Schools are closed in many countries around the world to slow the spread of COVID-19. This has suddenly thrown many parents and teachers into homeschooling. Fortunately, there are plenty of educational resources on the internet to use or adapt, although their licenses vary. You can try searching for Creative Commons Open Educational Resources, but if you want to create your own materials, there are many options for that to.
If you want to create digital educational activities with puzzles or tests, two easy-to-use, open source, cross-platform applications that fit the bill are eXeLearning and JClic. My earlier article on eXeLearning is a good introduction to that program, so here I’ll look at JClic. It is an open source software project for creating various types of interactive activities such as associations, text-based activities, crosswords, and other puzzles with text, graphics, and multimedia elements.
Although it’s been around since the 1990s, JClic never developed a large user base in the English-speaking world. It was created in Catalonia by the Catalan Educational Telematic Network (XTEC).
About JClic
JClic is a Java-based application that’s available in many Linux repositories and can be downloaded from GitHub . It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, but because it is a Java program, you must have a Java runtime environment installed .
The program’s interface has not really changed much over the years, even while features have been added or dropped, such as introducing HTML5 export functionality to replace Java Applet technology for web-based deployment. It hasn’t needed to change much, though, because it’s very effective at what it does.
Creating a JClic project
Many teachers from many countries have used JClic to create interactive materials for a wide variety of ability levels, subjects, languages, and curricula. Some of these materials have been collected in an downloadable activities library. Although few activities are in English, you can get a sense of the possibilities JClic offers.
As JClic has a visual, point-and-click program interface, it is easy enough to learn that a new user can quickly concentrate on content creation. Documentation is available on GitHub.
#interactive #learning #machine learning
