Increase Interactivity in the Classroom with Socrative

By Dr. Gabriela Palis

Socrative is an automatic response system that allows teachers create interactivity in the classroom via smartphones, laptops, and tablets. It does not require additional clickers.

Socrative is easy to install and use, taking a few minutes to set up. Once you have logged in through your smartphone, laptop, or tablet, you will be assigned a room number and prompted to select an activity: a multiple choice, true/false, or short answer question.

At the same time, your students will need to log in with the same room number to be able to receive your questions. 

Once the exercises have been completed you will receive an aggregated report, in an Excel file or as a Google spreadsheet.

Watch the video below to learn more or click here to go to Socrative

Following up on your students and yourself. (For Gmail users)

As a teacher you probably use email to communicate with your learners. Some of the things you may use it for are assigning tasks, ask questions, answer questions and request homework delivery among others.
Please see if any of the following apply to you:

1. You send a question or request a task, you get no immediate answer, and you forget about it until several weeks later (If you ever remember)
2. Your inbox is cluttered with emails you have to take action on the future, but not today or even this week.
3. You send yourself an email to remind you on something you must do in the future and it starts going down in your inbox. By the day you should be reminded, it is so down in your inbox that you don´t even see it.

If you answered yes to any of the previous situations and you use Gmail, then "Boomerang" can come to the rescue.
With "Boomerang" you will be able to be reminded to follow up on tasks you gave others, receive reminders of your own tasks the day you need to do them and clean your inbox of mails you must take action in the future, having them appear in your inbox the day you need them there.

To learn more about "Boomerang" watch the following video.

Continuing discussions outside the classroom

By Eduardo Mayorga

Many times, after a lecture and some discussion, time ends while still opportunity for discussion exists.
This discussion can be taken online using forums that usually are part of a learning management system.
Because not every residency program has a learning management system in place it is useful to know you can easily set up an online discussion using  "Google Moderator".

"Moderator" allows you to setup forums (called "series" ), where those you invite may post ideas, answers to the ideas and vote for the best ideas.

You may read more on how to use this tool clicking here. 

Publishing Documents as Magazines

By Dr. Helena Felipe

Issuu, http://issuu.com/ is a digital publishing platform that enables users to upload their authoring files featured as PDF and then have them published online ready to be “manipulated” as a journal.

We can have them all propped up in a personal shelf and share them with our own learning community.

We just have to create an account and once logged in it will be possible to upload as many files as we wish for free using the basic account features which are pretty much enough to accomplish what we have been describing.

When uploading documents we will be invited to provide their description and to define our target audience.

The basic account brings extra advertisements with it, usually related to our published topic and only allows printed material over payment.

After selecting the uploaded publication from the shelf we can then open it and view it interactive, page by page or selecting the specific pages in the timeline bellow.

http://issuu.com/hpriorfilipe/docs/lc_rgp#download

Publications can be downloaded, printed and shared using direct e-mails or/and social networks as facebook and twitter. There is already an app to use this tool with smartphones, making our documents ready to read on the go.

Learning by Playing

By Helena Filipe

Quizlet http://quizlet.com/ is a free learning tool allowing users to learn from sets of flash cards presenting a broad range of subjects including ophthalmology.

Learning content is organized in a set of thematic cards displaying as a slide show. Educators and learners can both benefit from creating their own set of cards on their topic of interest and also search in the site´s data base for a set containing their preferred studying subject.

An account should be created and by clicking on the home page button “ Create Set” you achieve the former and by clicking on the button “Find Sets” you got on to the latter. An excellent example of an already published set is “Ophthalmology Melanoma Flash Cards” set http://quizlet.com/8905805/uveal_melanoma-flash-cards/ elegantely created by Prof. Bertil Damato.

Content is built according to the rationale involving very clear definitions for specific questions (terms). Learning facts, processes and also concepts can be facilitated using smart an accurate flash cards content.

This free tool based on the Web allows interactive learning as a single learner as well as in a group of learners sharing similar goals. Work can be scalable also by sharing teaching/learning material in social networks as Face book and Twitter.

Get the big picture with Prezi

By Dr. Eduardo Mayorga

PowerPoint is the most popular presentation tool used for teaching. It is usually used for linear presentations. Sometimes you may need to be able to show the big picture of a project, process, concept or other complex ideas and at the same time go into smaller detail while clearly showing it's relation to the whole and it's other parts. PowerPoint is not very good for this.
Prezi can be a better tool for developing these kind of presentations. With it you can:

• Zoom in, out and around the prezi canvas to visualize your ideas.
• Import PowerPoint slides, images, videos, YouTube videos, PDFs, etc.
• Present online or download and show your prezi offline.
• Collaborate in real-time, across the room or across time zones.

See what Prezi can do clicking here

Use with caution. You audience may end up dizzy.  :-)

Keep track of what you should read. Keep it in your “Pocket”

By Dr. Rafsan Halim

The internet has aided the ease in which one can obtain information. These days, the harder thing is to have enough time to read all the latest articles & information that we are constantly bombarded with. How many times have you browsed websites and thought “that sounds interesting, I’ll come back and read it later” only to have forgotten the article or not be able to find it again?

This is where a nifty service called “Pocket” come in. Its function is exactly what its former name implies being “Read it Later”. Pocket essentially creates a reading list of articles and web pages for you to read at your leisure. It requires a valid email address and a free registration on the website at http://www.getpocket.com.

After signing up, you can register your email address with the service. This allows you to send the URL of any webpage to add@getpocket.com. The service then recognises that the email is from your linked address and adds it to your reading list. There is also a host of plug-ins available for various browsers that adds a “add to Pocket” button to the menu. After you set this up, it’s as easy as finding an interesting article and hitting the button.

Once you have saved an article or webpage to Pocket, you can view it whenever you login. You are presented with a neatly designed tile of all the saved pages. Clicking on the tiles will launch into a nicely formatted view of the article, free of any distracting ads or images. If you need to see the original article, you can always click the “view original” button. After you are done reading the article, you can check it off your list and Pocket will still keep the reference in its archive if you need to return to it later.

Neatly designed interface with “tiles” of your articles

Distraction free “reading” view

Competing services do exist and it is possible to assemble similar functionality with synchronised bookmarks etc, but the simple interface and easy-to-use nature of Pocket makes it an unobtrusive addition to every professional's workflow. The service also supports mobile operating systems with well designed apps for both iOS and Android with the mobile version of their website compatible with all other smartphones. Now it’s easier than ever to keep your research in your Pocket.