Teaching Online at UTAS

A lack of disciplinary vocabulary can be a significant set-back for students as they  listen to lectures, complete readings and construct assessment tasks. Here are some activities that could help students become familiar with the language of your discipline.

OPTION 1: Pop quiz

• Get students to complete a MyLO Quiz at the end of a recorded lecture or reading activity. Include automated feedback. While a quiz must be associated with a score, the score itself does not have to be recorded as a Grade Item, meaning that these sorts of tasks can be used for formative feedback.
• Quickly and easily create vocabulary lessons with Quizlet. It allows students to learn vocabulary in a variety of ways, including electronic flip cards, drag and drop matching games and more. You will need to provide students with a link to the Quizlet quiz.

OPTION 2: Flip cards, fill-in-the-blanks, crosswords and more

H5P is an opensource interactivity development tool. You can sign up for free and create a range of interactive activities, including dialog cards, drag-the-words, fill-in-the-blanks, mark-the-words and memory activities. Once you have created an activity, you can link to it or embed it within a MyLO HTML Page. Note that the results WILL NOT be recorded in MyLO Grades, nor will a record of completion. See the example below.

Hot Potatoes, developed by the University of Victoria (Canada) Humanities, Computing and Media Centre, is a free application that generates crosswords (see image on right), quizzes, cloze passages and more. Packages created with Hot Potatoes can be uploaded to MyLO for completion by students. The graphics are a little dated, but it still functions OK in Google Chrome browser. May not work on mobile devices. Note that the results WILL NOT be recorded in MyLO Grades, nor will a record of completion.

OPTION 3: Word of the week

Include a Word of the week in your weekly introduction (video or presentation), perhaps in an Announcement on MyLO.

OPTION 4: Glossary

You can create a glossary of discipline specific terms. Though MyLO has a Glassary tool, we do not feel that it contains sufficient functionality. Instead, we recommend creating an HTML page with a list of Glossary terms. You don’t have to make up all the definitions yourself. Instead, provide  links to  definitions on the web.

For more information about these options, contact your local blended learning/online learning team.