My thesis is about creating exercises (blind map) in Blackboard. I’m going to talk about all the different kind of exercises I used: what do you have to do? How does it work? Are there negative sides connected to this kind of exercises? Etc.

The first exercise is called ‘Hotspot’. You have a picture, in my case a blind map, and you ask a question. For example “Can you locate Gent on this map?”. Then you (teacher) mark the right answer. The student clicks on the map and if it is right he/she gets the points.xml:namespace prefix = o />

But how does is work? The teacher draws a square on the map. He or shy can decide how big this square is. The students have to click in this square. If it’s not right, then they receive no points.

This square is also a big disadvantage. When you look al the map, there are almost no countries that have a rectangular shape. So there is always some error. This can turn out good or bad for the students.

Another disadvantage is the limitation to 1 hotspot. For example Russia. This is one big country, but there is also a little country in Europe that is part of Russia. If the students click on this little part they don’t get the point, even though it’s correct.

The second exercise is a true/false question. This speaks for itself. The teacher asks a question or gives a sentence and the students must say if it’s true or false. An example: “Limburg is situated in the east of Belgium”.

I didn’t come across any difficulties. It’s an easy and exact question. Problem is that you can’t use this kind of questions very much. The theme blind map just isn’t ideal for these questions. If you want to learn the blind map, you have to use the actual maps. So hotspots have more possibilities.

Now I’m going to talk about the third exercise. This exercise is a multiple choice question. The students get a question and they have to choose the right answer. The teacher can choose how many possibilities there are, but the minimum is 4.

In these kinds of questions there’s only one correct answer. If the students don’t pick this answer they get a zero.

The disadvantage in these exercises is the limitation to only one correct answer. Just like with the hotspots, there are countries that exist from more separated countries.

The next exercise is a combinationquestion. The students get a few questions and they have to select the correct answer. The teacher can decide how many questions and how many answers the students get. These to numbers don’t have to be the same. You can have more answers than questions. I really like this option. This way the students have to think till the end.

In this next exercise the student have to order the answers. I used this for example to teach the students witch places will be crossed if you follow the red line.

The teacher can decide how many possibilities the students get. All the answers have to be used to get the full score.

Let’s get to the next kind of questions. In these exercises you (student) have to fill in the missing words. There are two possibilities.

In the first one there’s only one word to fill in. I didn’t use this, I always chose to make multiple fields to fill in. This way you can ask more, without always having to click on the next-button.

The second one is the one with multiple fields to fill in. I used this one very much. I made a table with in the first column a blind map (+ some numbers).  In de second column are the fields, the students have to fill in.

The teacher can decide how many words the students have to fill in, but there is a limitation.

The last questions I used in my thesis are the questions that have multiple right answers. The teacher asks a question and the students have to activate all the right answers. As a teacher you can chose how many answers you want to use and how many are right. But there is always a minimum of four possible answers.

I didn’t use this very much, but it’s a possibility.