We all have had lecture classes, and I am sure that most of us can say that most of our classes were lectures.

However, it is very very BORING!

Think about it. How many times have you sat through a booooring speech, and just wanted the speaker to finish talking?

How do you think students, their brains overflowing with energy and hormones, feel when we teachers are lecturing? Bored and sleepy, of course!

Even when watching some of these classes I myself feel sleepy.
I came across a great article called “Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing.” It talks about the reasons why teachers lecture and why we should not. It is certainly worth a read.

There are so many better ways to teach than to lecture, but if you must teach, break it up. Research has shown that people cannot remember more than ten minutes of information at a time, so stop after ten minutes–do another activity, ask questions, do pairwork, have a group discussion, review, tell a joke, make the kids exercise–something!!
But please, stop lecturing!! The kids are not hearing you.

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Google Docs–How to Make a Quiz that Will Grade Itself

I talked about making quizzes using Google Docs in my last post. The quizzes have a wide variety of uses, but this time I am going to tell you how to create a quiz that will grade itself.

One caveat, and it is a large one, is that for this quiz to grade itself each question must have only one answer. I’ll tell you how to work around this later, but it is a little tricky. For now, as I said, one answer.

Forgive me for going off the topic here, but as I said before, I do not recommend using this type of quiz frequently or even commonly. I also think that, in general, that such a test does not indicate a students real skill level. Having said that, let’s continue.

First, make a quiz. Be sure that there is only one correct answer for each question. If you are not sure how to make a quiz, see my earlier post. Let’s use a four question quiz, taking my Harry Potter example from the earlier post. These will be our questions:

After you have finished making the quiz, go ahead and publish it.

Next, you should take the quiz yourself, and put in the correct answers. This will give you a key, which you must have later on for this to work.
Next, go back to Google Docs main page.

You’ll see the spreadsheet for your quiz there. Open it. Of course, your correct answers will appear on the top line. Make sure they are right. (If they are wrong, you need to fix them.)

(Note: If you have made a mistake on your Google Docs form, you can edit it from the spreadsheet by clicking on “Form” then choosing “Edit form.”)

Now, let’s grade the quiz. First, we need to make two new columns. These will be “Number Right” (how many correct answers) and percentage (% correct). These should go to the right of the ones that are already there because new answers to your quiz will be filled in under your answers. Like this:

Now, the tricky part–the formulas. What you are going to do is to put a formula in the “Number Correct” field.  this formula will count each question as 1 if it agrees with your correct answer. If it does not agree, it will calculate the value as zero. That means if you wrote that Harry Potter’s mother was Leala, not Lily, you would get a zero for that question.
Here is our basic formula and what each part means.

This is to grade one answer. In this case, it is the answer in cell C3, here is an example:

=IF(C3=$C$2,1,0)

This means that if the value of C3 is the same as C2 put a one in this cell (the cell where the formula is), and if C3 is not the same as C2, put a zero in this cell.

(There are NO spaces in the formula.)

Here is a break down:

= This must be before every formula in a spreadsheet.
IF This sets up a conditional formula
C3 This is the cell where the answer is that you will grade.
= Do not worry about this second equal sign, since it is part of a condition.
C2 This is the cell that has the correct answer.
$ The dollar signs mean that this cell’s location does not change if you fill down (copy the formulas down the whole column)
1,0 This means that if C3 and C2 are the same, the value is one. If they are not, the value is zero.

Make this for your quiz. For me, I want the answer for B3 to be the same as B2. If it is, the test taker will get one point. If not, they get zero points.

If you have got that, let’s move on. I want to add up all the correct answers, giving one point for each that is correct. Therefore, I need to connect the formulas. To do this, we simply add them together by putting a + sign in between the formulas. Keeping with our former example, it should look like this:

=IF(C3=$C$2,1,0)+IF(D3=$D$2,1,0)+IF(E3=$E$2,1,0)+IF(F3=$F$2,1,0)+IF(G3=$G$2,1,0)+IF(H3=$H$2,1,0)+IF(I3=$I$2,1,0)+IF(J3=$J$2,1,0)

Looks like hieroglyphs, but the spread sheet will decipher it for you, no worries.
Of course, the letters and numbers will change for your cells.
You can use copy and paste here. To speed things up and make fewer mistakes, once you have the formula for the first cell, type a plus +, then you can copy the first formula and paste it. Change the letters and numbers. Then do it again and again until you have made the whole formula that you need.

Here is what my formula from the Harry Potter file looks like.  This formula goes in cell F3.

=IF(B3=$B$2,1,0)+IF(C3=$C$2,1,0)+IF(D3=$D$2,1,0)+IF(E3=$E$2,1,0)

Next, you need to double-check your formula will work. This is easy. Go back to your quiz (from the spreadsheet, choose “Form” and then “Go to live form” and do it, making a few mistakes as you do so.  Your results will then be in your spreadsheet.  Take a look:

If you want to then use the same formula in all the cells in column F, you can fill down.  To do so, click on F, and you will see a little square in the bottom right corner.  Then, keep holding the button drag it down, and the formula will paste itself in all the cells below it, automatically changing for each  cell.

This way, the answers of other people who take the quiz will also have the same formula applied to it.

Next, let’s make a percentage from this.  This is easy enough.  For any test, to make a percentage, just divide the number of points the student got right by the total points on the quiz.  Here, we would divide the number that the student got right by 4 (since there are only four questions).

Our formula for cell G3 will be =F3/4

However, your one problem is that this gives you a decimal number, so you need to multiply this by 100 to get a normal number.  Your formula would then be this:

=(F3/4)*100

This tells the computer to divide F3 by 4 first, then multiply it by 100.  That way, you end up with a percentage.  Let’s try it.  Put the formula in and it will do its work.

You can then fill down, and that is it.  You have a quiz that will grade itself.  Pretty simple.

Final caveat.  After setting up the quiz form, the spreadsheet, and the formulas, one has to wonder if you are really saving much time over a similar paper test.  Paper tests of this type are easy to grade, so I have my doubts.  However, your students may enjoy this type of quiz once in a great while as a change of pace.  Variation is always good in learning.

Good luck with this.

teachingislearning.com

After this, let’s add another question.  We will make it a paragraph this time.  I am going to ask “What is your favorite Harry Potter character and why?”  After typing that in, I think that this time we should add some help text.  Since this is a paragraph  question, I think we should tell the students what we expect here, so I will add “Write a short paragraph of at least 50 words.”  Like last time, I will also check “required question.”  Click “Done.”

We have two questions, so let’s add one more.  This time, it will be multiple choice.  Go to the top left and click the “Add Item” button.  This time choose “Multiple Choice.”  I am going to ask “What was Harry Potter’s mother’s name?”  Then, I put some choices in the boxes below that and click “Done.”

That is all there is to making the quiz. You can add more questions if you want, but let’s go on to see how to take it and how to see the answers.
To take the test, you will see a link at the bottom of the page.  You can paste this link into a web page or send it to people you want to take the quiz.

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An article in Newsweek reported something that most teachers know. Writing by hand, not on a keyboard, is good for your brain.

These are from two different articles.  This is the gist:

Brain scans show that handwriting engages more sections of the brain than typing. Bonus brain boost: it’s easier to remember something once you’ve written it down on paper.

A new study that compared the different brain processes used for writing by hand and typing has found that there are cognitive benefits to putting a pen to paper. These findings give support to the continued teaching of penmanship and handwriting in schools.

I have my students write most of their essays and the first drafts of their research papers out by hand. By doing this, students focus more on what they are writing and remember it better. Remembering it better means that they learn the basic grammar, paragraph structure, and essay structure better.  This can later be applied when writing on the computer.

The other benefit to writing things out by hand is that it takes longer, and it is much harder to go back and change it later. Why is that good? Students often will dash off a essay, working to get it done in the shortest amount of time possible, without much thought to quality. If they write it by hand, they have to think ahead. They consider the sentence structure and the paragraph structure before they begin. Those that do not quickly learn to do so, or they will be using most of their time erasing their sentences and rewriting them. Thus, handwriting requires more thought when putting thoughts down, but also in planning ahead than writing on a computer.

When is a computer useful for writing? When students need to learn about essay writing structure, it is useful. One easy way for students to learn more about their writing is to lift or change a topic sentence or concluding sentence and see how the paragraph reads without it. They can also look back at their introduction and see if it does, indeed, fit their essay well now that they are finished, and revise it or the essay if it does not. In other words, writing on a computer allows students to more easily visualize the structural parts of their essay and improve them.

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This is my third article on the English Center Test.

This time, let’s look at translation.  Many English teachers in Japan feel that they need to translate English into Japanese, or that students need to translate the English in to Japanese.  This has its uses, but they are few.  This time, we will look at the Center Test and see what translation is necessary.

Here is a picture of the English Center Test, page one.

There is a lot of Japanese on the English Center Test!  Wow.  However, these are only directions, telling the students how to do the questions.  Most of them do not read these anyway, since they have done these types of questions thousands of times.

So, is there translation on the English Center Test?  No.  Not even one question.

Why are some teachers translating?  (yakudoku)  I have no idea.

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We talked about grammar and the English Center Test in the last post.  We saw that in the first section we looked at, Part 2, Section A, that what looks like grammar questions, are in fact, testing usage.  They do not test grammar.

Next, I will look at the only section that really requires that Center test-takers know some grammar.  This is the third section in Part 2, Section C.  Here is the first question:

Did you install the computer software you bought last week?

Yes. And _____   __21___   _____   _____   ___22__ use.

1. easy  2. finding  3. I’m  4. it  5. to

This may be a little confusing, but the examinee must put the words in order, then they must choose the two words that go in blanks 21 and 22.   A double task, but not all that hard.

This is a simple sentence: S, V, C; Subject, Verb Complement.  ”I’m finding it easy to use.”  (Never mind that you should never ever start a sentence with ‘and.’)  Any student in junior high school should be able to get this.  However, is it really testing grammar?

Yes, and no.  You need to know how the words should be arranged.  That takes a little knowledge of grammar–to know that the subject comes first, then the verb, then the complement.  In other words, knowledge of basic sentence structure is necessary, but this is not particularly difficult.

However, I think that, as we saw earlier, this is also really testing how well the student can use the language.

Other questions in this section (there are only two more) focus on using ‘with’ as applied to people (Many students want to use ‘by’), passive voice, and infinitives.  The Center Test taker has to show that he or she can use these forms.  Knowledge of what they are is not necessary.  Hence, as I said earlier, it is more usage practice.

Next post, I’ll talk about translation on the Center Test.

teachingislearning.com

teachingislearning.com

It is the largest entrance exam in Japan, and most universities use this test as a reference to make their own exams.  Second, most high schools base their curriculum on preparing students to take this test, since they usually teach for the test enthusiastically.  Lastly, it is a good indication of what the Ministry of Education considers important and relevant to education in Japan.  Therefore, this test draws a lot of attention from universities, high schools, and the Ministry of Education.

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Fill out the forms.    Easy as pie.

What is all this?  Well, this is a basic version of Office online.  You can type papers, as if you were using Word or Appleworks, you can make a spreadsheet for grading, you can make a presentation for a class, you can make a form, or even a table.I’ll talk about these as we go on, but first, let’s look at the word processing function and see what is so wonderful about it.

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