Skolplus

The resource I want to promote in this blogpost is Skolplus (www.skolplus.se), it’s a webpage with a lot of games, most of them free. And a school can create an account and get all the games for free if they want to. Skolplus contains a lot of games with a variety of subjects, like math, Swedish, geography and English. There’s games that gives the pupils a chance to repeat things that they are unsure of, and in a fun way. There are games that can be used from grade one up to around grade six.  This sounds like an ad but I think it’s that good.

As the teacher, you don’t have to be afraid to ruin anything because it’s online. No matter what you do, you can’t break anything. And that can be nice if you haven’t used many ICT recourses before. The only thing you have to do is to decide what games the pupils should play and provide them with the address, they will do the rest. Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockley (2008) write that using WebPages is one of the most stress-free ways of using technology. And it’s nice not to add another stress element to your day just because you want to use technology.

But you have to be aware that there are games on Skolplus that are just for fun and won’t really teach the pupils anything. So I think that you have to tell the pupils exactly what games they are supposed to play. To tell the students to play on Skolplus won’t guarantee that they play a game that will help them consolidate knowledge. Especially children that are slower in their learning, I think, can benefit from using a game like the ones on Skolplus. They can need more time to learn, but you don’t always have that time. If you have some “gametime” or “finishing your work-time” on your schedule, they can go to Skolplus and repeat things that you have done in class. This is especially important when learning a new language like English since you need to repeat words a lot of times before they stick.

And consolidate knowledge is what Skolplus is good for, according to me. The pupils can repeat maths for example, something that otherwise can be quite boring. As Dudeney and Hockley (2008) writes: it’s also important to see the use of a webpage as something linked to the rest of the studies in the classroom. It’s not supposed to be a thing that the pupils get to do for fun once in a while. I have seen teachers use Skolplus as a reward for pupils. When they are done with what they are supposed to do, then they can play on Skolplus. And it works like that aswell. Because you as a teacher know that the students are playing games that are okay for their age, but Skolplus can be used to so much more than a reward.

Espresso Primary

Espresso Primary https://www.espresso.co.uk has received many awards since they started 1997 and they received the Bett Awards 2014 (British Educational Training and Technology).

The School I work for subscribes to this website, hence it is available to all faculty and students, used mostly from Pre-K to grade 5 in elementary school.

This website caters for all subjects, levels, learning and teaching styles. It is available at school and for home use, it even has a parents’ guide. Not only do we use the website for classes, but also as a reward for the students. For example, on a Friday the students get  “free time” on their computers/iPads, as long as they stay on the website. Usually the students will end up working together, finding new areas of interest. You will find that Espresso is visual, auditory, kinesthetic, musical and intrapersonal.

There are minimum technical requirements and recommendations for internet connections, computer hard-and-software, as well as for tablets and mobile devises. You can find everything specified by using this link  https://www.espresso.co.uk/subscription_pricing/#tab=2  and then choose to download the various requirements.

 

 

Their subscription fees are not stated on their website.. The website welcomes you to contact them for more information. You are also welcome to sign up for free samples of Espresso, just click on free sample and you will be able to sign up for a trial.

It can be used by head teachers, teachers and  ICT. If your school subscribes to Espresso there is also guidance and professional development available for faculty. On the website you’ll have access to – and help with – the new curriculum 2014 http://www.espresso.co.uk/nc2014 . There are webinars to keep teachers updated. For the new curriculum 2014 there are specific grade level videos showing the changes for the different subjects. You will find yourself spending much less time on finding suitable lesson materials and you will work with the newest material at all times. Since it  has the different sensory approach you know your lesson will cater for all learning styles including different learning disabilities, EAL, as well as behavioral and physical issues. Your students will be challenged but not overwhelmed.

Students loves games ! So embrace their love for games. They are able to learn at their own pace while playing and having fun, and you as a teacher are able to plan individual lessons, set targets, or have the class practice at home. When an 8-year-old has fun learning new vocabulary, times table or even geography, he is more likely to acquire this knowledge as opposed to just memorizing it.

Espresso has added espresso coding recently. It won a Brett Award 2014. as well. Espresso coding teaches how to code and make your own apps. It teaches how to program in a fun age-appropriate way. You can find out more and try for free until  the end of October 2014. It is amazing to see how we all can be in charge of our learning when we understand a little bit more on how the tools work. http://www.espressocoding.co.uk/espresso/coding/index.html

ENJOY! 

Christina Noren Zanoni

 

The webb site Fun English games

“Fun English games” is a web-site with many games and activities for children. The web-site is free for everyone and could be a good  resource for teachers that want to have new ideas in their teaching. Many of the exercises are printable if the teacher wants to work on that way. The web-site is divided into different sections: games, worksheets, activities, videos, quizzes and more as you could see down here.

There are both group exercises and individual exercises. One activity that I thought would be interesting to try on the students is a game called “who wants to be a millionaire. In this game the teacher divide the class into groups. Then the teachers ask a true or false question to one group member. If the student tells the right answer the next member in the group will have a new little harder question. Now the student can stop and collect the money or answer the question. If the answer is wrong the group has lost the “money”. The teacher can also add lifelines in the activity.  

The games on this web-site are very clear for the children. If we take one example of the game; “easy gaming puzzle”. In this game there are ten words that miss the two first letters. To the left of the words there are ten boxes with two letters in them. The work for the students is to drag the letters to the right word.  

I think this is a good page for teachers to work with. The students will learn English in a funny way. Last year I had one English lesson in the week with a smaller group of students who thought English was boring. But when we worked with this website the students thought it was funny and they learned more new words by using this page.

The web adress for this page is http://www.funenglishgames.com/

Best regards Stefan Nilsson

Google Drive

I would like to use this blogpost to encourage other teachers to use Google Drive. Google drive is a “Cloud” where you can create and edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets. On Google Drive you save your work online, making it possible for you to access your, your colleagues or your pupils work from anywhere in the world. At my school we use it as part of our internal-communication as well, for organizations Google have an free of charge product called Mapps.

Looking at the different programs on Google Drive I would like to first compare them with the programs in Microsoft Office, which most people are familiar with. Documents, the word processor, is basically the same as MS-office Word, Presentation works as PowerPoint, Spreadsheet as Excel and so on. So all of the benefits you have from working in Microsoft Office, you will have at Google Drive as well. Of course, there are some differences, but if you have something made in Word, it is possible to upload it to Google Drive and keep on working on it in Documents.

However, to be able to use Google Drive you need an Gmail-account. This is free of charge and it is possible to get specific account for organizations. At my school we use this as our internal communication, both with pupils and staff. 

Using Google Drive while teaching

I find Google drive very usable as a teacher. Both while working with my colleagues and in class. I will focus on the advantages on working with Documents and Presentation since these are the ones I use the most.

Google Drive allows realtime interaction in a single document, making it possible for pupils to create a story together while working on different tablets or computers. This realtime interaction also makes it possible for direct peer-assessments while working on a text. Working in the document is a format that most of the pupils already know, making it easy to get started.

Below I show how you could work with tricky pronunciations and Tongue Twisters. 

Since the document are saved in a “Cloud”, online, on the Google server, it is always possible for the teacher to take part of the work their pupils are making. It is easy to make assessments without sending an e-mail back and forth. And together with the class it is possible for the teacher to create different exercises in real-time or making a presentation.

With Presentation you can create a slideshow before class, which the student can make their own texts about, directly in front of the class, individually or in small groups. If you work with a tablet, which also is compatible with Google Drive, you can take pictures and upload it to Google Drive. This will allow you, or the pupils, to create slideshows of the pupils own pictures.

Since I began working with my class in Google Drive we never looked back, the pupils enjoy it and so do I.

/Christoffer Hejdedal

SMART Board

At my teaching practice school all classrooms are equipped with SMART Boards. A smart board is a large interactive whiteboard that is connected to a computer and a projector (either with cables or wireless). When the computer is connected, a picture of the desktop appears at the board. Since most computers have internet access, the smart boards can be used online too.

When purchasing a SMART Board, usually there’s a training course included. However, it is quite basic (in my opinion) so you really need to take some extra time to explore all different features. Otherwise, it easily happens that the smart board is mostly used for watching movies or video clips online (which is quite often the case in many classrooms). The smart board can be used in so many other ways though! The board is a large touch screen and by using (artificial) pens the pupils can write and draw directly on the board. It is great to use for mind mapping, since the teacher can print it out and then hand it out to the class. It is also possible to save the document the class is working with and then go back and continue to work with it next lesson.

 

Photo credit: Kathy Cassidy, Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathycassidy/

Using a smart board when teaching English can give the teacher an opportunity to explore a fun and creative tool together with the pupils. Making lesson-plans, exercises and games on your own can be quite time consuming though. I’ve come across some exercises at www.lektion.se that were actually really good, they were easy to download and use. On the SMART Board webpage there’s something called “SMART Exchange” which is an international webpage where teachers from all over the world upload and share lesson plans, activities, and different exercises. And it’s not only for English teachers, you can find a lot of different subjects there. Although I have not used that page myself it looks like something worth checking out.   

A new feature I just heard of is “SMART Extreme Collaboration” where the pupils can share photos and other work by using their computer, tablets or smart phones, and it’s all wireless. They upload it through an app and it comes up on the smart board. I think it’s a great way to encourage the pupils to work together and share their work as well. They can all contribute to each other’s learning. 

Here’s a video clip from a school in Sweden that has been working with “SMART Extreme Collaboration”. I would definitely like to try that out with my 6^th graders when teaching English. They would be thrilled to use their phones in class :) 

/Anna

www.skolplus.se

To practice English in a fun way with younger students

In our school we have a license with www.skolplus.se. If you don’t have a license only some of the practices are open for you, but you can buy a prescription for 320 Swedish kronor if you are a privatperson and a bit more if you want to buy for the school (no exact prise a given at the webpage, but it starts at a minimum of 1400 kronor.)

This is a Swedish website filled with funny practice for the younger and the older pupils. Most of the tasks are in Swedish and you can practice for example mathematics, Swedish and geography.

There are three very good tasks to practice English, two of whom my pupils are very found of.

 The first task is ”Build a sentence”. The same task is available in Swedish so my pupils knows how to do. They learn the words and the way to make a sentence very quick.

Here is a guide for the pupils.

How to do:

First, read the words and ask if there anything that you don’t understand.

Secondly, drag the words to the lines in the right order, don’t forget the dot or the question mark. Then press done.

If you did it right you will now se the sentence that you wrote. (The bird and the cow are acctually jumping on the screen.)

Even if the pupils don’t know every word when they start they will try and try and after a while they will recognize most of the words.

For me as a teacher I often use the tasks at my cleverboard when I have the class at my carpet in front of me, maybe if we have five minutes to kill, while we are waiting for the dinner to get ready. Together we read the words and make sentences. Sometimes we talk about the different part of the speech, it’s easy to see since they are marked in different colours.

We also use “Guess the word!”, a form of hang man. You can choose short words and longer words. For my second graders the short words are perfect. This is tasks that we do at least three times a week, maybe ten minutes at a time. We try to say the letters in English and guess the words in English even though it can be hard. The pupils thinks it very exciting to see if he is going to fly or crash and the whole class is very engaged.

The practices works excellent for working in pairs.

In the future I hope the makers come up with more English practices.

This was my contribution to the blog, I hope you will find some new things to try in your classroom.

Yours, Susanne Bernlind

(All the pictures from www.skolplus.se)

AV-Media

Our school and municipality has an agreement with "AV- media" and that gives us a great opportunity to use a lot of digital media. For example we can stream film and use for some of our English lessons. I teach in second grade and we have found series of films called "Kids English Zone". Each film is about 15 min and with contents relating to children’s experience and living conditions. The children appreciate the funny actors and the English children, everyone are native speakers, and the topic in each film is well known. For example the topic can be family, breakfast, lunch, colors or feelings. It is very good for pupils to listen to well spoken English and the repetition of essential words is beneficial for the students.The pupils often says after the actors spontaneously. 

Using those films connects to Lgr 11 (teaching English) in several ways:

Aim: "…In order to deal with spoken language and texts, pupils should be given the
opportunity to develop their skills in relating content to their own experiences,
living conditions and interests…"
 "Content of Communication
• Subject areas that are familiar to the pupils.
• Interests, people and places.
• Daily life and ways of living in different contexts and areas where Englishis used…"Listening and reading – reception• Clearly spoken English and texts from various media.
• Simple instructions and descriptions.
• Different types of simple conversations and dialogues.
• Films and dramatised narratives for children…"    ( from Lgr 11)

To be able to use such digital media as we do when we are streaming films it is necessary to have a computer, internet connection and possibility to use a multimedia projector. I really recommend "Kids English Zone" for young children beginning to learn the English language. The films are funny, simple, familiar topics and contain a lot of repetition.

//Carina