One of the areas I feel Flash has great potential in education is to enable students to help develop their own skills and understanding, using interactive tools to help them revise.
Last year I identified an issue with my Year 11 class that they knew their facts, but were finding it tricky to put together exam style answers. My intended solution was simply to give them lots and lots of practice questions. Trouble is, once I do this, I then create lots and lots of marking. Fair enough, but a teacher simply cannot keep up with a Year 11 student producing 10 essays and expecting them to be marked in 10 minutes.
An obvious suggestion is to get students to use a mark scheme or model answer to self-assess. This is how many revision books and online revision materials work. If the student is able to self-assess in this way they can actually begin to develop far more effective answers anyway. What I decided to do was to create a way of allowing students to do this online. I developed a Flash-based activity where I had an array which stored a question together with a model answer. The question is then displayed, the student adds their answer and then they can compare & contrast their answer with the model one.
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This is a really simple Flash activity that was easily programmed, but hopefully an effective additional tool to help students revise. The first attempt was the revision activity
I put onto my ReviseICT.co.uk website.
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I added a couple of Flash drop-down boxes to the front end, allowing students to select one question, three questions or the entire set of questions. The other drop-down allowed students to set themselves a time limit, or to remove the time limit. With these options a student could set themselves 3 quick questions and note down some quick ideas within, for example, a 30 second time limit. Alternatively they could make their own progress through the entire set of questions without a time limit and practice putting together a full answer.
Having been pleased with the results, I developed the concept a little further by providing students with a rich-text interface allowing them to add colours and formatting to their answers, supporting those who wanted to categorise and extend their ideas further. The Practice Paper activity on my SchoolHistory.co.uk site was the result.
Recently I’ve put together a ContentGenerator.net version of this activity. It is still in beta development, but has been released for testing. It is available for any customer of ContentGenerator. Thus if you have purchased one of the programs, this activity is available to you for free. Customers can download the beta directly from the ContentGenerator.net forums.
Already there has been postive feedback together with suggestions for improvement. I want to have this ready as rapidly as possible so fellow teachers can put together their own online revision activities. I plan to produce such an activity for each of the topics my Year 11s study.
1 response so far ↓
1 Rob Chambers // Mar 6, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Another great release Andrew – I have started making some already and I intend to launch these with my students for preparation for both GCSE and AS/A2 exams in the summer. This will be really useful!
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