Assigning homework should be to give students further practice and be purposeful. Don’t give homework just because that’s something that one “does”. In this article we are going to explore some ways how homework can be done online and why this might be useful as well as what possible downsides could be.

1) Let’s start with the obvious one: Having students submit their answers online will save you as a teacher lots of time with grading. On Learnclick.com you can easily create all kinds of question types, like gap-filling exercises, drag & drop quizzes as well as open-ended questions that can be annotated online. The answers will get automatically graded and you get a nice overview that let’s you quickly see with which questions students struggled.

2) Assigning quizzes online is also an advantage for the student as he gets instant feedback on which answers were right and wrong, provided you don’t disable this option. If he got the answer wrong, you can provide an explanation which will help the student understand the material better.

One of the disadvantages of allowing unlimited submissions is that it may encourage lazy habits, that is, the student re-submits the answer without thinking until he gets the correct answer. So you might consider limiting the number of attempts he gets.

3) A further advantage of assigning online homework is that you can link or embed multimedia elements like audio and video. Pictures can of course be in color whereas with paper homework you might just print them out in black and white.

A disadvantage of online homework that could be considered is that students might easily be distracted by other things when working on their computer. For example they might feel the urge to check their friends Facebook page or watch a video. However, most students will anyways use the internet for looking up explanations or asking their friends for help. This is something that a teacher can’t control outside of the classroom.

4) There are less books to carry as the student can look up material online. He won’t be able to forget his books at school or at home. Of course students can bring up the excuse that internet didn’t work at home, but that excuse won’t work every time…

Make sure that students know how to use the various online tools. Demonstrate it to them during class time and if possible give them some time to practice before they go home.

Recently one of our users wrote the following at the start of her quiz:

“The right/wrong questions on this quiz will be corrected by my own personal correction robot. The written (or typed) questions will be corrected by me. Only then will your final score be known.

This is an example of the happy cooperation of artificial intelligence and old-fashioned teacher brain, working in harmony. My correction robot works with phenomenal speed, giving you immediate feedback. I plod along like a middle-aged woman (funny, that).

Sometimes, my correction robot is a little lacking in intuition. She will mark you wrong, for instance, if you misspell a word. Don’t worry, if I notice that this has happened to you, I shall override her and give you full marks; that is, so long as the word you have misspelt bears some resemblance to the correct answer.

So take it easy and don’t stress if you make a small insignificant error. Human intuition is still involved and my aim is to award you as many points as possible.

Kind regards and best wishes from your (old-fashioned) teacher and your (up-to-the-minute) correction robot.”

(By Roslyn G, used with permission)

I found this quite funny and thought I’d explain how things work in the background.

If you are a pro member, like this user is, than you can have the answers recorded. You can either create a class, share the quiz with Google Classroom or have anonymous answers recorded (you can ask for the name at the beginning of the quiz).

You can decide if users get immediate feedback and see the score or not.

In any case, as a teacher you will see the given answers by clicking on the “Grade” icon in your dashboard:

If you create a cloze test, where students have to write the answer in the gaps themselves, you can have multiple correct answers (useful for alternate spellings):

Separate the alternative correct answers with #. Highlight the whole group of words before clicking the “Create gap word” button.

Examples:
Yellow is a bright color#colour
I live here#there#at home.

The “correction robot” will now mark both options as correct.

NEW: If your students submitted the answers and you noticed that some students entered another spelling and you didn’t add that to the alternative spellings, you can now add it later using the hashtag and when you save the quiz, it will automatically update the score and the answer will now display for all students who used this different spelling as correct.

Note, when answers have already been submitted and you want to edit a quiz, you get this warning:

This warning means, that you shouldn’t add additional questions or clozes, but you may still do some changes to the formatting, rephrase a question or add alternative answers as mentioned above.

Finally, this teacher mentioned that written questions will be corrected by her. She is referring to the open-ended/essay questions. The answers for these questions can also be annotated inside Learnclick, by going to the details page (clicking on “username”) on the grade page.

Learnclick can save time grading. Use these options and ask us if anything remains unclear.

Make sure you include a variety of listening material for practice, e.g. songs, news, dialogues, etc. They should get exposed to different accents and voices. Try to find material that interests them.

In order for students to improve their listening skills, it’s not enough to just have them listen passively. They must be active in their listening and think of answers, opinions, etc. Here is a list of question types you can create.

1. Use multiple choice quizzes to check for meaning. For example, ask what the meaning of an idiom is that was used in the recording.
2. Use open-ended why questions. For example “Why did the man not have time for eating lunch?”
3. Who said what? Write down a sentence that was in the dialogue and use the multiple choice question type to list all the possible people who might have said that sentence.
4. Which statements are true? Use the question type “Checkboxes (several answers correct)” and have several correct and wrong answers.
5. Ask your students to fill in the blanks. This will help them focus on the text at word level. They can help students with learning new vocabulary or grammar points.
   
   The text can either be taken directly from the transcript or you can make up your own, based on the transcript. If the goal isn’t for students to practice their writing, you can also have them choose from a dropdown or use the drag & drop question type.
6. Have them write an essay where you ask them about their opinion.

With learnclick.com you can not only create all the question types mentioned above easily, but you can also embed videos from youtube or upload a mp3 file to our server and have it play inside the quiz.

As a pro member you can have the answers recorded. If you choose to ask open-ended/essay questions, you can annotate the text and have the students view your feedback as a pdf file.

The Learnclick Quiz Creator is more versatile than you might think…

Recently a teacher asked the following question:

What would be the best way to set up the type of question below.

Identify the subject and verb in the sentence below:

Our answer: I suggest using the question type Generated Dropdowns.

You can simply paste your table into the textbox and then create some empty spaces (for the wrong answers) and mark those plus the correct answers as gaps:

This is how it will look like:

Other tips: How to create jumbled sentences Not sure how to create a question? Feel free to ask us.

Creating quizzes for embedding into a website has been possible for some time now. How to find the embed code (iframe) is explained here. You can find a number of quizzes that are embedded this way on some of the websites created by our users: https://www.learnclick.com/site/clients.

We’re excited about our new feature that let’s you record the user input.

Have you ever wondered how many of your site visitors actually try to take a quiz and if they managed to answer most of the questions correctly? You could also use this feature for creating surveys… Find out more about recording anonymous answers.