ProProfs bills itself as offering “knowledge sharing tools and online education,” including a quiz maker, brain games, flash cards, polls, and free exercises for studying for the SAT or IT certification.

At its core, and the site’s most powerful feature, is the quiz maker. This tool allows you to build custom quizzes with multiple choice, essay, fill in the blank, and multiple answer questions, add pictures or videos to your questions, and embed the final product on a website, blog, or wiki.

But that’s not all. The free plan allows unlimited quizzes and quiz takers. Want more? Upgrade to a premium account and get the following:

• Track who took your quiz
• Store, view, and download quiz results
• Use quiz analytics to identify knowledge gaps
• Copy and use existing quizzes to save time

For educational users, the cost of a premium account is $2.97/month, or $35.64/year. This compares favorably with the $49 annual subscription charged by rival Quia Web. While lacking some of Quia’s bells and whistles, ProProfs’ quiz maker has a simple interface that newbies will appreciate. And the capability to embed quizzes on more than one platform is unique.

If you want to give your students something fun and challenging, consider one of ProProfs’ brain games. These can also be embedded on a class website or blog for 24/7 availability. My favorite is HillBilly Hangman. It isn’t as intuitive as the other games, but the sound effects are outrageous, especially when you choose a letter that doesn’t belong in the hidden phrase. Try it once and you’ll be hooked!

HILLBILLY HANGMAN

After watching the video, I asked myself:  “How do you suppose the little guy got from Antarctica to Japan?” Put this one to your students and see how many interesting scenarios develop for discussion or even a short writing project.

For a limited time, Wikispaces is offering free “Plus” (premium) wikis for K-12 educational use, and they are available worldwide to teachers and students alike.

What’s so special about a Plus account? No advertisements, for one. And you get custom themes, double storage space, and extra privacy and security features that normally cost $5/month, or $50/year. Compare features here.

If you already have a Wikispaces wiki, you can upgrade for free by clicking on “Manage Wiki” and then “Subscription”. Then, under “Request a complimentary upgrade to Plus for K-12 education,” click “Request yours now”. It may take a few days to process your request, but be patient! Some of the custom themes are really slick.

How can I use wikis with my students? A good starting point is Wikispaces’ own EduWikis site, where you will find links to:

1. A list of articles and resources that describe how to use wikis in education
2. A comprehensive list of existing educational wikis to learn from
3. General discussions of wikis in education

Another excellent resource is the Wiki Walk-Through site published by TeachersFirst. English teachers: Drill down to the “Wiki ideas for language arts” section for some collaborative project ideas that lend themselves well to the wiki environment.

Wikispaces also offers some very helpful “how to” video tours, including this introduction for first-time users.

]]> http://eltportal.com/?feed=rss2&p=1466 0 http://eltportal.com/?p=1452 http://eltportal.com/?p=1452#comments Sun, 01 Aug 2010 14:28:34 +0000 bobp http://eltportal.com/?p=1452 [...]]]> Wouldn’t it be nice if every time you posted something to your blog, a Tweet would go out informing the Twitter community about it? Well, the folks at Brave New Code have made that possible with a WordPress plugin called WordTwit.

Essentially, WordTwit integrates your WordPress website with your Twitter account. Whenever you publish new content from WordPress, Twitter will automatically be updated with a brief description of your new content along with a link back to it, bringing visitors to your website.

Here’s how it works. When you create a new post from WordPress, WordTwit will Tweet a brief description along with the post’s permalink, allowing your followers on Twitter to easily read your new content. Another neat feature is that  WordTwit can be configured to only Tweet or not Tweet posts with certain tags or categories.

The only note of caution is that you must have a self-hosted WordPress account to install WordTwit. At present, the free accounts offered by WordPress.com and Edublogs.org do not support this plugin.

Word Games is a free online game website where games are organized into channels like word searches, typing, crosswords, sudoku, Mahjong, and puzzles. There is even one called ‘wordoku’ that uses letters for an extra challenge to traditional sudoku. New games are added every Thursday from popular developers including Crazy Monkey Games and Armor Games.

According to its developers, Word Games uses a custom Google search engine to quickly find your favorite games. You can also rate games and send them to friends.

With ESL students, demo an ‘Easy’ category word search and go from there. You might even add a Word Games block to your class blog or wiki to track the best scores per game, and even award extra-credit achievement points.

Many such establishments (and this extends to airports and coffee shops) have chosen a Wi-Fi scheme. Unfortunately, most of  these hot spots are unsecured, meaning that any information you send or receive can be intercepted and read by others logged in to the same network. What to do?

Protect your privacy by installing a virtual private network (VPN) application on your laptop. A VPN is an impenetrable tunnel that prevents others from viewing your web browsing activities, instant messages, downloads, credit card information or anything else you send over the network.

Although there are several VPN clients to choose from, I can recommend two that I have used successfully. The first is a free program called Hotspot Shield. According to its developers, Hotspot Shield allows you to:

• Secure your web session, data, online shopping, and personal information online with HTTPS encryption
• Protect yourself from identity theft online
• Hide your IP address for your privacy online
• Access all content privately without censorship; bypass firewalls
• Protect yourself from snoopers at Wi-Fi hotspots, hotels, airports, corporate offices

This video shows how easy it is to download and set up Hotspot Shield on your computer.

The other VPN is a paid offering from Comodo called TrustConnect. Its features, according to the company:

• Securely encrypts all data transmitted over both wired and wireless Internet connections
• Creates a Virtual Private Network to hide all personal web-surfing information
• Utilizes industry-standard 128-bit encryption
• Lightweight—protects without interfering with normal computer operation

Which to choose? If you’re on a budget, go with Hotspot Shield. You’ll be served some ads, but that’s how they keep their service free. If you are experiencing lengthy delays connecting with one of their servers, you might want to consider TrustConnect. For a few dollars a month, you get a faster connection and no noticeable delay in surfing speed.

Can websites contain viruses? Unfortunately, yes, and they can spread to your computer if you’re not careful.

Depending on the strength of your antivirus software, you may be alerted and your access blocked when visiting an infected site. But sometimes the software delivers a false positive. So, is the site I want to visit safe or not?

You can get a qualified second opinion using a free tool called URLVoid. From  their homepage, enter the address of the site you want to check, then click the Scan Now button. URLVoid will check the suspicious website with 19 web scanner services, including McAfee SiteAdvisor, Norton SafeWeb, and Web Security Guard. It will then present you with the compiled results. Impressive!

If you are teaching online or otherwise assigning online content as part of your course, URLVoid seems like a good bet for checking sites in advance. You might also consider setting up a wiki or similar resource where you and fellow teachers can pool respective lists of suspicious sites revealed by this scanning tool.

According to developer Tom Robb of Kyoto Sangyo University, “The Reader module allows quizzes to be randomly generated from a larger set of items for each book. The module allows teachers to easily install the module on their own Moodle system, download the quiz material for those textbooks in their graded reader library, and configure its operation to their own preferences.”

Be aware that you must supply the actual reading materials to your students; Reader Module is strictly a means for administering quizzes based on the reading. Also, as a security measure, Tom requires that you contact him via email for authorization to download the quizzes. Visit moodlereader.org for all the details, including the option to establish your own free course area on his Moodle site.

]]> http://eltportal.com/?feed=rss2&p=1357 0 http://eltportal.com/?p=1323 http://eltportal.com/?p=1323#comments Wed, 23 Jun 2010 01:27:59 +0000 bobp http://eltportal.com/?p=1323 [...]]]> Although Diigo  has been around since 2006, I’m just now discovering this fantastic tool, thanks to an e-learning course offered by the University of Wisconsin at Stout.

According to Wikipedia, Diigo is “a social bookmarking website which allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag web-pages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page.”

Well, it’s that and lots more. Once you’ve installed the Diigo toolbar, you can highlight text, pictures, or an entire web page, and then share it within a group in Diigo, or to individuals via e-mail. There are also collaborative features, including one that allows you to create a group knowledge depository. Check out the collaborative features here.

For a more general introduction to Diigo and its capabilities, see the video below. Tip: Switch to full-screen view for a clearer look at how to navigate the interface.

WordPress 3.0, “Thelonious,” the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the result of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include an elegant new default theme called Twenty Ten.

As a die-hard WordPress user, I am impressed by the new lighter interface, contextual help on every screen, over 1,200 bug fixes and feature enhancements, and a bulk updates feature that allows you to upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click. Wow!

Need more convincing to upgrade? Check out the video: