1.5 Small interactive tools with big impact

Tools that enable you to add interactive items to web pages, such as word clouds, quizzes, and drag and drop exercises are all freely available on the internet. If you have an idea for an online teaching technique that you’d like to try with your learners, the chances are that there will be a tool somewhere to help you to achieve it.

Tip

Some of these types of tools may use browser plug ins that add the ability to use technologies, such as Flash or Java software, to generate content for you. If this is the case, you may need to ensure that you and your students have up to date Flash and Java installations for these websites to work properly. Guidance on this can be found at Adobe Flash Player and Java. It is worth checking whether the interactive components work well on different kinds of browsers or platforms. For example, do they work on Firefox or Google Chrome, a tablet or mobile device?

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Figure 4 A screenshot of a tutorial using a web conferencing platform
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A screenshot from an online tutorial. A slide is shown, upon which participants have drawn ticks to indicate their areas of interest. Panels to the side show a list of participants (with names obscured) and a chat pane (names similarly obscured)

Figure 4 A screenshot of a tutorial using a web conferencing platform

1.4 Image manipulation

1.6 E-learning development tools