When we engage the tools of technology wonderful things will happen….
Here are three tools/resources that I am certain both you and your students will engage!
Free Rice
The first resource I would like to introduce to you is freerice.com . This site can be used in several ways for both intermediate and senior levels. I have used it for many subjects and students seems to enjoy it for many reasons. It will build confidence in students multiplication tables, it will help them with their chemistry symbols, it helps them build their word power or it can familiarize them with famous artists but, best of all it helps feed hungry people.
Free Rice is basically a personal trivia game that tests knowledge and rewards them by filling a bowl of rice for someone in a third world country. The whole class or whole school can sign on to a team and their collective knowledge could feed a whole village.
A few years back we created a competition between the Adult Education schools to see who could accumulate the most rice. With so many subject options, this site is a great compliment to any course. It can even be used for a whole class trivia for review. Having three hour long classes sometimes we need to break up the routine and interject that community competitiveness.
As a supply teacher on computer days with the intermediate students they would all log on and I would offer a prize for the one who accumulated the most rice for their multiplication tables. The students could really focus, build their skills and do their part for social justice all at once.
It is not surprising that those who love it the most are ESL (English as a second language) students still working to build their vocabulary, as the sixty levels in the languages go from very easy to quite difficult. The meanings of words, the spelling of words and the grammar all work toward improving language skills.
Fun Brain
This site is fairly new to me and I stumbled across it while searching out some of the links that have been displayed. Fun Brain has a plethora of kid friendly games and activities to engage students from Kindergarten to grade eight.
I particularly liked the Playground section of the site where the activities were geared toward primary grades. Simple things like following a pattern, using fine motor skills to paint or simply teaching them how to use the mouse by playing in the sandbox. They are easy to follow and do not have complicated directions. Very young students will easily move through the site and find many ways where they can improve their skills through simple games, but don’t tell them because they are having too much fun. The site also has several reading/writing activity pages, one being Mad Libs. My own kids used to love this writing exercise when they were small. Very fun and engaging!
It is quite obvious that this is an american site as some of the older student books are about american history, not that this matters, it is just that it would be great to see Robert Munsch or other Canadian authors being used.
Prezi is a fantastic resource for students to create presentations. PowerPoint is good, but Prezi just takes it to a whole new level. After you sign up for free, you are guided through all the detailed instruction for your presentation project. There are templates to decide or you can craft your own. I must admit it is a bit of confusion when you first log on but, once you play around and try different details it all comes together. As with anything the more you work with it the better you will get.
There are several examples online of completed presentation projects that you could look over and keep in mind that the free versions are not private as there is added cost for this but, if it is all about education ...why wouldn't we want to share it?
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