Another school year has already started and we are back in the classrooms with brand new ideas. Here are mine if you are looking for a techie-start to the new year and some first month activities using technology in your lessons.
Symfaceis a cute tool to express your emotions changing the face expression of an animated emoticon and writing why you feel like that. When you finish, you can tweet, get the link and share it with others. Children can create their own symfaces and talk about their feelings on coming back to school and how they feel about their classes, lessons.
We can also useWordle and it's alternatives for different activities. We can create a word cloud using the children's name to welcome them in the classroom or we can create a word cloud of our classroom rules. Children can create their own wordles about themselves including their ages, family, hobbies etc. and they can share and talk about them in the classroom. This can be a good icebreaker for the first month.
Voki is another famous edtech tool that we can use in the classroom. We can create a voki avatar talking about herself and we can ask or assign kids to create their own vokis. If they can't do it in the classroom, they write their text in the class and create their online avatars at home. We can also create a classroom mascot/puppet,and children can ask it some questions. We can use text-to-speech application of voki and answer the questions of the kids.
We can create a collaborative online board usingWallwisher or Linoit.Children can add their pictures and add their text about their summer holiday. They can also write about themselves and in the classroom we can read each note and try to guess who that person is.
Tricider is a brainstorming tool. You create a topic or ask a question and ask kids to answer and brainstorm on the ideas. They can also vote for each other's statements or they can go against them writing why. It can be a good tool to talk about the classroom rules and how to improve English.
Penzu is a tool to keep an online diary. Children can start writing about their first weeks and they can keep it until the last day.
Fotobabble is a tool to record your voices for your pictures. Children can draw a picture about their feelings of the school or about themselves, then upload it to Fotobable recording their voices. They can share them in the class and learn about each other.
Photopeach is a tool that lets you make slideshow quiz using your pictures, adding captions and music. We can create a slideshow quiz for our kids about school, rules, ourselves and lessons.
AcapelaTv is a text-to-speech application where there are ready flash animations that you can customize. We can create an animation using this tool that is talking about what we will be doing on that day.
Bubble.us is a collaborative brainstorming and a mind-mapping tool. We can brainstorm and create mind map of the classroom rules, our hobbies, the topics that we are going to cover this year.
We can create different types of quizzes for our kids to see what they remember from last year.EasyTestMaker is a nice tool to create one.
Online surveys or polls can be an interesting and a fun way to get to know our kids better, to learn their opinions about school,learning English or what activities they enjoy doing in class.SurveyMonkey and PollDaddy can be two good choices.
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