Give Young Learners Structured Writing Practice with WritingSparks

WritingSparks is a really useful tool to encourage younger learners to brainstorm and plan before they write.

You start by choosing the age group of your students.

Then choose the kind of task you want them to do.

You can also choose the amount of time you want to spend on the task.

You then get a writing prompt to share with your students.

Once they click on the begin planning they get a short period of time to plan what they will say. The site also prompts them and feeds in some words and expressions they might need.

They can then begin the writing task. This is timed for them too.

Then at the end of the writing task they receive a reward.

This is a great site for giving structure and adding an element of fun to writing activities, especially if you have a data projector so that students can see the prompts on the screen.

The site has been created by the makers of NightZookeeper and can be used in conjunction with that site or without any login.

I hope you and your students enjoy WritingSparks. You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

Related links:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers

Best

Nik Peachey

eBooks for Kids that Read Themselves

I've just spotted this wonderful online library for young learners called MeeGenius. It has a great collection of classic stories and fairy tales that are delivered as illustrated online books.

The library is very easy to navigate, just click on the book you want. You can personalise the books my selecting the names of the characters in the book, though you have to register to save these, or just read through by clicking on the button to read and clicking to turn pages.

You can also click on the 'Play' option and when you do this you hear the book being read to you with the words being highlighted as you hear them.
This is a great site to help younger learners with their reading. the stories are ones that will probably be familiar from their L1 anyway and this combined with the audio support and word highlighting should really help not only with their reading but also their listening skills and pronunciation.

There is also a mobile app for iPhone- iPad - iTouch, but it isn't free (the website is free). I bought it for about 2 euros and it works pretty effectively. You still have to download each book before you read it, so this is best done on a wireless connection (so you aren't paying mobile rates) but it is then stored on your device until you want to read it.

The site and the app are really good recommendations for parents if you want to advise them on how to support their kids learning development and help them to read with the kids.

I hope you find MeeGenius useful.

Related links:

• 3D Computer Games with Young Learners
• Get Rid of Embarrassing Ads
• Bring Your Kids Drawings to Life
• A Web Browser Designed for Kids
• A Virtual Language Learning World for Kids

Best

Nik Peachey

Get Rid of Embarrassing Ads

There's nothing worse than sending your students to or showing your students a website only to discover it is covered in embarrassing or unsuitable advertisements.

Most of you who use any websites with students will probably have seen these IMVU ones which seem to appear even on very respectable websites.

Well here's a really easy way to get rid of them. Just go to http://nomoreads.adout.org/. Enter the URL of the site you want to remove the ads from and click on 'Go'.

Now you have the site without the ads.



If you want to make sure the ads don't appear next time you go there or when you send your students to the site, just copy the URL from the top of the page and use that as your link. That's what I've done here, so if you click the link now you should be able to see the page with or without ads.

• HowJSay
• HowJSay without ads

This won't work with every ad from every sites, but it can get rid of quite a few on most innocent sites.

• You should also check to see if you can navigate around the site and make sure it has blocked any legitimate features of the site.

Adout isn't perfect but it's a free and easy way to get rid a few potential embarrassments particularly if you work with younger learners or students from more sensitive cultures.
There's even a browser button that you can add to your browser.
Just click on it if anything unexpected appears and it should help you to get rid of it.

I hope you find this useful.

Related links:

• Create Your Lego Avatar
• Multiple Media Search
• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Image based activities
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Darwin and Evolution
• Create Image Books

Best

Nik Peachey

Bring Your Kids Drawings to Life

I've just been playing around with a really nice site for kids. It's called Shidonni and it is similar to a paint program and allows kids to draw animals etc. The difference with this though is that once they have drawn an animal they then click a button and it comes to life!

There's more though. They can also draw items of food to put in the animal's fridge and draw habitat for it to live in. If that's not enough they can even play games of snakes and ladders with their animal and visit other planets where other students have created their own animals. So it's bit like a paint version of Spore for young kids.

• Watch this movie to see how it is done

I'm sure their must be loads of educational and language development uses we can put this to, so I'll be getting my thinking hat on. Until then I hope you enjoy getting your kids to create their own animals.

Related links:

• Creating Spore creatures
• A Web Browser Designed for Kids
• Educational Games That Really Are Fun
• Online Water Conservation Game
• Wonderland Virtual World and MMORPG
• Google's Lively Competitor with Second Life?
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Machinima with Moviestorm

Best

Nik Peachey

A Web Browser Designed for Kids

This is something I think I'll be trying out with my own daughter. It's a web browser designed only to access 'safe' websites. It's made by KidZui and there is the choice of a free version or you can have a membership subscription. The free version gives you reports on what your kids are using the browser for and what sites they are looking at.
The subscription version gives you the same but a bit more detail. It also gives you kids access to more accessories and Zui clothes!! (Think I'll go for the free option)

Anyway, if you want your kids to have access to 800,000 safe websites without having to look over their shoulder the whole time, then this looks like a good choice. Runs on PC and MAC.

Hope you enjoy it.

Best

Nik Peachey

A Virtual Language Learning World for Kids

Well what kid wouldn't want to be a language learning panda? Panfu has used this premise as the basis for a new virtual world for kids in which they can play games and learn languages at the same time.

They create their own panda avatar, dress the panda and have their own panda tree house to decorate and invite friends round to.

On the whole this looks pretty good and I'm sure my 9 year old daughter will be keen to try this out (she's already a Webkinz fanatic). Panfu are offering two levels of membership; Free and Gold. Gold entitles your kids to get extra customisation for their panda avatar and his lodgings.

Getting your kids involved in virtual worlds or any kind of social networking is always slightly risky, but it does look as though Panfu are taking this seriously.

The service is available in a range of languages. If your kids register as being English, then they get to learn some Spanish, if they register as other nationalities it looks like they get to learn English.

I haven't tried this one out yet myself, but it does look like a serious and well thought out educational effort. Definitely a step in the right direction.

Hope your kids enjoy it.

Best

Nik Peachey

What can you do with a $100 laptop?

Well quite a lot it seems. If you're interested in those little green and white $100 laptops that have been making the news for so long, but still haven't got your hands on one and are wondering if it's worth the while, well this is the site for you.The Sugar Labs wiki tells you all about the Sugar operating system (as used on the $100 laptop), the kinds of software that have been developed to run on it and the kinds of activities students can do on it.

There's some really nice stuff here and it does seem pretty impressive. Now if only I knew how I could actually buy one!!! Drop me a line if you know.

Best

Nik Peachey

Video sharing for young learners

Youtube isn't the place you'd really want your young students browsing, though as we all know there is some great stuff there for kids, and that's why Totlol is such a great idea.

It's new video sharing site and community which allows parents and teachers to set up their own channels and share videos for ages 6 months to 6 years and above ( Found quite a few that I liked). The videos are collected from Youtube, but are shared through the Totlol community site so there's no danger of your students clicking through to something unsuitable.

The site is still in beta, but it looks like there's some nice content there already, so this would be a good place to start looking or get your younger students in the habit of looking for good, safe, educational content. You can also sign up for your own free account and start contributing towards the community.

Well hope you find this useful and hope you enjoy this alien song!