction:

Build Effective Teamwork with Trello

Easter

How are you doing in the middle of the semester? We hope that you can have a nice holiday during the Easter break. This month we are planning to introduce a very nice teamwork management tool for both teachers and students.

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Trello

Trello is a project management tool which is widely used in Agile development. It is web-based and you don't have to install any software on your device. We have found that this visual collaboration tool is very useful for teamwork and project management.

It uses the kanban paradigm for managing projects. If you are familiar with the concept of lean production, you would know it was widely used by Toyota as part of its lean production, which is the secret for them to produce top quality cars with minimum cost and gains one of the top profit rates in the automotive industry.


Trello will be able to help your team to keep track of everything, end the endless email chains, organise things together, always stay in sync, and collaborate more effectively with clarity.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. Well designed and it makes the team collaboration really easily
2. It has a free basic version and it is good enough
3. There are plenty of examples online to inspire your use
4. iOS and Android versions for mobile devices
5. The contents are mobile friendly.
6. Very easy to use and the learning curve is minimum
7. It can also be used to manage your daily tasks

What is not so good?

I think that one of the issues is that the single sign on function is not there and we cannot log in with our Monash Google accounts. Also, people might think it is too much trouble to use a new online tool to coordinate a small team project even it might be helpful.

What's in it for us?

As Mahara is still on trial, our students normally use Google Doc or just Facebook groups to coordinate their group assignments. They can use Trello for this purpose and it does a great job. You can also use it similarly for coordinating the work with your tutors and co-lecturers in your unit.

Or you can use it to plan your lesson:

Or plan a project based learning activity for the students:

There are many inspiring ways to use Trello. If you are interested, you can find more examples at: https://trello.com/inspiration.

Fun Classroom Engagement with Socrative

New semester

The new semester is going to start! Have you gotten everything ready for the coming semester during last few super busy weeks? And how do you like our blog post about Create Interactive Videos with H5P from last month?

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Socrative 

This month we would like to introduce Socrative. Teachers can initiate formative assessments through quizzes, quick question polls, and space races with Socrative. You all know that Monash will implement Poll Everywhere and MARS this semester. Socrative is also an in-class polling tool for the similar purpose. It has its special charms for this application.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. Free account to create quizzes for up to 50 students
2. Real-time results display
3. Single sign on with Google emails
4. The contents are mobile friendly.
5. Student responses can be exported into Excel.
6. It is very easy to create, edit, reuse, and share the contents.
7. It has a Space Race assessment which is ideal for certain learning experience such as individual or group contests.
8. 
   

What is not so good?

This product is more popular in the K-12 programmes and there is a reason. The free account supports a 50 students session and the paid premium account supports up to 150 students per session room. It might be good enough for a tutorial but not a large lecture.

What's in it for us?

Monash has chosen MARS and Poll Everywhere, which also has a group quiz function. However, Socrative provides an easier and more interesting approach to do a team contest quiz in your classroom. If your tutorial has less than 50 students, why not give them an individual or team spaceship contest quiz as the students gonna love it:

If you are interested in finding more about Socrative, check out the introduction video below: