Tools and E-tivities
SWF Tools
An interesting website of conversion and other tools for manipulating files into Flash.
http://www.swftools.org/
E-tivity error
A common mistake beginners make when designing interactive activities for students is to ask them to post the answer to a question that has a single right answer or a limited number of answers. This means that the first student to post with the right answer prevents all the others from participating. There’s no point in any of them doing the work!
This might be a calculation – first student to post the answer has done the work. Everyone else has no need to.
Commercial web promotions can make the same mistake
I was just looking at a promotion whereby a company aimed to get visitors browsing its website by offering a prize for those who find certain information on the website – everyone who can quote the information goes into the hat and a name is chosen to win the products.
The problem being that they asked people to post a comment on a company blog posting.
The first person to post went to the website had a look around and posted the result. I went to the blog and posted the answer without having ever been to the website! And none of the other 55 people who posted the answer need ever have visited the website. Not a promotion that really achieved its aims!
The right way to do it? Use a blog with moderated comments so that no-one can see the comments with the right answer in until the end of the promotion, when all comments are enabled in one go and the name drawn out of the hat.