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MOARS

MOARS, the free, open-source Mobile Audience Response System for students to use with iPod Touch, iPhones, and other mobile browsers, will be featured in two sessions at the JALT 2010 Conference, which will be held November 19-22, 2010, at the Aichi Industry and Labor Center in Nagoya. The first session is a hands-on workshop that will walk the participants through the installation of MOARS. The second session is a forum with three presenters who are using MOARS at their universities.

Workshop: Friday, Nov 19, from 5 PM

The hands-on workshop will be on Friday, November 19. It is one of the Teaching and Technology Workshops (TnT). That day, there will be 12 workshops by various presenters between 1:00 and 6:30; each session is between 45 to 90 minutes long, with two or three sessions running concurrently during each of the three time slots.

Bill Pellowe's TnT workshop will be during the 5:00 - 6:30 time slot. The title is Quiz and survey system for mobile devices. If you'd like to follow along with your own installation of MOARS, you'll need some space on a basic "LAMP" web server (LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). If you don't already have this, Bill recommends LinkSky, which he's been using for years for various projects.

Forum: Saturday, Nov 20, from 5:15 PM

The forum will be held on Saturday, November 20, from 5:15 to 6:45 in room 1780. The title is Student response system for mobile devices. The speakers are Bill Pellowe (Kinki University, Iizuka), Trevor Holster (Kyushu Sangyo University), and Kevin Ryan (Showa Women's University). First, we'll demonstrate some of the features of MOARS. Then each of us will discuss and/or demonstrate how we use the system with our students.

Related Presentation: Sunday, Nov 21, from 3:50 PM

Entitled Student response systems - What, why, how, this presentation focuses more on using a low-tech approach to student response systems, but the underlying theory is the same. This will be held Sunday, November 21, from 3:50 to 4:50 PM in room 1008. The speakers are Bill Pellowe and Paul Shimizu, and will mainly focus on using flashcards for responses. Bill and Paul developed a 4-answer flashcard "paddle" that can be downloaded from their website (captur.me); the site also has a collection of activities for the EFL classroom.