Symface is 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.

We can also use Wordle and it’s alternatives for the first day 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 days.

Voki is another famous edtech tool that we can use in the classroom for the first days. 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 using Wallwisher 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.

Penzu is a tool to keep an online diary. Children can start writing about their first school days 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.

Enjoy the new year …

This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.

Wallwisher is an online notice board maker and a favourite of mine recently! Each child can write about him/herself such as name, age, where they live, what they like to do and add a picture of themselves; or they can write about how they spent their summer, you can also use wallwisher to decide on the classroom rules by brainstorming with the kids or get feedback from them about  the first days of school.

Voki is a tool to create animated speaking avatars. You can create class pet/mascot/puppet that can ask questions to the children or talk about weather, day, month, the activities that the children will be doing in class that day. You can also ask children to create their own avatars that talk about themselves. If you have a class website, it’s also a good idea to have a Voki avatar that introduces you to the kids and the parents.

You can start a talk group using Voxopop. You can talk about yourself or ask questions to the kids that you want them to talk or start a discussion on any topic.Voicethread can be an alternative to Voxopop. If you give the children a book report assignment for the summer, you can ask them to leave their comments on a Voicethread by using different commenting styles. The activities that you can do with Voicethread throughout the year truly endless.

Online surveys or polls can be an interesting and a fun way to engage your children. You can use them to get to know them better or you can design a survey to learn their opinions about school,learning English or what activities they do enjoy in class. SurveyMonkey, Polldaddy, PollEverywhere can be the tools where to start!

If you want to give a quiz at the first days, you can choose a more techie way and use some online quiz generators. EasyTestMaker, HotPotatoes, QuizEgg and QuizMaker are my favourites.

What about asking children to create timelines as if they are keeping an online diary that starts from the first day of school? Xtimeline or OurStory can be some examples of these tools.

Creating an animated film may seem difficult to produce, luckily we have Web 2.0 tools to make it very easy and fun for us and for our children. Zimmertwins, Xtranormal and DVolver are my favourite tools.You can create a film starter and ask the children to guess the ending or create their own films on any topic you’ve given them. These sites are new ways to engage your kids and improve their creativity.

EduGlogster can be an awesome way to use in class all throughout the year. You can create a colourful glog for your children with links, pictures, animated pictures, colourful background, audio or with a video. You can create a glog to introduce yourself/your lesson, brainstorm ideas with kids or simply ask your children to create a glog to introduce themselves to each other.

You can also use Box.net or Drop.io to send documents online and collaborate with your kids.

If you are using different video sharing sites in your lessons, you can also have a look at SchoolTube, TeacherTube, TeachersTV, Discovery Education,KidsVid, Totlol, SchoolsTube, and SchoolWaxTV.

Web 2.0 is sure to impact the way you are teaching! Have a great year and be someone’s favourite teacher!

Cross posted on TechLearning!

* Students make a circle with the first letter of their names or their birthdays.

* Students throw a ball to each other saying their names and when everyone says his/her name, they have to throw the ball back to the person who has thrown them saying their names. Challenging!! 

* Teachers make a circle, everyone says how many years they have worked as a teacher adding the number they have heard from the teacher before them. (We ended up 114 years of experience in teaching. It was great fun!)

* In a circle, students throw a ball to each other saying ‘I like….’, when everyone finishes their sentences, students throw the ball back to the people saying what they said they liked (Danny likes travelling etc.)

* In pairs, students write three words about their lives. It can be their age, their brother’s name, what they like to do, the year they were born etc. The other pair tries to guess what the words mean by asking questions.

* In groups, students try to find a word starting with ‘T’ or ’C' for these sentences.

•  Something that has wheels.
•  Someting that is worked by electricity.
•  Something that you can find at the coast.
•  A sport or a hobby.
•  Something to do with weather.
•  Something that is in your living room.
•  Something that is yellow.
•  Something that you wear in cold weather.

* Teacher gives some questions to the students before the reading activity. Students try to answer the questions with made up answers. When they finish, they retell their story looking at their answers. The good thing is that everyone will end up having a different story. Then teacher gives the real story. What’s your story out of these questions?

1. Where is Minton?
2. How many medical students arrived in Minton?
3. What time of the day did they arrive?
4. What did they tell the landlord of the pub?
5. What did the students do the following weeks?
6. How did the local people feel about the activities of the students?
7. How did the local people stop the young students and get them leave the town?

I can send you the real story, just let me know.

* Teacher starts telling her true story using not more than 3 or 4 sentences then she stops and asks the students to go on telling the rest of the story trying to guess what it may have happened and ended. When they finish telling the story, teacher tells the real story of her own.

* After students read the story, teacher writes some words from the story on the board and asks students to put the words in order as they are in the story without looking at their texts.

* Teacher writes a sentence, a rhyme or a song on the board and reads/sings it with students. Every time they read/sing the text on the board, teacher deletes a word or chunks to make it more difficult and fun for the students to read and remember.

* Students tell the number of the letters of each word as they read it. (Jack/four, and/three, Jill/four,went four, up/two, the/three, hill/four ….)

* After students read a story, teacher divides the class into groups of three and each group members choose to be either A, B or C. Teacher dictates questions adding one of the letters from A,B or C. All the A’s in the class has to write the question whenever they hear ‘A’ letter. The same goes for B’s and C’s. When teacher dictates all the questions, each students answers her/his answers and shares it with the rest of her group. (It was difficult to explain, hope you get it)

* # Students work in pairs. Each pair has six different words on their lists. They try to memorize the words, pairs change their lists and try to remember the words on their lists. # Each pair tells 5 words form the other pair’s words list and they try to remember the 6th word on the list. # Each pair tells 4 words form the other pair’s words list and they try to remember the 5th and the 6th word on the list. #Pairs get their own lists and try to write the other pair’s words on their papers.

* This is a post-reading activity. Teacher divides the class into groups, each group is asked to read one paragraph of the text, then teacher asks each group to write one or two sentences after their paragraph that will not change the story.

* Students expand the story with the adverbs and adjectives that the teacher has given to them.

* Students add one extra character or a scene to the story.

* Teacher gives each student an animal word (sheep, dog, bird, cow etc) Students start walking around the classroom making the noises of these animals. Each students try to find the rest of his/her group by listening to the noises. Students can be given different songs, they hum around and find the rest of their group.

*  Teacher gives each student in the class a letter, A,B,C…. (All the letters of the alphabet should be) . Teacher shouts out one word, e.g DOG. The class try to spell that word by standing up and saying their letters at the right time.

* Teacher lays the pictures of the story on the floor and hands out different parts of the text to students. They try to match the pictures with their texts. When everyone finds the right picture, they read their texts and show their pictures.

* Students choose one sentence from the story and write each word of their sentences on small papers and place them on their desks randomly. Students walk around the class and try to put the words into correct order to find the sentence again.

* Teacher gives different parts of the story to some of the students in the class. They all stand up and face the rest of the class. Each student only read their parts of their story while the rest of the class try to put the story into correct order moving students to the right or to the left and asking them to read their parts.

We can easily make our students read the texts more than once by using these activities and make them understand the it thoroughly. I hope you enjoy and find these activities useful.  

I would like to thank to Philip Franklin, the Coordinator of the Foreign Languages Department of Terakki Vakfi Okullari for this opportunity.

Here on this blog entry, I would like to share some of the activities with you.

* This is a concentration game. In pairs, students face each other and one by one, they count to three and repeat the three numbers without a pause. (1st pair: one / 2nd pair: two/ 1st pair: three/ 2nd pair: one /1st pair :two…) It may seem very easy to do it but once you do it fast, it’s really difficult to concentrate to count.

*Let’s extend the activity above. When the pairs say number ’2′, they have to clap their hands.

* We can do the same activity with letters A-B-C, or V1,V2 and V3. (1st pair: clean/ 2nd pair:cleaned/ 1st pair:cleaned/2nd pair: break/1st pair: broke ….).

* We can ask our students to do three word sentences. (1st pair: watch /2nd pair: a /1st pair: film /2nd pair: drive/1st pair: a /2nd pair: car …)

* This activity can be done as a whole class activity. We really enjoyed while we were playing this. Teacher says a word that is going to be the first word of a sentence and each student has to repeat the words that is said and add one more word to continue to build a meaningful sentence/s and a story at the end. Our sentences are ‘Last (this was the word that trainer gave us to start) summer, I went to Bodrum andI saw my best friend at the hotel andwe started to fight loudly about Helen.’ When you finish the activity, we ask the students to write the sentences down. After they write the sentences down, they can expand the story or they can delete some of the words that won’t change the meaning of the sentences once they are deleted. 

*I always like picture dictations, you can even do it with young and very young learners. On this activity, you describe a town and students draw what they have heard. When it’s finished, you ask them to draw themselves on the picture doing something. Students swap their pictures and write what the other students is doing on the picture. They give the pictures back and talk about if their guesses were true or not. To extend this activity, we can divide the classroom into two big groups and ask the first group what they can do in this town if they go there in summer time and the other group write about what they can do when they go there in winter time.

* You give a blank paper to each student and ask them to write their names on the top of the paper and you collect the papers back and hand the paper out randomly. You give written questions to the students and ask them to write the answers of the questions as if they were the person whose name they have been given. The questions can be :

• Where do you live?
• How did you come to class today?
• What did you have for breakfast today?
• Where did you go for your last holiday?
• What books do you like to read?
• What films do you like to watch?
• What food do you like to eat?
• What are your hobbies?
• What do you hope for future?

The questions can be more or less difficult according to the level of the students . When finished, students give the papers back to the students whose names written on the paper. They can talk about which guesses are true.

* Teacher reads out some sentences and if the sentences are true for themselves, students write them down on their notebooks.

* Students write four true and one false sentences about their last holiday/weekend. They swap their papers and they try to guess and underline the wrong sentence of the other pair. Each student can read out the true or the wrong sentences.

* You divide the class into four groups. You give each group a paper that’s written one sentence of a story on it. Each group has to come up with words that can be in the story. When they finish, you give the students the original story and they scan the story and underline the words they have written if they are in the story.

* You write six or more words on the board and ask the students to make a meaningful story out of the words you have written. Our words were shepherd-fox-stomach-hollow-starved-oak tree. What is your story out of these words?

* Running dictation is one of my favourite activities. If it is the first time that you are going to read about it, I’m sure you and your students will love it. It’s a great activity to enliven a tired classroom. You divide the class into groups. Each group has to choose a writer and a leader or leaders can change. You hang a text on the board. Each leader has to run, read the sentences committing them to memory. When they think they can remember, they go back to the group and repeat to them what it said. The writer writes down the story as it is dictated. (or you can cut the text into sentences and place them on the board. Leaders can run and memorize the sentences and go back to their groups to retell it. You can put even some obstacles on the leaders way to make it more fun. When they finish the running dictation, they can put the sentences in correct order.)

* You give a picture of the scene of the story. Students label 6 pictures on the paper and sawp their pictures.

* Students write in bubbles what the characters are saying in that scene and share it with the rest of the class.

* In pairs, students retell the story to each other. When the teacher says ‘STOP’, the other pair has to retell the rest of the story.

This is the first part of My Pilgrims Diary. I will write the second part soon…  

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