Moodle Teachers - Create a Google Meet room in your Moodle course easily
Moodle plugins allows you to integrate with other online learning platforms. You can make use of other educational platforms like Zoom, Canva with Moodle to enhance your online learning experience. In this post, we will see how you can create a Google Meet room right in your Moodle course.
The Google Meet for Moodle plugin makes it possible to create Google meet rooms in your Moodle course. As an educator you can create the Google Meet room without leaving the Moodle course. Your students can also watch the recordings of your Google Meet rooms which are saved in Google Drive.
Google Meet is a video-communication service developed by Google. It’s a great solution for both individuals and businesses to meet on audio and video calls. It was born from Google Hangouts but boasts some unique features.
You can download the Google Meet for Moodle plugin from the official plugin’s repository here. If you are new to Moodle, please check out this guide to learn how to install a Moodle plugin. This plugin is compatible for all major Moodle versions.
The plugin needs an active OAuth 2 service for Google. You can follow this guide to set up an OAuth 2 service for Google.
Once installed & configured, you can use this documentation to setup the Google Meet in your Moodle course. You can also send out the notifications to your students about the start date of the event.
Have you ever used the Google Meet in your Moodle course? What is your preferred web conference program which you are using with Moodle? Please share with us in the comments section below.
What is Pear Deck and How Does It Work? Tips and Tricks
Are you tired of boring, one-dimensional presentations? Look no further than Pear Deck! This innovative tool allows you to create interactive and engaging presentations that keep your audience involved and interested. Whether you’re a teacher or a business professional, Pear Deck can take your presentations to the next level. Read on to learn more about what Pear Deck is and how it can benefit you.
Pear Deck is an interactive presentation tool designed to engage students and audience members in real-time. It allows educators to create interactive presentations and enables students to respond to prompts, questions, and activities on their own devices, such as laptops, tablets, or smartphones. This results in increased engagement, participation, and retention of information.
In this blog post, we will explore the features of Pear Deck, how it works, some tips and tricks to make the most of this tool, and how to join and get started with it.
What is Pear Deck and how does it work?
Pear Deck is an interactive presentation tool that allows you to create engaging and interactive presentations. With Pear Deck, you can add interactive questions, polls, and quizzes to your slides, allowing your audience to participate and engage with your content. Pear Deck works by integrating with Google Slides, allowing you to create your presentation in Google Slides and then add interactive elements using the Pear Deck add-on. When you present your slides, your audience can participate using their own devices, such as smartphones or laptops, making it easy to engage with your content.
The idea is to offer a digital tool that teachers can use to create and present material to the class on the big screen. But students can follow along on their personal devices, and interact when invited to, all helping to make the presentation far more immersive for the class.
This tool also works for formative assessments throughout the class, allowing students to show how they’re understanding the material and teachers to better pace the lesson to include all levels of ability at the right speed.
What is Pear Deck and How Does It Work? Tips and Tricks
Pear Deck Best Features
Pear Deck has a range of features that make it an effective tool for interactive presentations. Here are some of the key features:
Interactive Slides – Pear Deck allows educators to create interactive slides that can include several types of questions, prompts, and activities. These include multiple-choice questions, short answer questions, drawing activities, and more. Students can respond to these prompts in real-time on their own devices, which allows for more engagement and participation.
Engagement Dashboard – Pear Deck provides an engagement dashboard that allows educators to see in real-time how many students are participating and how they are responding to prompts. This dashboard provides valuable insights into how engaged students are during the presentation.
Teacher-Paced or Student-Paced Mode – Pear Deck allows for both teacher-paced and student-paced modes. In teacher-paced mode, educators control the pace of the presentation, and all students see the same slide at the same time. In student-paced mode, students can work through the presentation at their own pace, which allows for more flexibility and individualization.
Google Integration – Pear Deck is integrated with Google Slides, which makes it easy to create and share presentations with others. Educators can create presentations in Google Slides and then import them into Pear Deck. Additionally, Pear Deck integrates with Google Classroom, which makes it easy to share presentations with students.
Tips for using Pear Deck in the classroom
Whether you’re a teacher looking to enhance your classroom presentations or a business professional looking to engage your audience during a presentation, Pear Deck can help. Here are some tips for using Pear Deck in the classroom:
Start with a clear objective for your presentation.
Use interactive questions and polls to keep your audience engaged.
Customize the design and layout of your presentation to match your branding or personal style.
Use Pear Deck’s analytics to track audience participation and adjust your presentation accordingly.
Encourage audience participation and feedback throughout your presentation.
Use Pear Deck’s integration with Google Classroom or other learning management systems to easily share your presentation with students or colleagues.
Practice your presentation beforehand to ensure a smooth and engaging delivery.
How Pear Deck Works
Pear Deck allows teachers to create slide show-style presentations using their Google Slides account. This can be done from scratch, however, there is a massive selection of templates to work with, making the process easy.
Pear Deck also allows teachers to see the deck live so they can see who is participating at that moment. Student responses appear on the teacher’s screen in real time, even if working remotely.
Teachers can create, share, and present their Pear Deck presentations directly from a laptop or tablet easily. There are apps but user reviews are not great as there are some usability issues – so it’s often easier to use this via a web browser.
While building, teachers can pick from four question types:
Draggable questions with agree/disagree or thumbs up/down.
Drawing questions with a free space or grid for students to draw in.
Free response questions with short text, long text, or number capabilities.
Multiple choice questions with response of yes/no, true/false, or A,B,C,D.
How to share Pear Deck Join Code?
To share a Pear Deck join code with your students or audience members, you can follow these steps:
Open your Pear Deck presentation and click on the “Present” button.
Once you are in presentation mode, click on the “Settings” gear icon in the top right corner.
In the Settings menu, click on the “Session Settings” tab.
Under “Session Settings,” you will see a section titled “Join Instructions.” Here, you can customize the instructions that will appear on the screen when students or audience members join the Pear Deck session.
Copy the join code provided in the “Join Instructions” section. You can also choose to display the join code on the screen by selecting the “Display on Projector” option.
Share the join code with your students or audience members through a method of your choice, such as displaying it on a screen, sending it via email, or writing it on a whiteboard.
When students or audience members enter the join code on their own devices at joinpd.com, they will be able to join the Pear Deck session and participate in the interactive presentation.
How to join Pear Deck?
If you are a student and your teacher is using Pear Deck, you will need to join a Pear Deck session by entering the session code provided by your teacher. You can do this by going to joinpd.com and entering the code. This will allow you to participate in the interactive presentation and respond to prompts and questions on your own device.
How much does Pear Deck cost?
Pear Deck pricing starts with the Free package with Individual Premium & School packages. The three packages are:
Free: Offers most of the main feature including creation of lessons, Google and Microsoft integration, student Locks and Timers, templates to use, and access to a Flashcard Factory.
Individual Premium at $149.99 per year: This has all of the above as well as the ability to view and highlight responses by name, support remote and asynchronous work with Student Paced mode, add draggable and drawable responses, add on-the-fly questions and activities, share student progress with Takeaways, get Immersive Reader, add audio to slides, and more.
Schools and districts at a custom price: All of the above plus efficacy reports, training, dedicated support, and LMS integrations with Canvas and Schoology.
How to measure the success of your Pear Deck presentations?
One of the excellent features of Pear Deck is the ability to track audience participation and engagement through analytics. You can see how many people responded to each question or poll, which questions were most popular, and how long people spent on each slide. This data can help you adjust your presentation for future audiences and improve your overall presentation skills. Additionally, you can ask for feedback from your audience at the end of the presentation to get a better understanding of what worked well and what could be improved upon.
Pear Deck Engagement?
Pear Deck engagement refers to the level of participation and interaction of students or audience members during a presentation or lesson that is created and delivered using the Pear Deck platform.
Pear Deck offers a range of interactive features, such as multiple-choice questions, short answer questions, drawing activities, and more, that enable students to respond to prompts and questions in real-time on their own devices. This allows educators to gauge the level of engagement and understanding of their audience during the presentation.
The engagement dashboard in Pear Deck provides real-time data on student participation, responses, and progress throughout the presentation. Educators can use this information to adjust their teaching strategies and adapt the presentation to ensure that students remain engaged and on track.
Some ways to increase Pear Deck engagement include:
Incorporating interactive activities and questions that require student participation
Varying the types of activities and questions to keep students interested and engaged
Providing timely feedback to students to keep them motivated and on track
Encouraging peer-to-peer collaboration through group activities and discussions
Using student-paced mode to allow students to work at their own pace and engage with the material in a more personalized way.
Overall, Pear Deck engagement can lead to improved learning outcomes, increased participation, and greater retention of information. By using the interactive features of Pear Deck, educators can create engaging and effective presentations that meet the needs of their students
Canva for Education has partnered with EverFi K-12 to offer readymade templates in the Canva App. EverFi offer’s standards-aligned, ready-made digital lessons to teach students for career and life success.
With the partnership, Canva for Education users can access free EverFi templates. EverFi is a ready-made digital lesson provider with a mission to equip students with real-world skills. EverFi courses range from financial literacy, career readiness, to social-emotional learning and more.
The EverFi lessons are used by more than 60,000+ teachers and are available for free of cost. All the lessons are Interactive, game-based lessons designed by experienced educators help you engage students at all grade levels and bring real-world skills to your classroom.
EverFi offered lessons on the following topics:
Financial Education
Character Education
Health & Wellness
STEM/Career Readiness
Early Learning
You can check out all the lesson offered by EverFi here. Check out all the templates offered by EverFi in Canva here.
Duolingo English Test has announced its partnership with The Next Genius Scholarship Programme
Duolingo English Test (DET), a modern English proficiency assessment for today’s international students and institutions, has announced its partnership with The Next Genius Scholarship Programme. This partnership aims to undertake an Inspiring India tour, encompassing 1000 high schools in over 50 cities across the country during the upcoming two years.
The Inspiring India Tour initiative provides the best educational resources to students and counsellors across India. Through this initiative, Next Genius aims to help students from all backgrounds access quality education and achieve their goals.
Speaking on the collaboration, the Founder of The Next Genius Scholarship Programme, Dr Neeraj Mandhana, said:
Access to a world-class education is essential for talented and deserving students to achieve their full potential, regardless of their geographic location. Next Genius provides comprehensive scholarships, mentorship, and networking opportunities to students in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, empowering them to access quality education and fulfil their aspirations. Next Genius is committed to creating a community of diverse and accomplished scholars who will positively impact the world. Next Genius is happy to partner with Duolingo English Test (DET) to reach out to more students and schools, spread awareness about the scholarship program, and support students’ academic and professional aspirations.
While the Next Genius team is helping with scholarships, an English proficiency test is mandatory for most universities and colleges abroad for their admission process. India is the largest market for the Duolingo English Test, with people taking the test from over 1,200 cities and towns in the past year, making the Inspiring India Tour initiative timelier and more relevant.
The Indian overseas education market is projected to hit $100 billion by 2025, as more than 2 million Indian students intend to pursue higher education overseas.1 However, students face challenges with expenses, visa requirements, and intricate immigration procedures. According to Duolingo’s India Report Card, 71% of students pick their preferred countries to study abroad because of scholarship opportunities.
India Marketing Head of Duolingo English Test, Tara Kapur, added:
At DET, we’re constantly working to break down the barriers to higher education abroad and help more students access the opportunities they deserve. Our goal is to provide a modern English proficiency assessment accessible to the broader Indian population. The Inspiring India Tour is all about making study abroad dreams come true. We’re proud to partner with Next Genius as they go on a journey to visit schools nationwide and empower students with scholarships and educational opportunities. The DET is recognized by over 4000 institutions in over 50 countries and is trusted by the top universities in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and more.
Established in 2014, The Next Genius Foundation is a registered charitable trust in India with a vision to identify world changers and connect them with outstanding university scholarships. In the last eight years, the platform partner’s colleges have awarded scholarships worth $38 million, helping 294 students to pursue their undergraduate education in the US.
DeepHow, an AI-powered video platform raised $14M in a Series A funding
DeepHow, an AI-powered video platform for skilled workforce training, has raised $14M in a Series A funding round led by Owl Ventures.
DeepHow plans to invest in go-to-market initiatives to accelerate its business growth, and to ramp up its investments in product, engineering, and generative AI innovation. DeepHow has already fast-tracked the development of powerful product enhancements that leverage the power of generative AI to accelerate SOP video creation, multimodal workflow generation, AI chat assistance, and strategic knowledge mapping.
DeepHow was founded in 2018 by a team of ex-Siemens researchers and engineers who saw an unmet need to transfer knowledge in the skilled workforce market. They developed an AI-powered, video-centric knowledge-capture and learning platform that bridges the skills gap in the manufacturing, service, and construction industries. DeepHow streamlines the capture and transfer of technical skills and know-how – compressing project time by 10x, boosting worker performance by 25% and dramatically reducing overall training and development costs.
Commenting on the development, Dr. Sam Zheng, Co-founder & CEO of DeepHow, said,
Today, manufacturers are under intense pressure to improve efficiency and reduce costs while meeting growing customer demands. At the heart of this transformation is Industry 4.0, which leverages advanced technologies such as AI, IoT, and automation to achieve operational excellence. Realizing the full potential of Industry 4.0 requires more than just technology investment, it also requires a strategic approach to capturing, sharing, and transferring knowledge across teams and departments. This oversubscribed Series A round underscores that our investors share our vision. It also demonstrates their confidence in our ability to build on our technical leadership and accelerate our go-to-market operations.
DeepHow’s compelling value proposition for the manufacturing and service industries is fueled by the confluence of several industry trends that are driving demand for workers who can quickly assimilate technical skills. Among the forces that are shaping industry globally are the rapid evolution of advanced technology in use on the factory floor, the digitalization of manufacturing associated with Industry 4.0, the restructuring of global supply chains, and a paradigm shift in the way people prefer to learn.
Ian Chiu, Managing Director at Owl Ventures, said,
The need to capture the skills and know-how of senior, experienced workers—and then transfer that knowledge through engaging and efficient training during on-boarding and through reskilling initiatives has never been more important. Over 70+ global customers, the majority of them multinational enterprise companies, are leveraging DeepHow’s AI-powered training platform to streamline the capture and transfer of technical skills and know-how — compressing project time by 10x, boosting worker performance by 25%, and dramatically reducing overall training and development costs. We’re excited to be partnering with Sam, Patrik, and the entire DeepHow as they continue to scale and expand on their market leadership.
What is SlidesGPT and How you can use it for education? Tips & Tricks
SlidesGPT is a new AI-powered tool that allows you to quickly make slide presentations automatically. It is designed to make your life easier through automating a lot of it, using AI. The idea is that you simply type in what you want, and the system will trawl the internet for images and information to come back with a slideshow all set for you.
With SlidesGPT you need not to worry about the writer’s block and blank slides to start with. You will get a good chunk of content in your slides deck which can be updated to make your life easier. It works with Microsoft Powerpoint & Google Slides.
SlidesGPT can be an incredibly useful tool for students and educators alike. It can help students create engaging presentations quickly, which can be especially useful for students who are short on time or have difficulty creating presentations on their own. SlidesGPT can also help educators create visually appealing presentations that can capture their students’ attention and help them understand complex concepts more easily.
What is SlidesGPT?
SlidesGPT is an AI-based presentation tool that uses machine learning to generate high-quality slides automatically. It is a product of OpenAI, a research organization that focuses on developing AI technologies for the benefit of humanity. SlidesGPT is based on the GPT-3 language model, which is one of the most advanced AI models currently available.
The idea is to save time on slide presentation creation by using the artificial intelligence to most of the digital leg work. This means using AI to take directions and perform tasks on the person’s request. You can use AI bot to crawl the internet to compile the information for you and find out images.
How does SlidesGPT work?
SlidesGPT is pretty straightforward to use with only web interface. Everything is web-based so it can be accessed across a host of devices, from laptops to smartphones — as long as you have an internet connection. You just need to navigate to https://slidesgpt.com/ and enter your topic in the text box.
SlidesGPT
Choose the theme out of the two and hit “Create Deck’ button. It will take some time to compile the information & images and get the slides deck in place. The final result should be a selection of slides with text and images that you can scroll down through, right there in the web browser. At the bottom is a short link you can copy as well as a share icon and a download option, allowing you to immediately distribute your creation with the class, individuals, or to other devices for sharing on larger screens, for example.
What is SlidesGPT Pricing
SlidesGPT offers two plans – Free and Pay-per Download. As the name suggests, the free plan allows you to create unlimimted presentations and share them. The design templates are limited for the free plan.
In the Pay-per-Download plan, priced at $2.50 per download, you can download your presentation in Microsoft Powerpoint, Google Slides as well as PDF format.
What are the best SlidesGPT features?
The best feature of SlidesGPT is the ease of use. You can get your presentation without visiting a single webpage in few minutes. This can help you save a lot of time especially if you are someone who suffers from Writer’s block. There is no need to stare at blank screen and think how to get started.
You can also make use of SlidesGPT in your class to showcase to your students how AI works and what are its limitations and abilities. They may be going through more AI tools in near future as it becomes more prevalent and better at its tasks.
Singapore-Based Explico Raises $1.4M in Pre-Series A Funding
Explico, an online assessment-based learning platform using AI and machine learning that helps students to measure their learning outcomes and identify their strengths and weaknesses, announced that it has raised $1.4 million in its pre-Series A funding.
The Singaporean startup plans to utilize the fresh capital to create a more comprehensive learning platform for students and commence growth expansion starting with SouthEast Asia, specifically Vietnam and Philippines, and Africa.
Founded by Ashutosh Shukla in 2020, Explico measures students’ learning outcomes based on subject, topic, concepts and sub-concepts. The platform conducts regular live sessions by experienced teachers with decades of experience. It can generate assessment tasks, find appropriate peers for study groups, and provide transparent adaptive feedback using artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The startup uses these AI techniques that adjust the task to the student’s abilities, giving them tailored assessment experiences and producing a learning method suitable for their capabilities.
Speaking about the platform, the Founder & CEO of Explico, Ashutosh Shukla, said:
We aspire to introduce and implement the most robust assessment-based educational system in Singapore. Our sessions are customized to suit the needs of individual students as we have a team of experienced tutors and educators in their respective fields who would be able to properly guide, mentor and educate the students and create a module that is suitable based on their assessment needs for them to excel.
Explico is also part of Microsoft for Startup Founders Hub, which enables them to connect to education sectors across the globe through their networking channels. The company’s advisory team includes former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education, Er Kwong Wah and the Founder of AsknLearn, Yee Jenn Jong. Commenting on the fundraising, Co-founder & COO of Explico, Sandesh Shetty, said:
The value of the global Edtech market was $106.46 billion in 2021 and projected to grow annually by 16.5 per cent, up to $404 billion in 2025. With English as one of the primary languages spoken in Southeast Asia and Africa, we look forward to scaling Explico in those regions, beginning with growth expansion plans to Vietnam and the Philippines in the first quarter of 2023.
The firm is fully equipped with an academic faculty of experienced educators and mentors in English, Science and Mathematics and collaborates with various institutions in Singapore and internationally, which allows students to have the opportunity to access worldwide education from a young age.
Moodle Teachers use this plugin to detect cheating students
Moodle LMS is one of the most easily customizable learning management system. The plugins allow’s you to add any type of functionality in your Moodle LMS easily. There are times when you are looking to find out if your students are cheating during the quiz in your Moodle course. In this post, we will see about a new report plugin which allows you to figure out if any students are cheating in your course.
The Simultaneous activities report plugin is intended to provide teachers with a simple tool to detect possible cheating by students during online assessment. The report analyzes Moodle activity logs to count the number of various user activity events during a time interval.
The report performs the following searches:
User visits anywhere in the course. If selected, reference activities are excluded.
User visits in any part of the entire server (includes other courses).
Instant messages sent by each user.
Actions performed on messages by each user. For example: delete, read, write instant messages.
The plugin does not give details of the detected actions, it only gives the number of detected events. If a teacher suspects inappropriate activities, he/she can make a more detailed analysis of his/her course logs or ask the administrators for help for further investigation.
For all users who are concerned about the privacy of their users, the report does not disclose detailed data, only count of events. It does not analyze users of other courses.
You can download the Simultaneous Activities report plugin from the official plugin’s repository here. If you are new to Moodle, please visit this guide to understand How to install a Moodle plugin. The plugin is available for Moodle 3.9 version onwards till Moodle 4.2 version.
Women Career Engagement Platform HerKey Raises $4M in Pre-Series A Round
HerKey, India’s most prominent career engagement platform for women, announced that it has raised $4 million in its pre-Series A round led by Kalaari Capital and 360 ONE Asset.
Founded by Neha Bagaria, HerKey (formerly known as JobsForHer) supports companies in building a diverse and inclusive workplace, attracting and retaining top talent, and positively impacting their business. Through HerKey, companies can recruit, retain and promote female talent by providing the required opportunities, learning and communities – all customized to women’s needs.
According to the company’s statement, the platform seeks to address the gender gap in the Indian workforce, where only 20% of women participate in the labour force, compared to 60% in China and 55% in the United States.
Speaking about the capital raised, Founder & CEO of HerKey, Neha Bagaria, said:
We are grateful to our esteemed investors for their support in helping us create a more inclusive workforce for women in India. We need to create a movement where everyone, including men, supports and champions women’s careers. By working together, we can create a more inclusive and equitable workforce, which will benefit all.
Founder & Managing Director of Kalaari Capital, Vani Kola, added:
A crucial aspect of India’s economic ascent in the coming decade will be increasing participation of women in the workforce. A digital platform like Herkey is the need of the hour to make progress towards this goal. HerKey helps women exchange diverse knowledge and perspectives and enables them to interact without being constrained by time and location. We have been impressed by HerKey’s growth trajectory and look forward to partnering with them as they redefine the landscape of women’s careers in India.
The startup currently serves 3.5 million women and plans to scale this number to 30 million. It claims to have over 10,000 companies enrolled for the platform to engage with women candidates.
Join the Learning Impact 2023 in Anaheim, California from June 5-8, 2023
The Learning Impact 2023 conference will take place in Anaheim, California from June 5-8, 2023. The edtech conference connects academic and technology leaders to create and evolve innovative digital solutions and strategies that improve education and opportunities for learners at all levels.
The Learning Impact 2023 conference will have more than 100+ sessions and networking opportunities, dozens of thought-provoking speakers to learn from and inspire you.
The Learning Impact 2023 edtech conference will have sessions focused on K-12 Districts, higher education & Edtech suppliers. There will be many exciting panel discussion sessions like Is Artificial Intelligence Going to Improve Learning, Dumb It Down or Something Else?, Leading Innovation to Power Learner Potential and many more.
You can register for the Learning Impact 2023 edtech conference through this link.
1EdTech is a member-based non-profit community partnership of leading educational providers at all levels, government organizations, and edtech suppliers working together to enable better digital teaching and learning. 1EdTech hosts the annual Learning Impact conference and other engagement opportunities to advance the leadership and ideas that shape the future of learning.
For more details about the program schedule, venue, sponsorship etc, please check out the official website here.
