Plickers

Plickers - Clickers without the need for clickers!  This is a great app for taking polls, voting and giving your opinion with the added bonus that students don't need a mobile device. The teacher simply prints out the 'Plicker' cards and students hold them up in one of four positions in order to cast their vote. The letter of their vote needs to be at the top. There are 4 choices, A, B, C or D. The only device needed is one for the teacher in order to scan the cards and collect the data.  The Plicker cards are quickly scanned and the results can be seen on line in seconds.  This is particularly handy as many schools still don't agree with the BYOD idea and in many schools, mobiles and tablets in the classroom are still not allowed.  Plickers is being used for pre-assessment and assessment but you can also use them to GAMIFY your classroom.  How you use them is up to you and your own imagination!

See the following video which sums up the app in a nutshell.

MYSTERY SKYPE

MYSTERY SKYPE

Mystery Skype and other educational Skype activities are taking off in a big way in schools all over the world.  It's a great way to open up the walls of your classroom by taking your students to other classrooms around the world, virtually of course!  It's also a great way to bring interesting people into your own classroom.

There are three activities offered on the new Microsoft for Education platform:

1. Mystery Skype
2. Guest Speaker
3. Virtual Field trip

In all three activities, students are able to virtually go out into the world and see other places or meet interesting people thanks to video-conferencing tools such as Skype.
I have personally been trying out the Mystery Skype activity with teachers who are learning this new methodology and it has been a great success.  There are so many skills being worked on during a short 20 minute Mystery Skype game:

• Critical thinking skills
• Mapping skills
• Language skills
• Collaborative team-working skills

No matter what the age, the activity is fun and engaging.  I have seen teachers turn into children in minutes! I would highly recommend introducing Mystery Skype into your classroom.  It is such a rich activity in all senses and takes very little organisation if you allow the students to manage the activity using all the

 JOB TASKS that you give them. The big job for the teacher is finding a class to play with but nowadays with Twitter, Google Hangouts and the Microsoft Education platform, it's easy to make professional connections in order to organise the dates and time of the activity.

To play Mystery Skype, I signed up here and found a class almost immediately.

Here is an example of the activity, done by teachers from Catalonia and 5th graders from Canada.

Riddle - Create, Customise, Publish, Analyse!

Riddle is a great tool for creating polls, riddles and lists.  Very easy to use and with some imagination, students could create some great content for their classmates to comment or vote on.  Easy to use and easily shareable.

CLOUDS

Do clouds weigh?

YES

NO

MAYBE

HSTRY - Timelines for English language learners

HSTRY - Timelines for English language learners

There have been many different types of timeslines come out in these past few years and I have tried many of them.  They all have different features that make one better, easier or more practical than the next.  I just came across this one which also seems to have some unique features that your students may find attractive.  

The tool HSTRY allows you to add images, videos, audios to bring your timeline to life.  Students are also able to add comments to the timeline which creates interaction and feedback for the author of the timeline. They can add quizzes too!

I haven't tried it with students but it does look like it could be a fun tool to use and it could certainly be useful for EFL students when it comes to making oral presentations in English.  I am adding the link to HSTRY's webpage.  If you try it, I would love to hear how it went and see some examples!

https://www.hstry.co/

HEADLINE NEWS STORIES

This cool tool by Class Tools is great for creating personalized headlines related to real or fictive news. Students can use their imaginations to create dynamic titles, headlines and summaries of their news stories. The tool allows you to create an almost instant downloadable image which could be printed out to decorate the classroom.  It also allows you to share the url or tweet your headline instantly!

CODE-MONSTER

I'm sure a lot of you have heard of Scratch, which is a programming language which teaches kids how to code in order to make their own interactive games or stories.  I just came across CODE-MONSTER which has the same purpose of teaching code language to kids but is much more basic.  Kids carry out very simple tasks in order to get an idea of how coding works.  The results are instant.  Every task carries out some type of visual action that can actually be seen on the screen. I think this tool could be very motivating for those students who are interested in game designing, web page creation, etc. because of its simplicity.
Have a look and try it out yourselves!

http://www.crunchzilla.com/code-monster

GRAMMAR IN INFOGRAPHICS

Infographics are a great way to present grammar, punctuation or common spelling mistakes to your students. Not only are they good for students but also for many of us native speakers who often make the same common mistakes!  How many of us have misspelt 'there' or 'their', 'meet' or 'meat', 'who's or whose'? Present it on an infograph and get your students to create others. A great visual way for it to finally stick in your students' mind....and in yours!

Explore more visuals like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.