In the fourth Go-Lab Newsletter 2020, you can read about premium apps, Graasp updates and much more!
Premium apps now for free
We hope that you are doing well in these difficult times. We from the Go-Lab team try to support you as much as possible. In our last newsletter we announced that our premium labs were available for free during the Corona crisis, now also our two premium apps are free for use. Both of them are teacher dashboard apps (so not for your students but for you as the teacher). With the Quiz overview you can see an overview of the input of all students in all quizzes in your ILS and with the app you can grade all questions; the app then calculates a total score for each student. The App overview allows you to inspect what students have filled in in several apps of your ILS. More information can be found here. Even if at later stage we would make these apps again premium apps, they will keep working in the ILSs where you now include them. We will evaluate their usage and also consider making them longer available for free.
App news
You may also have noticed that the Experiment Design Tool (EDT) has been upgraded. Now, the look and feel is the same as the Quiz and Quest apps. The configuration now gives an explanation of the fields and feedback on inconsistencies. There is also an improved look and feel of the student view, for example fields that have been completed are shown in orange. We have included system variables for computing automatic variables (e.g., density from mass and volume).The final app news is that the Name the Frame app is now ready for offline usage.
New features in Graasp
Also, in Graasp we have a set of new features, on top of those that were announced in the last newsletter. In Activity/ILS, the “Create Space” button has been renamed “Create Phase” to avoid confusion. Aliases are now shown in the left-hand side of the Page/Standalone view to provide more navigation opportunities without breaking the hierarchical constraints, i.e. adding ILSs within an ILS. To further protect your privacy, in searches, only the spaces in which you are a member are retrieved and displayed. Finally, in the Page/Standalone view, there is now a link to download the original MS Office files displayed as pdf.
100 new ILSs
Since January 2020 close to 100 new ILSs were published. Quite a few of them have a very nice design, pls check them out, also if they are not in your language, they can be very inspiring. Also, a few new labs were newly added, and we will have a few new additional labs from our colleagues from PhET soon too.
Since the start of the Corona crisis the usage of Go-Lab and Graasp has multiplied. Also, the attention for the Go-Lab ecosystem has much increased. For example, an interview on Go-Lab was published at the official Cordis website of the EU. Maybe also interesting for you and your colleagues. Science on Stage is organizing two webinars around Golabz and Graasp. You can register here and here. We have to end with sad news since the Go-Lab summer school to be organized in Marathon (Greece) this year had to be cancelled due to the Corona crisis. This means that we have a break in an already long tradition, but we intend to organize it again next year!
We wish you and your students all the best; stay healthy!
Diana Dikke, Denis Gillet, and Ton de Jong
Go-Lab coordinating team
