NIS Learning Curve

Online ‘interactives' are becoming commonplace in higher education as a way of presenting Blended Active Learning experiences, and the advent of easy-to-use tools means that you don't have to be an experienced multimedia designer to create content. Teachers and learners are now able to design and develop their own activities, and HP5 is the ideal authoring tool for this type of content. H5P( HTML 5 Package) has some great tools to make your content pages more interactive. The platform empowers everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content - all you need is a web browser and a web site that supports H5P (for example Google sites/ Blogger / Weebly, WordPress, Moodle etc). You can see a few examples at the end of this article.  H5P was created for teachers to use, to make online courses more interactive and engaging for students. In all, there are 40 types of interactive content available to create on H5P, with the “featured” tools being for course presentations, interac

  Instructional Strategy#13: Claim, Evidence, Reasoning (CER) This strategy provides a scaffolded way for students to use evidence to formulate and justify their own arguments by breaking down materials and research into smaller pieces for analysis.                                                                                                                                                              (Click on the images to enlarge) McNeill, K. L., & Krajcik, J. (2008). Inquiry and scientific explanations: Helping students use evidence and reasoning. In  J. Luft, R. L. Bell, and J. Guess-Newsome (Eds.) Science as Inquiry in the Secondary Setting. Arlington, VA: NSTA Press. Happy Learning!

Instructional Strategy#12: Create the Problem This mathematics-focused instructional activity has students create a hypothetical problem that matches a given real-world solution.                                                                                                   (Click on the images to enlarge) Keeley, P., & Tobey, C. (2011). #11. Create the problem. In Mathematics Formative Assessment: 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning (p. 80). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, SAGE.                                                                                                                      Happy Learning!

If you are looking for a part calculator, part interactive simulation tool, Desmos is a standout example of inquiry-driven math tool with super-smart instructional supports. Desmos is an easy-to-use tool that gives students a visual way to understand expressions. It is a Graphing Calculator app that provides features beyond those of a regular calculator, allowing users to graph functions, create tables, simulations and more.  The site boasts a huge collection of activities in accordance with IGCSE and AS/A level requirements. The tool is free and is available on the web as well as on iOS and Android. In addition to plotting equations, classroom activities are available to help students learn about a variety of math concepts. For example, students can learn how to transform periodic functions by trying to slide marbles through points on a graph. Or they can plug in their own equation and see what kind of graph pops up; sliders allow students to adjust values and see what happens. Users