Activities for students to figure out (together) what is happening in a painting

Activities for students to figure out (together) what is happening in a painting

by b k -
Number of replies: 6

I have some paintings I would like to show students, about 5 each week, and have them work together to guess what they are depicting. What is the best way to do this? Especially if I want to easily re-use the activity.

My original idea was to use a one-page nested forum discussion where I post 5 replies to the main post, each with a different image. Then they could post replies to those image posts.

Another idea was a regular forum where each image was its own thread.

Are their better ways to do this? I looked at the database with its commenting feature, but it seems like it is overkill.

I want group interaction, so a quiz isn't what I'm after.

What are your thoughts? Will either of my above methods make it possible to duplicate the activity easily in other courses?

Thanks!!

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In reply to b k

Re: Activities for students to figure out (together) what is happening in a painting

by AL Rachels -
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Hi b k,

Hot Question would work well for this. You can separate participation by using groups. I would create a separate Hot Question for each picture. To reuse, you just simply start a new round, which then lets you maintain the old results for later use/comparison. Set entries to require approval, if you don't want the students to see each others guesses. Approve after a while to let them see. You can allow them to apply "heat" to an entry they think is right. Hide the teacher priority and heat columns, if you don't want to use them. Let me know by private message if you want to try it out at http://m3x.drachels.com/mod/hotquestion/view.php?id=5808

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In reply to AL Rachels

Re: Activities for students to figure out (together) what is happening in a painting

by b k -
Oh! This is perfect. I would have never found this on my own. Thanks!
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In reply to AL Rachels

Re: Activities for students to figure out (together) what is happening in a painting

by b k -
So a followup question @ALRachels,

The heading for the responses are labeled "Questions" which for my use case is not correct. Is there a way to modify this?
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In reply to b k

Re: Activities for students to figure out (together) what is happening in a painting

by AL Rachels -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Hi b k,
If you want to change "Questions" to something else, for the whole site, you can do it via language customization. Otherwise, you will need to wait until the next release. This is something that has never come up before, but since Hot Question can actually be used for so many different things, I can see an immediate need to make that a setting for each individual Hot Question activity. After all, each of the download page suggested uses, could use something more meaningful for the use, than "Questions." In fact, I can see a use case of having settings to change the other columns, Priority, Heat, Remove, and Approved, to something more meaningful to the activity use, or language being used. Thanks for bringing this up.
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In reply to b k

Re: Activities for students to figure out (together) what is happening in a painting

by Dave Sherwin -
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I really like your original thought of using a Forum activity. The forum would allow students to post and exchange ideas by posting their guesses on what is being depicted in the paintings. Of the various forum types to use, I feel that the Question and Answer forum would work for this type of activity. What is nice about QA forums is that the students cannot see other students post to a teacher question until they post their first guess. That way students are not reading all the posts before they give their guess (that would be an unfair advantage). 

As a teacher, for each painting you would post a question one for each painting for a total of 5 separate posts (question). Then the students could their guess to a painting and then look at everyone elses posts and reply what they thought of the other students guesses. To encourage student engagement, you could also give the students permission to rate each other's posts with a customized scale similar to how users rate these posts. Note the instructions for this are found in the Forum FAQ. 

Of course, forums are asynchronous, if what it to be more synchronous you could use a Chat activity. However chats do not allow students time to reflect on the painting or the feature of ratings. 

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