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.
