Interactive Grammar Exercises: Better and More Useful than Ever

Some think that grammar reviews are only useful when taking a developmental writing, or the required set of first-year composition courses. In reality, grammar and syntax reviews are valuable across the board, and all college and university students can benefit from ongoing writing reinforcement. So,whether you are writing a term paper about hospice care, or an analysis of the current economic situation, the proper care of dogs, or any other topic, understanding the basics of grammar will help you.

I highly recommend supplementing peer reviews and personal guidance with interactive exercises. Many interactive grammar reviews are available online without registering, and they are free of charge. You can practice grammar using your laptop, tablet, and handheld.

Link: http://youtu.be/kTnxMD9pFx4

Further, many of the grammar reviews have downloadable apps so they display nicely and work smoothly with your smartphone or tablet. If you are currently enrolled in a course, chances are your textbook will come bundled with an e-lab (MyCompLab or My Writing Lab, just to name a few). These are also excellent guides.

If English is your second language, you may wish to pay special attention to sections such as "countable and non-countable nouns" and "easily confused words."

click for video

Here are a few good, easy-to-access, easy-to-use interactive grammar exercises:

Grammar Bytes -- http://www.chompchomp.com (by Robin L. Simmons)

Skillswise (from the BBC) -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/topic-group/writing

Interactive Quizzes (Capital Community College Foundation)

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/quiz_list.htm

Business English Grammar Exercises (actually applicable to all occasions)

http://www.better-english.com/grammar.htm

Enjoy!

(E-Learning Queen http://www.elearningqueen.com // Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.)

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Interview with Jill Ambrose, CourseSmart: Innovators in E-Learning Series

E-textbooks and other digital assets have become extremely important in the world of textbooks. The texts are evolving quickly, in both the way that they are delivered and in the kinds of instructional activities, materials, and collaborations that are included.

Welcome to an interview with Jill Ambrose, Chief Marketing Officer at CourseSmart.

1. What is your name and your relation to e-learning?

Jill Ambrose, chief marketing officer at CourseSmart, the world’s largest provider of eTextbooks and digital course materials. CourseSmart believes in anywhere, anytime access of course materials for everyone. Therefore CourseSmart enables and supports access to e-learning.

Jill Ambrose, CourseSmart

2. What are some of the latest trends in e-learning?

I would say the two biggest trends in e-learning right now are the push towards mobile access and learning as well as interactive course materials that improve learning outcomes.

With today’s students being more tech savvy and taking their college learning experiences beyond just the classroom, mobile access to e-learning tools has become increasingly important. CourseSmart has been committed to meeting the growing mobile needs of today’s students, and just this year, we led the industry in mobile innovations by introducing the first eReader app for Android™-based devices which joined our other industry firsts – the iPhone® and iPad® apps, launched in 2009 and 2010, respectively. We also launched an HTML5 single platform reader (another industry first) allowing users to access digital course materials online, offline or on mobile devices. And earlier this summer, CourseSmart launched the industry’s first social commerce tab on Facebook, giving students unprecedented access to eTextbooks through a site where they already spend a lot of their time.

CourseSmart is the only digital course provider that offers eResources from multiple publishers. eResources are highly engaging and interactive learning products that make faculty teaching more effective and student learning more engaging by providing immediate feedback to the student to ensure comprehension of key learnings. eResources include an automated, integrated grading system that provides real-time feedback to ensure comprehension of key learnings by the user.

It’s not just about what’s “fun and interesting” in their eTextbooks, but rather, it’s what truly helps students with learning and ultimately the comprehension of that learning experience.

All eResources are not alike but many include quizzes, tutorials, interactive exercises, videos, links to other websites and the digital text.

3. How have digital textbooks changed over the last 5 years?

First off, the content has not changed. Availability and how you interact with the content is where there have been dramatic increases.

Regarding availability, digital course materials and eTextbooks are now available through multiple channels; online, through some Publishers and the campus bookstore. The sheer volume of the CourseSmart catalog of eTextbooks continues to grow everyday and currently includes more than 20,000 eTextbooks which represents 90% of all core higher education textbooks in use today.

How you interact with the content has also changed. Mobile access is a big shift in the last few years with the increase of smartphone and tablet usage as well as emerging mobile app technology. At CourseSmart alone, almost one third of all users (faculty and students alike) prefer to read their materials on a tablet rather than on a computer. Product features have also improved significantly, as CourseSmart has continued to listen to consumer feedback, adapting our features to meet the changing needs of students. This includes improved highlighting and note-taking functionality, the ability to cut and paste sections of text, email select content to classmates, etc.

4. What do you see as some of the main trends in cloud-based digital texts?

An important element that CourseSmart recognizes in the use of digital texts is the ability to access texts when needed, without limiting storage to only one device or access through multiple devices, as well as creating the ability to synchronize notes and highlights when you are working between computers and devices. This is where the case for cloud-based digital textbooks becomes especially relevant to our customers. The availability and portability of cloud-based applications, such as CourseSmart’s library of eTextbooks and digital course materials, means that students and faculty can access the texts and course materials anytime, anywhere. Access is available from any web-enabled device or through one of CourseSmart’s downloadable apps. Our cloud-based model perfectly fits with the on-the-go lifestyle and need for portability without the burden of carrying around heavy textbooks. Even notes on the texts, if entered within CourseSmart’s interface, are portable!

The cloud-based nature of eTextbooks and digital resources also eliminates the need for costly investments in storage and infrastructure by schools and students to store loads of downloaded materials. While CourseSmart eTextbooks and digital course materials can be accessed offline, they remain stored on the cloud, taking advantage of the efficiency of cloud storage.

5. How well do CourseSmart texts integrate with learning management systems?

They integrate extremely well. CourseSmart is dedicated to providing a streamlined teaching and learning experience for faculty and students. CourseSmart Solutions for instructors and institutions can be fully integrated with various learning management systems like Pearson LearningStudio, Blackboard® and Desire2Learn, allowing instructors and students to access their course materials in their current daily workflow. Current solutions may be found at Arizona State University, University of Michigan and Western Governors University to name a few.

6. (Revised) What kinds of multimedia do you typically bundle with an e-text? Do you have standalone audio (mp3 format) that students can download to their portable devices, or do they have to access the e-text through the CourseSmart portal each time they want to watch a video or listen to an audio podcast?

Publishers determine the content that should be offered as an eTextbook or an eResource. The publisher also determines appropriate content that should be bundled with eTextbooks. There are various forms of multimedia used with titles offered by the publishers. Again, these are determined by the publisher. The types of multimedia selected are based on how well they support the concepts being taught.

All of CourseSmart’s eTextbooks are stored within the cloud and are accessible to students and faculty anytime, anywhere via a Web-enabled device connected to the Internet. At this time, only CourseSmart’s non-multimedia content can be accessed offline.

© 2011 CourseSmart, LLC. All rights reserved. CourseSmart® is a registered trademark of CourseSmart, LLC. All other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Interview with Allen Partridge, Adobe Systems: E-Learning Innovators Series

The iPad is becoming increasingly friendly for any time / any place learning, ranging from K-12 to graduate programs. Welcome to an interview with Dr. Allen Partridge, the eLearning Evangelist for Adobe Systems, who discusses some of the new technologies that make it possible to convert different formats to play on the iPad, including HTML5 and HTML5-enabled Captivate.

1. What is your name and your relation to e-learning?

Dr. Allen Partridge is the eLearning Evangelist for Adobe Systems Inc. In addition to his work for Adobe Systems, he continues to serve on the doctoral faculty in the Communications Media and Instructional Technology program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Allen has written several books and a host of articles on topics ranging from 3D game development to Instructional Design for new technologies. He is active in explorations of Immersive Learning as well as traditional multimedia enhanced eLearning and rapid eLearning. Allen works closely with the eLearning Suite and Captivate teams at Adobe, providing a channel to customer needs and concerns and helping facilitate communication among team members.

2. What are some of the exciting new directions you've observed in elearning?

Most of the movement lately has been in the expansion / ease of access to creating great content with limited experience working with software. We’ve been focusing a lot of attention over the past couple of cycles on modernizing Adobe Captivate and the Adobe eLearning Suite to modern standards. Most eLearning online uses Adobe Flash to deliver the content in a web browser played back using the Adobe Flash plugin. About five years ago Adobe made dramatic improvements to Flash technology and adopted a new programming language commonly called AS3 (ActionScript 3). All of Adobe’s eLearning software is now fully AS3 compliant so it all runs better, smoother, and much much faster using the full strength of Flash.

In more recent months we’ve been extending Captivate’s reach on mobile devices. Captivate users can already publish content to Apple iOS using the App Packager that comes with eLearning Suite, but we wanted to add the option to produce HTML5 compatible content easily from a Captivate SWF.

3. Where do you see some of the most innovative uses of tablets (iPad, etc.) in elearning?

We’re offering the HTML5 converter free to the public on Adobe Labs while it is still in development. We feel strongly that this open forum will provide users with a relevant voice as we rollout new features and seek to meet the needs of users for this rapidly growing platform. While for a long time, we saw little statistical evidence that eLearning content was being created for mobile platforms, the introduction of mobile tablets had dramatically altered the playing field for educational content developers. This does a number of things. 1. It creates a strong need for touch based interactions that anticipate the differences between clicking a mouse and touching an application with your fingers. We addressed a lot of those issues with the release of Captivate 5.5 – most notably adding special interactions to quizzes that made it much easier to deliver successful quizzes on mobile devices.

The addition of another export format (HTML5) further extends Captivate’s reach as the industry leader in eLearning authoring. This thing is really pretty cool. You just feed it a Captivate SWF – like an application capture demo, and it spits out HTML5. Then post the HTML file.

4. In the past, the fact that some technologies do not run on iPad operating systems has been a problem. What is being done to address that?

We’ve seen a variety of approaches from various companies. Some rely on third party technologies, others have developed proprietary solutions and some of the companies who had traditionally used older technologies like HTML, found that they could easily support HTML5. Adobe was among the first to offer a robust solution, and was the first to create a Flash to App converter which was released with Adobe Flash Professional CS5. There were however some difficulties, because Apple altered the terms of their developer’s license shortly before the CS5 software was released, and that alteration prevented authors from using the Application Packager from Adobe. Shortly afterward, Apple reversed course, and re-enabled the use of the Packager. So people can use it now, and many do. In fact many large games for iOS devices are Flash games, converted with the App Packager.

5. What is HTML5?

Well that depends on who you ask. Some will tell you it’s a clever marketing campaign. HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language. It’s the standard used by web browsers for the past 20 years to display text and graphics (and sometimes other stuff) on web pages. The number 5 is the version number. HTML5 is not yet complete, none of the browser companies display the content in the same way, or use the same technologies to display that content. So think of it as the next version of the web language. The excitement comes because it will be able to do a lot of interactions and animations, video etc. that weren’t possible before. That said, it’s not at all a silver bullet. It has a lot of limitations, and won’t really effectively replace the kinds of things we see in eLearning today, but we feel it goes far enough that we can do a good job of converting most of the features of Captivate and making it much easier to get rich interactive content created for iOS devices.

6. What are some of the Captivate products, and what are they used for?

Adobe Captivate is a super simple to use eLearning authoring platform. It’s used by more eLearning developer than any other eLearning authoring tool and people love it for creating all kinds of eLearning content. It’s famous for interactive screen / application captures. It also does a great job with PowerPoint conversion, allows authors to easily create custom interactions without any programming, and makes branched projects –like scenario based training simple to pull off.

7. Specifically, what does it mean that Captivate products can now be converted to HTML5?

The converter is an Air Application that takes an Adobe Captivate SWF and exports a web page (HTML) that complies with the HTML5 standard. It has been optimized to perform best on Apple iOS devices including Apple iPhone, iPad & iPod. Especially on iPad, this will give eLearning authors the ability to quickly and effortlessly convert their content into a format that will play in the browser of an iOS device and will not require them to duplicate their efforts, building a separate version from scratch just to accommodate users on iOS devices.