Showcasing Educational Webtools: Pear Deck

    Pear Deck is a popular add-on used by many teachers to make presentations in which students can interact with content. Through the interactivity students are kept interested in the lesson. They can easily give your opinions and change the flow of the lesson. It is up to the creativity of teachers to get the best of the interactivity. Since Pear Deck is an add-on, we need to download it so that we can start working on it. Getting the add-on is rather straight forward. First Google Slides should be opened and after creating a slide show, there is an "Add-ons" option in the top section. Once "get add-ons" option is selected, there will be many options to choose from. Because Pear Deck is so popular, there is no way to miss it and there is no need to search for it, it will be right on top. 

    After downloading is complete, Pear Deck is ready to be used in the same section as where we have downloaded it, add-ons. Pear Deck pops up when Pear Deck for Google Slides add-on is selected and we are presented with many ready to use templates. 

    After we complete our slide show, we can click the start lesson button on the top right. A Pear Deck account is required to open a presentation and invite the students. Following the account creation, in the same fashion as the other educational web tools, the lecturer gives the code to their students for them to join. To check how the students view the slides and interact with them, watch a short part of the following video. 

Showcasing Educational Webtools: Edpuzzle

    Just as Edmodo was mentioned as the equivalent of Facebook for education, Edpuzzle can be summarized as YouTube of education. After creating an account in the same fashion as before, teachers can create their classes and share the class codes with students. Layout of the website is as minimalistic as it gets so there is no room for confusion. Edpuzzle offers a platform for teachers in which they can assign videos for their students to watch. The videos can be customized by teachers according to their wish. Students can be prevented from fast-forwarding and skipping to later parts of the videos to make sure they watch the whole video. Teachers can add their own verbal comments on top of the video while making audio of the video silent. Questions can be added throughout the video to test whether the students have learnt or not. The assignments have a due date that is determined by the teacher and therefore students need to complete the task in time. If they don't, teachers can check who has done the tasks in time, who has done late and who has not done at all. By taking these factors into consideration, performance of the students can be evaluated. 

    If a further explanation is needed, check out the following tutorial. 

Showcasing Educational Webtools: Edmodo

    Showcasing educational webtools will be a short series with brief explanations about tools that teachers can utilize to enhance their lessons. This series will begin with Edmodo as it serves as a base for materials, which will be inspected in the following days, to be shared. Edmodo is a platform which allows teachers to create classes and make posts to serve the needs of their students. The easiest way to portray the platform would be to call it as the Facebook of education. Teachers and students create profiles according to their roles. 

    Once an account is created, teachers can create classes and send the class code to their students so that they can join their classes. Edmodo's interface is rather straightforward and home page, like Facebook, is a general view of posts from all the classes based on the latest date of posting. To check the classes individually, add, create or withdraw from them, class management under the classes segment should be checked. 

    After the basics are set, teachers can start to upload various materials for their students. Homework can be given with due dates and directly evaluated through Edmodo itself. Teachers can give feedbacks on the homework, students can comment on the posts or directly message, all of which resemble features of basic social media platforms. For a more in-depth tutorial on how to utilize Edmodo, watch the following video. 

Presence Types in Educational Experience

    Educational experience framework is the presence types that occur during lessons. Each types of presence affect the educational experience of the students and therefore the importance given to the presences directly affect the experience in the end, for the better or the worse. 

    Social presence, as its name suggests, is all about the students feeling their presence acknowledged in a social context. To make this happen, teacher needs to create environments for students in which they can express their feelings and thoughts. These inputs then must have an effect on the flow of the lesson so that the student can feel their presence having an effect on the environment. In the days of online education teachers have to utilize various of tools to make students contribute to lessons so that they can feel socially present. 

    

    Transactional presence in its simplest form is the act of students recognizing the presence of each other. To recognize not necessarily requires an interaction, which is the act of cognitive presence that is about to come. Transactional presence is achieved when a student answers a question or gives a presentation, making the other students feel the person speaking is a part of the class. 

    Cognitive presence is the interaction of students. Sharing and taking thoughts and feedbacks is a crucial part of this presence type. In order to achieve having students feel cognitively present, teachers need to create tasks that require group work. Thanks to group works, students feel that their thoughts have an impact on the others. 

    The last but not the least is the teaching presence. Teaching presence is what makes other presences be possible in the first place. Without designing how the lectures will be prosecuted, the other presences simply have no room to exist. It is safe to say that teaching presence is the foundation of the educational experience. 

   

    

Multimedia Learning

     Multimedia learning is a cognitive theory which is built on the principal of enhancing the learning by providing not only verbal but also visual input. This theory is known to be popularized by Richard E. Mayer. The theory focuses on delivering the dual senses, which are words (verbal) and pictures (visual), to the senses, ears and eyes. It is believed the appeal to both of these cognitive senses will improve the learning more than it would if it was to be limited to verbal channel. The senses transfer the input to the working memory, whose capacity is limited. Representation of the sounds and images in the working memory has to be solidified with prior knowledge to be saved in long-term memory. The whole process of implementing multimedia learning into lessons is difficult and therefore requires efforts of both the input source (teacher) and the learner. In order to understand the theory better, I am implementing this method and adding a visualization.