Our whole-hearted thanks to everyone for voting WizIQ to victory at the World Education Awards 2011 for the ‘World Education Public Choice Award’. As the name of the award suggests, this award is truly an outcome of the public choice that earned WizIQ this award in the category, “Best Innovation in Open and Distance Learning”. We look forward to more such participations and winning more such awards with your support.
Here are some pictures from the award presentation ceremony:
The flipped classroom concept comes from top educators’ extensive study and experimentation. Let’s take a look at what flipping your classroom entails, and how the WizIQ Virtual Classroom helps you get the most out of this technique.
What are flipped classrooms?
Flipping your classroom involves reversing how you look at lectures and “homework.” With a flipped classroom approach, students listen to class lectures at home, typically as pre-recorded (asynchronous) video or audio modules along with doing their pre-class reading assignments.
Then, when they come to school, they do their “homework” in class. This approach gives students immediate access to both teachers and peers as they work through the material. It also allows the teacher to focus on facilitating learning in truly collaborative environments.
Why are flipped classrooms so popular?
Teachers adopting the flipped classroom approach love how much more interactive their student time becomes. No more talking at people, watching them zone out during “stand and deliver” lectures. Instead teachers get to spend their time teaching, by answering student questions and helping them apply their new knowledge to their homework.
Students enjoy getting immediate help when they get stuck, more chances for hands-on learning and in general are more engaged by doing something active rather than just sitting and listening.
How is the WizIQ Virtual Classroom an effective tool for flipping classrooms?
Today’s technologies make flipped classrooms a truly practical, yet innovative option. In particular, the WizIQ Virtual Classroom offers a number of benefits for both teachers and students.
Benefits for teachers
In the flipped classroom paradigm, WizIQ helps teachers get improved results from their students. Features that facilitate these improvements include:
Creating and recording lectures in the WizIQ virtual classroom for asynchronous delivery
Using the whiteboard tool for writing and drawing
Using the advanced math, text and drawing tools
Sharing a wide variety of content during your sessions, including word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, slides, and YouTube videos
Teachers themselves benefit from the following WizIQ features:
Organizing lecture content in your folders
Getting student feedback and publishing it on your profile page
Though, remember that teachers can also deliver live, synchronous classes through WizIQ. Use the virtual classroom synchronously for:
Taking student questions
Guiding practice sessions
Guiding lab time
Etc.
Even better, you can record these sessions and distribute them amongst students for review, aiding those who missed class or want to review.
There are other side benefits as well. Imagine snow days no longer stopping classes. Instead, teacher and students can meet online!
Benefits for students
There are plenty of benefits to students in flipped classrooms when you choose WizIQ. They can:
Download and learn from recorded lectures at their own pace and time, including features such as pause, rewind, watch again, and review.
No more failure to complete homework that the student couldn’t finish without assistance, which is made worse when there’s no time to help the next day in class.
Much more time to “do” than just listen, allowing teachers to better address different types of learners.
What’s more, teachers can encourage students to schedule their own virtual classroom sessions with classmates. Students can use these sessions to tutor one another, collaborate, review for exams, etc.
Parents can view the recordings as well, letting them better understand each teacher’s approach to particular concepts, or to refresh their own skills as they help their children study. The next time parents ask “What did you learn in school today?” their children can respond with “Watch the videos” instead of the typical “Nothin’.”
Interested in learning more? Request a demo to assess the WizIQ Virtual Classroom, and experiment with your own ideas around flipped classrooms. The e-teaching community will be delighted to hear your WizIQ flipped classroom approach and thoughts. We look forward to brainstorming and learning with you!
We just opened a developer portal, from where website owners can integrate WizIQ Virtual Classroom in their websites, CMS/LMS systems using the WizIQ API.
WizIQ has supported web services for some time, allowing users to integrate the Virtual Classroom into any website or content management system that supports the education and training markets. New RESTful APIs are now fully documented on developer.wiziq.com. WizIQ will be providing more direct support through this site to users looking to leverage these APIs.
WizIQ will also be investing over the next several months in creating turnkey and/or well-documented integrations with such open source learning projects as Instructure Canvas, openLMS, Centre SIS, and openSIS. These solutions will become available on developer.wiziq.com and will complement our existing Moodle module, Building Block for the Blackboard LearnTM platform, as well as plugins for proprietary systems.
WizIQ's Virtual Classroom enables organizations, teachers and learners to connect live from anywhere, offering real-time collaboration and communication.
The WizIQ Virtual Classroom features include:
Activities from your own website - schedule, manage and conduct live classes
Live online classes to small or large number of attendees simultaneously
Attendance report
Co-brand WizIQ Virtual Classroom with your logo
Multi-way audio (any number of attendees can speak at the same time)
Building Blocks® is Blackboard's open architecture project. WizIQ has developed a new Blackboard Building Block to give synchronous, live classes using WizIQ Virtual Classroom, directly from the Blackboard Learn platform.
The WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block allows users of the Blackboard LearnTM platform to schedule and launch live classes, view attendance reports, and view recordings by simply clicking on the links in their Blackboard Learn accounts. The WizIQ Virtual Classroom Blackboard Building Block works with Blackboard Learn 9.0 and 9.1.
The WizIQ Virtual Classroom Blackboard Building Block features include:
Quick download, deployment, and configuration in just a few minutes
WizIQ Virtual Classroom can be accessed without additional authentication or duplication of user databases
Teachers, instructors, moderators, and course builders can schedule and manage classes, enter live classes, view attendance report and past class recordings from within Blackboard Learn platform.
Advanced communication features such as web camera sharing, VoIP audio communications, text chat and even screen and application sharing across computing platforms are available for real-time collaboration
Instructors can share PDF, Word documents, Excel sheets, YouTube videos from inside the WizIQ Virtual Classroom with all users in the course
Advanced Whiteboard tools built into WizIQ Virtual Classroom like drawing, math tool, etc., are available for better learning experience
Instructors can allow students to use microphone, web camera, or write on the whiteboard
WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block for Blackboard LearnTM platform integration
WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block provides a nicely integrated workflow with Blackboard Learn platform. The close integration of WizIQ’s virtual classroom Building Block with Blackboard Learn platform frees teachers to focus on their content instead of the technology. This integration provides a way for Blackboard Learn™ administrators to easily install and configure the WizIQ Virtual Classroom Blackboard Building Block; allow teachers, instructors, moderators and course builders to schedule classes as part of their course offering; and students to enter live classes and view past class recordings.
For comprehensive information on prerequisites, installation, configuration and integration, please visit http://www.wiziq.com/vcplugin/
WizIQ Virtual Classroom Blackboard Building Block for instructors
WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block for Blackboard Learn platform provides instructors with a highly organized interface to schedule and manage classes. For each course, instructors, teaching assistants, course builders, and/or graders can schedule, conduct, manage and record live classes. Furthermore, classes are made available to all students registered in that course.
Schedule live classes
Here are some simple steps to schedule a class:
Define the class name, the start date and time, duration of class and description about the class in the class Schedule form (You can edit the class information any time)
Choose to record a class or not
Login to Blackboard Learn platform and click the Courses tab
Select the course from the course listing
Click Course Tools and select WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block from from Blackboard Learn’s Control Panel
Fill the schedule class form and click the Submit button
Manage classes
Once classes are scheduled, they get listed in Live and Upcoming Classes and also appear in the instructor’s My Calendar.
Here is how you can manage your classes:
View the complete list of current, upcoming and past classes on WizIQ Virtual Classroom home page
Edit class details, or cancel the upcoming classes
Join the class by simply clicking on that class’s title. Your students can also join the class in the same way (Attendees are not required to enter their usernames or passwords for the class, as they are pre-authenticated from the Blackboard Learn platform)
View the attendance report including details like, attendee name, exact duration of attendance, etc., after the completion of the class
View the recordings any time
WizIQ Virtual Classroom for students
Here is what students can do:
View class listings and class details, and enter live classes
Access recordings of past classes from WizIQ’s virtual classroom
Access upcoming classes directly from the list of Live and Upcoming classes and it’s course calendar
To join a live class or view a recording, students can simply click on the class title and WizIQ Virtual Classroom is launched. Students are not required to enter a username or a password for the class as they are pre-authenticated by the Blackboard LearnTM platform.
Once the live class is over, students can access recordings at any time.
Again, the complete guide is available in a print-friendly PDF format when you sign up here on WizIQ.
WizIQ users can already generate vanity URLs by suffixing their own user-names to WizIQ.com. A similar feature has now been extended where users can get short URLs for their learning resources as well.
What is a short URL?
In general, a short URL is something that is short in length, rather than a lengthy random number assigned to it, which is easy to remember and search, one that contains the name of a person/product/feature, etc. For example, the URL, http://www.wiziq.com/username/78256, was randomly generated by the website’s software, but, such an URL can be edited by a WizIQ user to make it short that looks like this: http://www.wiziq.com/username
A short URL is one that gives a user the ability to have his/her own name in the URL, where resources created by the user can be placed.
Advantages of a short URL on WizIQ
Easy to share
Easy to remember and search from the address bar of a browser
Creates brand value
Gives the ability to build brand image of the learning resources you own
A web space of your own, where your public learning resources on the website can be placed
Examples of short URLs
A short URL of one of our most active teachers, Dr Subroto Biswas: http://www.wiziq.com/drsubrotobiswas
A short URL of classes scheduled by George: http://www.wiziq.com/George/classes
A short URL of tutorials created by George: http://www.wiziq.com/George/tutorials
A short URL tests created by Gurjinder: http://www.wiziq.com/techguru/tests
A short URL of George's followers: http://www.wiziq.com/George/followers
A short URL of users followed by George: http://www.wiziq.com/George/following
Currently short URLs are available for classes, tutorials, tests, followers, and users followed by a user. Short URL will be made available to the courses soon.
Welcome to the annual Connecting Online 2011 (CO11), live online conference. You are cordially invited to participate at the live online conference starting from the 4th of February to the 6th of February, 2011.
Educators at all levels will find this conference very useful, as many eminent intellectuals from across the globe will be holding webinars (web based seminars) on a variety of topics that help you understand:
The importance of integrating technology into traditional classroom teaching
Social networking, digital learning and best practices
Moodle and other APIs that augment existing LMSs (Learning Management Systems)
Challenges that educators, administrators, students, and community members face in online learning/teaching
Independent e-learning strategies, etc.
This is a rare event and happens only once a year. This event is not only useful to educators, but also to administrators, students, and community members. So, we suggest that you do not miss CO11. Register for the webinars by clicking the title links below:
