A kosarad üres
When you use mozaBook on a regular basis, you are bound to encounter tweaks and updates here and there. When we enabled our 3Ds for VR goggles, for instance, everybody noticed immediately, but people are usually unaware of the upgrades as they consider it natural. For us, that is a sure sign that mozaBook becomes more and more handy for everyday use at school.
This time, we will focus on such an “inconspicuous” feature.
Work hard, preparing screenshots and saving it to your exercise book whenever you want to point out, let’s say, a particular object within a 3D? From now on, you can simply start using a brand new feature that lets you draw on each and every 3D model in real time with no need for time-consuming and unnecessary additional operations.
So, how does it work? Open your favourite 3D or grab the one you want to present to your students in the classroom (History teachers, have you seen one of the latest, Napoleonic Wars?), click on the Local Menu (accessible at the bottom corners of the window), and there you go! The new feature, marked by a pencil icon – the very first up there – awaits you to make the teaching experience as smooth as possible. Click on DRAW to enable the feature, choose the color you find most appropriate (FYI, you can also adjust the line thickness), select the pen on the left of the toolbar, and point at the object you want to direct your students’ attention to by sketching a line, a circle or an arrow.
Try it yourself as I did with my favourite, the Colosseum 3D, for my Art classes. The feature can be used literally everywhere. Below you have a glimpse at the annotated Colosseum cutaway:
And another frame from Animation:
Remember, whenever you are done with drawing, but still want the feature to remain active for other views, just deactivate it by clicking on the pencil icon. This way, all drawings disappear at once. Want the 3D to rotate again? Simply close drawing mode.
Everything what you have jotted down dissapears. However, should you like to have images taken from a 3D model in your exercise books, don't forget you can always use the Screenshot icon from the Menu bar and the image will be placed into their exercise book. Feel free to work on your pasted image further using numerous built-in mozaBook tools, e.g. with the help of the one called Edit picture.
If you feel like sharing your ideas on how to further improve mozaBook with us, feel free to get in touch either via the FEEDBACK option within the software, by filling in the website contact form, or jotting down a message to office@mozaweb.com.
I’d like to turn your attention towards the Media library and focus on its exceptionally versatile nature which can effectively ease the burden on teachers if they can use its advantages in the classroom. I’m well aware of the fact that our Media library doesn’t need my marketing lines here praising the content since it speaks for itself, but let me recommend you some possible ways to utilize it, first in a simple language class, then in bilingual education. Are you ready?
Imagine this: as an English teacher, you walk into a crowded and noisy classroom noticing some some of the guys have just finished copying the homework, but they already look bored of the upcoming the 45 minutes. No need to worry, today’s topic is tourism, everybody loves travelling, you’re sure it’s going to be all right. Hoping the best, you ask them the first warm up questions regarding the topic, in order to ease the nerves, set on edge by the short, but traumatizing school bell and the mere fact that they have to say something in English. Do you like travelling? Why do people travel abroad?
Unfortunately, what you can hear, my friend, is the sound of… well, silence (kudos to the great Simon & Garfunkel).
To avoid this situation you can decide to show the students one of the 3-5-minute educational videos about tourism. It’s always easier to make language learners a little more proactive if they have something to grasp, in terms of general ideas or required vocabulary.
Most of the videos have English narration, but as you can see, it is also possible to watch them with subtitles, available in various languages. For instance in this short, but quite comprehensive video on tourism, you can hear about the general notion of tourism, popular destinations, and various reasons of people travelling somewhere in their leisure time. This way the passive vocabulary of the students gets activated and the lesson has already kicked into gear.
We also have the option of choosing among the exciting and very detailed 3D scenes and showcasing them in the class. Discover the mysteries of Great Britain’s most well-known symbol, the Stonehenge! It's easy to raise the students’ interest with the help of these 3D scenes, resembling their favourite video games, and make them think about the topic. Then you can simply select some parts of the written text and go for the built-in gap-filling exercise, or create a new customized test with the Test editor tool. 
The narrated and labelled 3D scenes can play a huge role in bilingual education as well. In many countries there is more than one official language so the immediate necessity for students to learn more languages simultaneously is a valid concern. In addition, as a result of globalization, more and more parents choose to enroll their children at a dual language institution in order to open up more and better career opportunities at home or even abroad.
In many other countries, such as the USA or Germany, people face different challenges when talking about bilingualism since the number of ‘language learner” students (who need language support services in order to succeed in school) is very high because of the significantly multicultural environment. This issue might be really controversial, as there is no general consensus about which educational system is the most effective, but these students could benefit a lot from mozaBook Multilang for sure. The language of the interface and the content can be switched at any time during the lesson so the students are able to check out the problematic terms in their mother tongue. This way, educators can make sure they won’t be left behind.
As you can see, mozaBook can give you all the tools you need in a language class and put them at your fingertips in order to provide the students with a supportive and creative atmosphere where learning becomes fun and teaching becomes more efficient. Combining these possibilities with your own ideas, one thing is for sure: it’s going to be an exciting year at school!
Multilingualism is one of the phenomena of the modern world, prompted by economic and cultural globalization. According to recent research there are more multilingual than monolingual people in the world. The situation when individuals are using one language at home, another one at work and yet another one while socialising with their friends is becoming a norm rather than an exception.
The European continent, with its fluid national borders in the past and growing economic and cultural integration in the present, is one of the places where duo and multilingual teaching systems are no longer a dream, but a reality and a strong necessity.
Many European countries have more than one official language with Serbia being an absolute leader of the continent in this respect, recognising seven official languages; Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland following closely behind. Luxembourg has a unique educational system using three languages as the main instruction languages during the span of twelve years of schooling. However, even those European countries that only recognise one official language often have minorities that are either allowed to learn exclusively in their mother tongue or in both the official language and their native language. For example, there are plenty of Hungarian schools in Romania and parents can choose whether they want their children to be schooled exclusively in Hungarian or bilingually.
Luckily enough, the modern education system gives even those children who were not exposed to a bilingual environment from the cradle an opportunity to become fluent in a foreign language. Languages are seen as one of the most important disciplines in many European schools and are taught from the first grade. Students in many countries also have an opportunity to learn a second foreign language at no additional cost.
Despite this continuous and truly impressive progress of expansion of the bilingual population in Europe, teaching languages remains a very challenging task. Although language teaching techniques have definitely advanced a lot in the last two decades, it seems that no one has yet found a golden technique that would help make every single student fluent in a foreign language. Some argue that no such technique can be developed when it comes to language learning. Instead, the main task of the teacher is to get off the beaten path and show students all the opportunities that speaking a foreign language offers.
mozaBook is a powerful educational tool whether it is used for bilingual classrooms or to support the study of a foreign language. mozaBook is translated into 20 languages and the MULTILANG mozaBook license allows for the interchangeable usage of these languages. It is possible to switch the operational language at any point while running the software. mozaBook also contains educational tools that were specifically designed to help students learn foreign languages. For example, our Word finder and Lan(g)game tools are a fun way for students to learn new words, while our Spelling tool is a bottomless resource of spelling exercises to use in class. If these are still not enough, our 3D models can run in two languages simultaneously and become the center of attention in a bilingual classroom.
If you would like to incorporate fun and interactive language tools into your language classes or at your international school, you can learn more about MULTILANG mozaBook in our webshop.
Mozaik 3D scenes have been proven to be very effective in visualizing objects, phenomena, processes, and rules which are hard to illustrate with static images and hard to capture on videos, let alone imagine them. (For example, Cosmic or microbiological occurrences, or long destroyed historical landmarks. My personal favorite: the Van der Waals interaction on a gecko’s foot).
But to give support in other, not so 3D-friendly fields, our developers went a step further. For unusual topics such as probability, logic, or advanced spatial geometry, they have invented the 4th dimension by creating puzzles and exercises to be solved within our 3Ds.
One good example of all the innovations claimed above would be our Constructing shapes 3D (above), in which the user is challenged to reconstruct a spatial object when we already know the front, side and top views.
In another model, Light and shadow (below), the user can experiment by placing a light source near different spatial shapes in a room which is actually a 3D coordinate system. Depending on the type of light source, its placement and its distance from the shape, the shadow cast will differ dramatically. There are 8 different objects and two types of light to choose from in the coordinate system and the ability to rotate the 3D model and view the objects and shadows from different perspectives provides a great demonstration for students of art and physics alike.
For statistics and probability (besides the best tool in the world (probably!)), our Dice 3D model (below) offers great support. Here the user can roll with different numbers and colors of dice and, as they roll they receive a statistical chart summing up the results, showing us the essence of the rules of chance.
With our inbuilt exercises, our developers are doing their best to make sure that teachers receive sufficient help in explaining all topics for students with interactive digital tools. Register on mozaWeb to try out our 3D models for free, including the human skeleton!
What is the digital textbook market like in your country? Are digital textbooks easy to find in the average classroom?
With the growing use of new technology in classes like interactive displays, tablets, smartphones and interactive projectors, decision makers in many nations have started investing and making digital textbooks available to educators and students. In some countries, textbook publishers are even required by law to provide the digital version for each of their textbooks in order to stay in the market. This is a drastic change - not only for publishing businesses, but also for teachers and students. That’s why it is important to provide solutions that make digital textbooks easy to use and easy to teach with.
Mozaik Education was founded in 1990 as a textbook publishing house and nearly a decade ago Mozaik began developing digital solutions in an effort to offer a new product which would add to the educational value of its printed textbooks. These digital education resources were built to be used alongside traditional teaching methods - not to replace them. The idea behind mozaBook was to create a software which would foster a better classroom dynamic and offer interactive educational content which would provide new insight to students that paper books and still images could not. Mozaik continues to print and license textbooks, but now offers a range of digital solutions for use with textbooks and separately.
mozaBook Exercise books are wonderfully suitable for making classroom presentations and lesson plans. Along with text content we can use our own photos or images from the Internet, the image bank found in textbooks, the built-in drawings, illustrations from the mozaBook Gallery, videos as a material source for presentations. However, we can also insert the mozaLibrary 3D models and the mozaBook tools.
If all this was not enough for raising pupils' interest, the animation is still to come. All the items of an exercise book can be animated. We can choose from entrance and exit effects and other exciting playful schemes. We can set the speed and direction of animations and we are able to adjust the timing of the appearance and disappearance of elements. We can start the popping out of 3D models, videos and tools, and after having finished their use, we can continue with the animated presentation.