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Last December, just before Christmas, Mozaik was invited to the beautiful, historic city of Cluj-Napoca to speak about digital education at the local Babes-Bolyai University. The reason? A few of the institution’s professors had been to the Transylvanian ICT conference earlier in the Fall where they had met some of our colleagues presenting mozaBook. After reviewing our products, they were so impressed they asked us to prepare a lecture on the relevant issues that might be viewed as causes for concern and motivate our team to move forward. Our host - Ms Magda Illyés, a wonderful psychology professor - had a course on digital education and incorporating digital content into teaching/learning last semester, so our presentation was the perfect conclusion to her class.
Although presenting to a Hungarian audience is not always easy (we usually present or give lectures in English), it was an amazing opportunity to interact with soon-to-be teachers and get their take on the challenges of education today. It is always very constructive to add a new perspective so one can examine everything from a different point of view; not to mention this was a great way for us to get valuable feedback on what we are doing.
The first half of our presentation was about the successful usage of digital content with already existing materials in the modern classroom, while the second part was more about the features of mozaBook and the benefits of using the mozaLearn system for both teachers and students. By providing a quick overview of the situation of education today, we were able to take a closer look at how educators are caught between traditional values, an old-fashioned curriculum/methodology and the digital world we - especially students - live in, along with how teachers can use various devices and technology to their advantage in the classroom.
We hope our audience enjoyed the guest lecture as much as we enjoyed our visit. It was truly an honor to be invited to talk to the next generation of teachers. We are confident that they will be able to utilize all this information soon.
If you feel like sharing your own experience or would like to request a guest lecture, please hit the comments or e-mail us to start a discussion.
Teachers have it rough these days.
As you can see from this blog post, in addition to having to adhere to the national curriculum, teachers need to motivate disinterested students, consider each student’s individual needs, build a sense of community within their classroom, and create assessments that measure both skill development and critical thinking. Pretty overwhelming... How can one have their cake and eat it, too? Let’s take a closer look.
Whatever methodology a teacher prefers, the presentation of a topic is crucial to how much a student will remember. Lessons need to awaken perception and get kids thinking, otherwise they are prone to overload their minds with unnecessary information, either because they don’t understand the material, or they don’t know how to employ brainwork. However, using mozaBook will ensure students acquire knowledge while applying logical links, and will be able to recall many details vividly. Highlighting, chart creation and animation are just a few of the many basic features mozaBook incorporates in order to warrant the best and most effective teaching and learning experience. Audiovisual stimuli can also assist learning, emphasizing the most important points and clarifying thought processes. Not only that, our 3D models, audio, visual, and other interactive content can be searched and inserted into a presentation in, literally, seconds.
Whether one agrees with the concept of standardized testing or not, it is still the preferred method to measure student growth. It is also the framework for most school leaving exams; practically every country subjects their schoolchildren to this form of assessment during their formative years in the education system. Therefore, even though teachers might not like it or agree, they must prepare their students for certain milestones, which are, of course, based on the national curriculum. So, what’s a teacher to do? Make the best of a bad situation! Open up mozaBook, and amaze students into a deeper understanding of the subject, and maybe even get them excited about the lesson! With our packed media library and wide range of tools and games at their disposal, teachers can show students instead of telling them, engage them instead of boring them, and motivate them to learn instead of making them averse to the education process. Regardless of the topic, we have the content, and everything we offer is interactive, detailed, and customizable. This gives teachers more confidence in their lessons and ensures students are always engaged. We already have enough content to last any teacher a lifetime, but we are constantly producing even more solutions.
Practice… Practice… Practice... This simple word often defines the difference between success and failure, and this is especially true in today’s classroom. Classwork, homework and assessment are key components to solidifying the learning that takes place during class. It is possible to automatically generate assignments directly from mozaBook and upload them to mozaWeb as a homework assignment, without missing a beat. This can actually be completed, during instruction time, without disrupting the class. In just 3 clicks, mozaBook can generate a test from the content you are presenting, as you are presenting it; 2 more clicks, and it can be uploaded as homework. These tests can also be sent to students’ devices, such as smartphones or tablets for real time responses and feedback from students. Now, this is incorporating technology into the classroom! This is mozaMagic! Moreover, to help youngsters develop critical thinking skills and cultivate an inquisitive mind, the teacher can organize debates or quiz games as collaborative exercises in class. Fun activities always heighten interest and increase productivity, and a little friendly competition brings out the best in team spirit, and positively impacts the classroom community. Who’s to say evaluation can’t be enjoyable? Teachers and students all prefer a more relaxed class atmosphere, where participants feel safe to ask questions or pose dilemmas. After all, the ultimate aim of education is to build knowledge while stimulating curiosity, is it not?
Want to try mozaBook for free? Download the installer file from here and enjoy!
The Mozaik Team is often asked at exhibitions and trainings about teachers’ opinions on mozaBook. One of the teachers from the University of Szeged Juhász Gyula Faculty of Education Practicum and Primary Art School, Libor Ildikó was kind enough to tell us why she likes mozaBook. Read her opinion below, get inspired and download the trial version of mozaBook for your school so you can see for yourself what the software has to offer.
“Textbooks are the indispensable basis of the educational process, being the library of information to be learnt and taught at the same time. When I take a book in my hands, I can utilize the knowledge gathered in it; however, today this seems insufficient, as students expect more and teachers want to give more.
In the past, the use of interactive boards, projectors, and audio and video players in the classroom required a great deal of effort and preparation from teachers. But fear not, for mozabook provides the perfect solution to this problem: now you can collect all the supplementary content that you wish to upgrade your lessons with - something that previously required the parallel usage of many different tools or equipment - in one place.
The images, audio files, 3D models, etc. prepared in mozaBook are directly related to the topics covered in the K12 curriculum, and can all be added both to the relevant chapter or unit of the textbook you are using and your own presentation.
mozaBook makes it easy to enrich your textbook and make your lessons more colourful by adding images, audio and video files related to your lesson. Insert the images, audio or video segments as icons on the margins and play them with a single click when needed.
The presentation of interactive content inserted as icons to the margins of the textbook does not require the use of additional devices or drivers. mozaBook’s framework contains all necessary media players to run smoothly.
Another advantage of mozaBook is that the inserted content is saved into the software, so it becomes retrievable any time. This way you can reuse your presentations from class to class, one academic year after another.”
One of the keys to successful learning is having well developed memory and attention skills. Visual memory and attention can be improved with diverse exercises and games. It is possible to prepare exercises for memory skill development within the framework of any subject. With the help of mozaBook’s tool set, this can be performed easily and playfully. A smartly chosen memory task can be a tool for motivation and teachers can easily build further exercises upon it.
While editing exercises, we should pay attention to the Magical Number Seven and gradualism, i.e. it is not worth inserting more than 7+2 elements on one slide.
It is highly important, especially in the beginning, to ask students what kind of techniques they use to memorize certain elements.
In math class, we can project number cards according to the selected number sets and relevant topics students are learning about. After a short time, around 60 seconds, we should cover the numbers which are to be written down by students from memory. They can write down the numbers in any order.
In case of broadening the number sets we are working with, we can continue the exercise, for example, with sorting them in increasing order, with the specification of neighbouring numbers, with rounding or with grouping them into sets. While practising operations, we can, for example, complement them to 10,000 and calculate the sum and the difference of the number pairs. Further exercises (for instance, true/false statements) can be created with the help of the test editor.
We can also plan this exercise differently: after a short time of observation, we display another image. In this case, students only have to write down the changed numbers. We can further complicate the exercise by modifying the position, the colour or the font of the numbers.
Another options is to spell the numbers with letters, let students spend some time trying to memorise them and then cover the numbers written in letters and show them the digits including one that has been modified. The task will be the same as in the previous exercise to find the number that was modified.
We can make the exercises more difficult with the editable word cards. This way, students can see the numbers one after another, rather than all at the same time. To make it more difficult, turn the cards faster the second time around. Then, students should write down the numbers, in random order.
The word cards can be used in the same way no matter which subject you are teaching. For instance, instead of numbers we can use words from the already learnt parts of speech, or the typical characteristics of given animals or plants in biology. In the latter case, you can ask your students to guess what animal the words on the cards are describing.
It is also possible to do the same exercise with the help of the dice, rather than memory cards, but, you might need some more experience with mozaBook for this. As any other mozaBook tool, the dice tool is editable and you can choose how many edges it should have and what numbers should appear on the edges. After rolling the dice, give students time to memorize, and then roll the dice again. Keep in mind that with this alternative, the same number might come up more than once.
With the help of mozaTools, you can create many different types of exercises to practice mental calculation, which help to develop attention skills and visual perception at the same time. It helps with solving the exercise if operations are animated. See images below to have more ideas of how you can use mozaBook to help your students develop memory and attention skills.
From the perspective of teachers, with all their responsibilities, there can be an ambivalent attitude toward incorporating new technologies into the classroom. I know because I am a teacher. I have been in the meetings and seen the frustrated faces of those thinking: “Not again. Another big idea from the administration which will only mean more work for me…” or “There goes my lunch break!” However, with mozaBook and mozaWeb there is no need to reinvent the wheel. With our simple drag and drop function, you can seamlessly integrate your existing lesson plans onto our platform and transform them into exciting, interactive publications or presentations. If you have a lesson plan in PDF or pptx. format, which is tried, tested and effective, you can simply upload the file onto our software and begin using mozaBook and mozaWeb to supplement your lessons.
Each student acquires information differently; be it visually, verbally, via movement or tactile means. Our software facilitates differentiated instruction by presenting each new concept in a variety of modalities and gives you back the command of your classroom. Not every student is engaged in a lesson simply by auditory means. Does this mean teachers should stop speaking? Of course not… However, when you are standing in front of a visual learner, lecturing about how an aqueduct works, it is no wonder that they are looking out the window for stimulation as you’re speaking. 
Simply lecturing to a visual learner is no different than not speaking to an auditory learner. We need to speak their language in order to engage them in our ideas. They need to see the water wheel and aqueduct! For instance, here is our 3D animation of Syrian water wheels from the 13th century. Two anticipated questions regarding this concept are 1) What makes the wheel move? 2) How does the water not spill from the moving buckets? Don’t simply explain these phenomena, allow your students to see the damming process and the effect of kinetic energy in action. Show them the buckets releasing the water only at the top in order to demonstrate this elegant, yet simple design. Allow your students the benefit of direct experience rather than forcing them to reinvent the wheel in their own minds! They need to watch it work in order to understand its purpose, relevance and significance.
Visual learners convert words into pictures in their minds. While they are more skilled at this than most, it requires a lot of energy and they can tire easily. With Mozaik’s software, you can give your students a break and demonstrate important concepts with one of our 3D drawings or photos from our digital library. You will see your visual learners perk up and their eyes get big as you show them one of our 3D drawings, because our 3D pictures are so real, they practically jump off the screen and grab your student’s attention. And that’s the point, your students will love it. When students are engaged, they are learning.
All students learn by doing. Allow them the opportunity to reinforce what was learned by playing one of our engaging and interactive games. The focus of a professional development seminar that I attended on solidifying skill mastery showed that students must practice a skill 7 times, on average, in order to obtain mastery of that skill. Therefore, practice really does make perfect.
As our understanding of the educational process evolves, we realize where our approach to teaching and understanding of the learning process had been lacking. When students are engaged, they are learning. When students are learning, they aren’t being disruptive. When students aren’t disruptive, but rather focused on the lesson, the teacher has the freedom to address the content and actually teach. The more modalities you can present to your students, the higher percentage of them will be engaged in the lesson and the happier a teacher, you will be.
With the functionality of Mozaik’s software, you can address the variety of your student’s understanding and play to their strengths rather than the conventional ‘one size fits all’ approach to teaching.
Do you have the perfect lesson to teach phonics to young readers? Great! With a few clicks you can add it to our software and begin the process of making our software work for you by adding customized, interactive letter cards or random exercises to your favorite phonics lesson. It’s time to make phonics phun. Simply import your lesson and you can add 3D models, cool exercises or interactive games from our media library. Not only that, but with Mozaik, collaboration is a cinch! With our software, you can upload and share your favorite lesson plans with your colleagues or upload them on mozaWeb so your students can practice at home with their parents. We want teachers to be able to make technology work for them in the classroom, not the other way around. This is why we also offer an incredibly user-friendly, easy-to-use platform (essentially, your grandma could use it), and even offer to train teachers in using our software!
At Mozaik Education, we believe that technology is meant to make the teacher’s life easier, while simultaneously making the lessons more engaging, interactive, and effective for your students. We know how difficult teaching is. Many of us are teachers. Our goal at Mozaik Education is to make your life better and give you the most benefit from the software, without ever missing a lunch break.
We think our 3D scenes are already cool, but today we’d like to announce it to the world: our 3D models just got even more amazing!
Every one of the interactive scenes which include the Walk feature, available on mozaWeb, have entered the world of virtual reality. More than 60 3D scenes can now be used with a virtual reality headset through the new mozaWeb 3D viewer. Download the mozaWeb 3D viewer to your Android smartphone from Google Play. The iOS application is also available on the App Store.
See for yourself: open one of your favorite 3D models, open the Walk feature, denoted by the walking man icon. A small icon of VR glasses will appear. Just click on that and place the phone in your VR headset. Then have a walk around! Just look down towards your feet to start and stop the movement.
Don’t have a favorite model in mind? Here are a few of our team’s favorites. (Once you've downloaded the app, these links will automatically open the app) :
Medieval inhabited bridge (London Bridge, 16th century)
The city of Babylon (6th century BC)
Viking stave church (Borgund, 13th century)
Nikola Tesla's laboratory (Shoreham, US)
Any type of Virtual Reality headset will work - you don’t have to spend a lot of money for a fancy pair of glasses to walk around and explore a new world. Everyone in the business development department has tried it and with great response! We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.
We are developing this feature for every 3D scene that we have so stay tuned. Soon you’ll be able to use your VR headset for every type of animated model.