E-assessment

E-assessment is a valuable tool in Higher Education for many reasons. It has huge potential benefits for students in terms of learning and retention of material as well as increasing their engagement with their chosen topic. E-assessment offers many advantages over traditional pen and paper exams.

When e-assessment is at its best students receive instant and individual feedback on their work allowing them to form an accurate picture of their progress through the relevant module and to build their confidence. The use of e-assessment makes it much more realistic for students to get this timely and appropriate feedback.This feedback given can also be further enhanced by technology as it may contain links to interactive material, further reading, videos etc. so that students can be directed to engage in self-directed learning tailored for their particular difficulties.

E- assessment can

• Supply immediate and focused feedback on students' work

• Allow students more than one attempt at an answer

• Present questions in a predetermined or random order

• Be used for diagnostic, formative or summative assessment

• Guide students to further reading or resources if they are having difficulty 

• Increase students' digital literacy

• Record highly detailed student learning analytics and present them to the lecturer in real time.

Develop Phase

Microsoft PowerPoint is an easy program to use and a powerful tool for giving a presentation. Whether your presentation needs a visual kick, tools for collaboration, easy access or the ability to share information beyond the initial meeting, PowerPoint is a good option. It can even help reduce speaking anxiety by drawing eyes away from the speaker and towards a screen. 

Visual Impact

Making your presentation more interesting through the use of multimedia can help to improve the audience's focus. PowerPoint allows you to use images, audio and video to have a greater visual impact. These visual and audio cues may also help a presenter be more improvisational and interactive with the audience.

Collaboration

PowerPoint allows you to work with other people in a collaborative manner. This is especially useful in office settings where teamwork is key. Multiple people can collaborate on and contribute to a presentation. By going to the "Review" tab at the top of the program and clicking the "New Comment" button, you can leave notes and reposition them on the screen for other team members to view. Comments can be an especially beneficial tool for clarification.

Flexibility

PowerPoint can be used in a number of different effective ways to communicate with your audience. Slides are completely customizable to fit your needs. Depending on your approach, you may want to have a presentation that is text-heavy, image-heavy or some combination of both. Text-heavy presentations are generally good if you are giving a lecture to a group and want them to take notes. Image-heavy presentations can help to make your presentation more conversational in style since there only visual cues. Combining the two approaches gives listeners the benefits of both visual aids and notes.

Evaluation/Assessment

Assesment and evaluation are very important parts of the constructive alignment process. 

Well-designed assessments will allow your students to use the knowledge and skills they have learnt and indicate their level of mastery. The feedback on the assessments will also provide students with clear information on the criteria they need to match to succeed at the tasks and can give the lecturer a clearer sense of how the task is assessing mastery and what aspects are being assessed. Evaluation of the course by students and lecturers should feed back into the whole process of curriculum alignment and reflect critically on the outcomes, the teaching and learning activities, the assessments and the experience of the course. Reflexivity and continous learning and development are key aims to successful evaluation.

The evaluation of students should be done both formatively and summatively and based around:

• Class participation.

• Student contributions during the delivery.

• Homework assignments.

• Examinations and any online quizzes.

Assesment is a process that includes four basic components:

1. Measuring improvement over time
2. Motivating students in study
3. Evaluating the teaching methods
4. Ranking the students' capabilities in relation to the whole group evaluation

The purpose of classroom assessment and evaluation is to give students the opportunity to show what they have learned rather than catching them out or to show what they have not learned.

Planning and organizing multimedia projects

A successful project is well organized and planned.Some important steps to consider in planning and organizing multimedia projects are:

• Setting Instructional Goals 

Instructional goals and assessment criteria need to be introduced at the beginning of the project. The goals need to work for ourselves and for our students. Know yourself, your strengths and your target standards.

• Deciding on a project

Teacher selects and designs a project to meet the desired goals.

• Developing Prerequisite Skills

Basic computer skill are needed first as other more advanced skills can be taught during the project.

• Assessing Resources

It is also important to consider the following questions:

Is there any internet connection?

Do all students have the necessary software and equipments to carry out the project?

• Creating cooperative groups

Success depends on positive interdependence, where students perceive that better performance by individuals produces better performance by the entire group.

• Scheduling computer times

Consider the circumstances for your project. Multimedia takes time so be sure that you are thinking about a project that you will be able to accomplish in the time frame you have.

Critical Thinking for Vocabulary Learning

The question is not:

Can we use critical thinking to teach vocabulary?

The question is:

How can we teach enough vocabulary without it?

Critical thinking is defined as a higher order process of reasoning that allows a student to move beyond an individual an individual viewpoint, to question assumptions, and to deeply analyze a range of complex information issues and problems. Teaching the elements of critical thinking is important in modern education, as it provides learners with the ability to deal efficiently and successfully with the changes of the new technology world. To cultivate such competency, learners must go beyond focusing on textbook knowledge and develop the necessary cognitive skills to make valued judgements, rational arguments, and evaluations.There should be exposure to teaching and learning of critical thinking during the process of learning L2. Once critical thinking is integrated into the ongoing education process learners will be more successful in thinking critically in  the second language.Teachers should train students in choosing the appropriate strategies that best suit their language needs. In addition teachers should design useful activities for students to improve their vocabulary.

In this regard i believe that traditional teaching methods need to be replaced by the learner-centered approaches in order to develop students' critical thinking ability.

Technology tools and lesson planning

Computers save time and help us organize material more easily when it comes to lesson planning. There are also lesson-planning apps and websites we can use to make our life much easier when typing up and organizing our lessons. I would like to mention some ways to enhance our lesson planning and organization.

• Lesson organization

Computers help you better organize and present your information. Typing up your notes in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, or creating a PowerPoint presentation, helps you focus less on how you’re going to teach and more on what you’re going to cover.

• Visual aids

Fortunately, the Internet provides more opportunities than ever to find relevant images so we can give students a concrete context for the subject. 

• Videos

A short, entertaining, instructional video is a great way to get students excited about learning.

• Class reading

Kindle library can be used by the teachers  in their English classes. The students could adjust the size of the text and follow along as their classmates took turns reading. Besides using Kindles, you can also project the assigned text onto a big screen 

• Board work with a Smart board

With this technology, you can easily project your computer screen onto the board while still retaining the functionality of a traditional classroom whiteboard. Games
Educational games are a great way to reinforce your lesson and engage your students. Students can play pre-selected games on individual computers, or the teacher can project one game onto the board and play it as a class.

• Research

Now, computers enable students to quickly and easily collect information from a wide range of credible online resources. Students can also use local library web pages to more efficiently search for relevant hard-copy sources.

• Presentations

When it comes to presentations, computers provide a fun variety of ways for students to share their knowledge. PowerPoint is definitely a favorite that can be used with all ages.

Constructivism

Constructivism is an approach to learning that holds that people actively construct or make their own knowledge and that reality is determined by the experiences of the learner. Constructivism believes in personal construction of meaning by the learner through experience, and that meaning is influenced by the interaction of prior knowledge and new events. 
I would like to mention some of the principles of constructivism.

1. Knowledge is constructed, rather than innate, or passively absorbed
2. Learning is an active process
3. All knowledge is socially constructed
4. All knowledge is personal
5. Learning exists in the mind

So what is the role of the teacher in a classroom?

The primary responsibility of the teacher is to create a collaborative problem-solving environment where studenta become active participants in their learning. A teacher acts as a facilitator of learning rather than an instructor. The teacher makes sure she understands the students preexisting conception and guides  the activity to address them and then build on them.

What are the features of a constructivist classroom?

1. Knowledge will be shared between teachers and students.
2. Teachers and students will share authority.
3. The teacher's role is one of facilitator or guide.