Tools: H5P
H5P is a exercise creator: a suite for creating automatic and programmed response exercises.
Why use H5P?
Teaching advantages
The enormous range of types of exercises, the presence of some "innovative" exercises, some ergonomic layouts which positively impact learner engagement.
Organizational and technical advantages
It is not necessary to pay a subscription to a platforme: H5P can be deployed by an institution on its Moodle or other LMS, or even by an individual on their computer using dedicated software (Lumi⇗ or Digiquiz⇗).
This allows sustainability of resources and implementation flexibility, and therefore the possibility of investing in the development of resources in the long and medium term.
Teacher professional development
Having a complete suite of exercises available without access constraints (as in exercise creation commercial platform) allows you to explore the relevance of each type of exercise in the educational course.
Some problems for creators
Several details sometimes make creation problematic. For example, the "Column" and "Interactive Book" exercises, which are supposed to organize "real" exercises into a page or a series of pages, cannot host all types of H5P exercises. Again, the copy and paste functionality, very practical for the creator, does not export the images. The “mark the words” exercise allows you to select only words and not blocks of words (even if there is a workaround to this problem). It is sometimes complicated to use this tool easily and fully.
Summary
Creators must already be familiar with handling H5P activities and other digital resources they rely on. It is not a turnkey tool, it requires personal and possibly institutional engagement. This looks like the typical case of powerful tools, which are also complex to use.
Examples of activities
See the video below, part 3 (from minute 5):
-interactive video
-branching scenario
-mark the words
Learn more with this video
1) overview of technical-organizational aspects
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2) advantages-disadvantages
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3) examples of three types of exercises for language teaching
-interactive video
-branching scenario
-mark the words
Video created as part of the Language teaching and ICT MA, course Design of digital activities, with my colleagues Zheqing Zhou and Xutong Wei (Université Lyon 2, March 2023).