Chalk and magnetic board for the foreign languages course

Mar 14, 2012

I’d like to share with you the experience associated with an e-learning project that I am currently working on.

The goal of the training is learning English and German. This course is designed for people who are just getting started with learning Goethe’s and Shakespeare’s language.

The whole project consists of 12 lessons - 6 of each language. Every lesson is one topic in which we pass some basic phrases and words. Topics that we chose is: shopping, health, vacation and travel, family, culture and holidays.

In the original version, we assumed the simultaneous transmission of knowledge of both languages - but after much discussion and analysis of advantages and disadvantages of this approach, we finally decided to produce one same-time language version.

As you can see in the following print screens (only English version), the visual design of the slide I used, is the tip of chalk board, which Tom Kuhlmann described on his blog

For the captions and commands on the board I used Calibri font and gave it a white fill available in the WordArt section. After writing the text, I saved it as an image and imported into PowerPoint.

Then I used the pastels smooth effect on the inserted picture, which is available in the Format tab, Adjust group, Artistic Effects. In this way the text looks like written in chalk - a very convenient solution, because it is not easy to find a handwritten font in Polish due to our specific case. This trick was also mentioned by someone on the community blog.

Additionally, to make the slides more attractive, the blackboard chalk was treated also as a magnetic board. The magnets fasten the paper cards with the English or German words.

I used also branched scenarios to give the user a choice whether he wants to solve the test or to learn new words. Great screencast by David Anderson referring scenarios is available here and the blog post of Tom Kuhlman

What do you think of this idea, what are your impressions? Maybe you have any suggestions? Would you organize the graphics and slides in some other way?

Best regards from Poland

Joanna

7 Replies

Jeanette Brooks

12 years ago03/15/12 at 9:36 am (UTC)

Joanna, your slides look great! And the technique of "chalkifying" the text is a really clever solution!

I especially love the Labeled Graphic interaction in the 2nd screenshot. What a great way to carry over the magnet-fastener theme. What happens when learners click on the red magnets on the clock? Do they see additional text? An image? A movie? An audio explanation?

James Brown

12 years ago03/15/12 at 1:24 pm (UTC)

You have a nice idea and I take it you are just trying to do something like Rosetta Stone. I.e. you are trying to teach conversational Deutsch. The trick is the sentence structure which took me over three and a half years to learn along with many high school and college German courses. Gutes Glück mit Ihrem Projekt.

Poornima Ramachandran

12 years ago03/16/12 at 12:23 am (UTC)

Nice trick with the chalk font. My teammate Tom Thomas has also made an interesting blog on how to get a chalkwritten font, with the help of MS Paint. Here's the link - http://instructionaldesigning.blogspot.in/2011/03/write-on-chalkboard-using-ms-paint.html.

Natalia Mueller

12 years ago03/16/12 at 1:30 pm (UTC)

I really like what you're doing here and how you continued it into the labeled graphic. I'm actually pulling up my Design.doc right now to add a reference to this thread. Great ideas!

Joanna Kurpiewska
Author

12 years ago03/19/12 at 4:15 am (UTC)

Thanks everybody for your feedback.

Jeanette Brooks said:

I especially love the Labeled Graphic interaction in the 2nd screenshot. What a great way to carry over the magnet-fastener theme. What happens when learners click on the red magnets on the clock? Do they see additional text? An image? A movie? An audio explanation?

Jeanette,

After clicking on the mangets on the clock, user can hear the question: "What do you eat for...(the name of the meal)". Just like this one below:

Also all quiz interactions are made in the magnetic board style.

I really had a lot of fun designing the slides.

James Brown said:

You have a nice idea and I take it you are just trying to do something like Rosetta Stone. I.e. you are trying to teach conversational Deutsch. The trick is the sentence structure which took me over three and a half years to learn along with many high school and college German courses. Gutes Glück mit Ihrem Projekt.

James,

my project is like a combination of image, text and sound with the emphasis of practical phrases.

Vielen Dank für deine Interesse und wünsche dir auch alles Gute