Spelling – iLearn Technology

World Education Games 2015! Math, Literacy, Science

October 12, 2015Kelly Tenkely1 Comment5333 views

What it is: You guys, the World Education Games is back again, taking place around the world October 13-15, 2015! More than 5 million students from over 200 countries and territories will participate in the games for 2015. This is an exciting online challenge for students around the world. The competition begins tomorrow and continues through October 15. The World Education Games includes World Literacy Day, World Math Day (which has been around since the first World Education Games), and World Science Day. Just by participating through the answering of questions, students will be earning UNICEF points which are converted into money that goes directly toward supporting UNICEF education programs where class and school resources are desperately needed.

In World Literacy Day, students will enter the Spellodrome to compete with students from around the world. A sentence will be read aloud and it is the student’s job to spell the missing word.

For World Maths Day, students will enter Mathletics, to compete with students around the world. This is a place for students to practice and work on math fluency speed and accuracy.

World Science Day will bring students to the IntoScience dashboard where students will test their knowledge with a panel containing 16 question boxes, split into four categories of science. Each question is worth one, two or thee points based on the difficulty. In this game, you must answer faster than your opponents.

How to Integrate World Education Games into your classroom: I love the World Education Games for the fun way that it helps students (k-12) practice facts in math, spelling, and science knowledge. This makes drill/skill infinitely more fun. Students can practice with their own classmates and with those around the world. When I was still in the classroom, World Math Day was a time of year that students looked forward to. They ASKED for homework (can I keep playing at home?). True story. The kids loved finding out which country they would be paired with. It was always very motivating to see someone half way around the world playing the same game at the same time. My students worked hard to see if they could be paired with someone on every continent before the Games were over. Keep track of the countries that your students get matched with on a Google Map or on the printable maps offered on the World Education Games Website.

For at least one week, ditch the worksheets (or do it like we do at Anastasis and ditch them every day!) and practice math facts and spelling with fun games instead. This is a few days of fun, friendly competition for your students. The adjacent learning opportunities during the World Education Games is great (similar to what the Olympic games brings!). Geography, math, spelling, and science investigations are the obvious adjacent possible. This year, UNICEF is partnering in on the Games and the points that your students earn goes toward a very worthy cause, for every point your students earn, money is being donated to UNICEF for education. In addition to the drill/skill, your students can inquire into the Power of One (as our students at Anastasis Academy are doing), or can inquire into organizations that make a difference in the world (like UNICEF) and explore the social issues that these types of organizations are working to solve.

Tips: Using an Android or iPads in the classroom? World Games Day has Apps for that! Download the Mathletics app here for free!

Post-it Plus: Digitize your Post-it Notes and take brainstorming with you!

November 18, 2014Kelly Tenkely2 Comments15251 views

What it is: Post-it Notes are among my very favorite office supplies. I use them for brainstorming, my calendar, to jot down reminders, and to collect the brilliant ideas that happen in the middle of the night. At Anastasis, we use Post It Notes constantly to help organize brainstorm sessions and lines of inquiry during an inquiry block. As you might imagine, we use TONS of Post-it Notes during any given week! They are hard not to love, brightly colored squares just waiting to collect brilliance and post it for the world to see. Recently, I stumbled on an app, Post-it Plus, that takes my love of sticky notes to a whole new level! Post-it Plus is an app that lets you snap pictures of a Post-it note brainstorm session, and then arrange, refine, and organize the notes on a virtual board. The newly organized digital board can then be shared out. Students can capture 50 Post-it notes at a time and collect and combine ideas from multiple categories. Notes can be organized on a grid, or free form any way that you would like. Boards can be shared via email, PowerPoint, Excel, Dropbox, by PDF, etc. After the work has been shared, anyone can help contribute and arrange the notes to create a great idea! The app is free and optimized for iOS 8.

How to integrate Post-it Plus in your classroom: Post-it Plus is a great way for students to capture their brainstorms and group work so that they can take it with them.

Collaboratively brainstorm with your class or explore some different lines of inquiry and record each new thought on a sticky note. Students can then take a picture of the group on their iOS devices and arrange and group in a way that best makes sense to them. Now all of your students can manipulate the sticky notes individually and bring their learning with them.

As students are writing (either creative or informational), they can write each new idea or paragraph on a different sticky note. Then they can arrange their notes and take a picture. As they create different arrangements, they can use the digital version to compare with the original to make decisions about the flow of their writing.

Teach young students? Write down the different parts of a story (beginning, middle, supporting details, end) on several sticky notes. Students can snap a picture of the notes and practice sequencing the story. Each student has the digital version, so each can practice ordering and you can quickly assess their understanding.

Post-it Plus could also be used for phonics work. Write phonemes on individual sticky notes and ask students to take pictures of each phoneme with the app. Then call out words that students can create with their phonemes in the app.

Post-it Plus is also fantastic for students learning math processes (order of operations anyone?) and algebraic thinking. Write each part of an equation down and students can manipulate the digital sticky notes to show process.

Students can also use Post-it Plus to categorize and organize ideas and events in history, science, government, etc. How We Got to Now anyone? 🙂

Tips: I can’t tell you how many conferences I’ve been to that we used Sticky notes to brainstorm ideas. Post-it Plus makes it easy to take that thinking and learning with you in a very practical form that you can interact with later! Speaking of conferences, the 5 Sigma Edu Conference is a great one to test out this app!

Kids Picture Dictionary App

July 30, 2013Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment3803 views

What it is: Kids Picture Dictionary is just what you would imagine it to be: a dictionary, for kids, with pictures. This picture dictionary has something extra special built in, it includes a self record feature so that kids (teachers or parents) can record their own voice to record sentence examples. Each word includes a picture, an audio recording of the word, and the ability for kids (teachers or parents) to record their own sentence.

How to use the Kids Picture Dictionary App in your classroom: This is a very simple dictionary app for young students. It is organized well so that they can search words by letter and picture. The words included are pretty basic, but would be perfect for an emerging reader/writer. Students could use the dictionary to help them with spelling during writing time. I’ve often seen kids who can tell a fantastic story, but their writing is limited because they don’t want to spell a word that they aren’t sure of. Kids Picture Dictionary app could be just the confidence they need to let their ideas soar.

The Kids Picture Dictionary app could also be really helpful for ELL/ESL students who are learning vocabulary. Each word not only includes a picture, but also a sample sentence. Students can listen to the word used in context and then practice recording their own sentence using the new vocabulary. The recording is saved within the app so students can work independently, and teachers can go back through the app to assess understanding later.

Tips: The Kids Picture Dictionary app is free; however, it does include advertisements at the bottom of each page. For $1.99 you can get the app without the ads. A strong suggestion for educational app developers: It is RIDICULOUS to put an in-app purchase option on an educational app. If a school is going to buy your app, they will want to do it through the Volume Purchase program. In app purchases are NOT education friendly! (If you are purchasing this for school, the app exists in the app store twice, the free version always comes up first and if you dig, you can find the $1.99 ad free version.)

Price: Free

Device: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad with iOS 4.3 or later.

World Education Games: Registration Now Open!

February 1, 2013Kelly Tenkely1 Comment6639 views

What it is: Holy cow, I am SO excited! Today registration is open for World Education Games!! If your students have never participated with World Education Games (like World Math Day), this is the year. They will thank you for including them in this fun world wide contest. February 1st, that’s today, registration is open and the official warm-up training period for students begins. On March 5h students can participate in World Literacy Day, March 6 is World Math Day, and March 7 is World Science Day. March 22nd Global award presentations begin with the Official World Education Games Awards. The World Education Games is an annual global online olympics to get students from age 4 to 18 excited about learning. The fun comes in the friendly competition between countries as students compete to represent their country in the games. There are 3 days of games focused on literacy, math and science. The games are a great way to help students in speed, accuracy and general fluency in core computation, number and spelling skills. World Science Day has been designed to encourage curiosity and excitement in science while helping them answer knowledge, application and reasoning questions. Each game (a competition against other students from around the world) lasts just 1 minute. Students can go head to head as often as they would like, but only the first 50 games are counted toward the competition point tally. World Math Day was launched in 2007 and my students have taken part in this fun competition each year. Since then, Literacy and Science day has been added to the games. SO much fun!

How to integrate World Education Games into the classroom: World Education Games are such a fantastic way to encourage students to practice foundational skills. In the past, I have hosted an “opening ceremonies” at my school and done it up like the Olympics with flags, songs, etc. We go over what the World Education Games are and then make a big deal about the handing out of usernames/passwords (like lighting the torch) and then we kick off our training portion. Students get excited about participating in this fun day and we get lots of “training” in before the big day. On the actual day, we wear red, white and blue and play against kids from around the world. This is great fun in a one-to-one setting or a computer lab where all students can participate simultaneously. Don’t have that option? Because the games are 1 minute long, students can play 5 games each on classroom computers in a rotation.

Since your students are competing against students from around the world, why not use the competition to practice using a map and identifying countries? Since we have a one to one iPad program, we do this digitally with a Google Map. Each time a student competed against a country, they would come up to the board and put a “pin” in the map. Don’t have devices for each student? Use an interactive whiteboard or the paper map and actual pins on a class bulletin board, these options are just as fun!

Don’t forget closing ceremonies at the end of World Education Games. Make up fun medals and give them out to top performers, hardest trainers, etc. Think outside the box on these. Not all kids are speedy in their fact recall…find a way to honor their participation and hard work…did they see huge improvement or growth? Honor those achievements!

The World Education Games are available for free on any internet-connected computer and as a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 app.

Check out the Resource page for teacher and student guide, a world map, a poster, and for School-in-a-box information.

Tips: Schools participating in the World Education Games can also work toward giving other children the opportunity to start school. World Education Games has partnered with UNICEF to make this happen. During the games, host a fundraiser to purchase “School-in-a-Box” Each $236 donation is enough to send 80 kids to school! What a great way to help kids understand what a privilege education is and model compassion and empathy for others.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using World Education Games in your classroom.

Wordia

February 27, 2012Kelly Tenkely3 Comments4208 views

What it is: Wordia is a site that has been around for a little while, I recently took a look at it again and was pleasantly surprised with the updates. Wordia is game-based platform that helps expose students to a variety of words and vocabulary. The Wordia platform uses a dictionary as its foundation and blends learning games with interactive videos that teach vocabulary. Using Wordia, students build “Word Banks” as they engage in some friendly competition with classmates and other schools. The games in Wordia focus on spelling, grammar, oracy, auditory and phonics. This update has included some helpful goodies with schools and classrooms in mind. Games have been developed for educator led one-to-many scenarios that can be played on an interactive whiteboard or or projector connected computer with the whole class. One-to-one games are perfect for the classroom, computer lab or home. Word lists and lesson plans are available with both options for some great ideas for whichever situation best meets the needs of your classroom.

Wordia keeps track of student progress through a series of badges. Students work to build their own word bank and collect badges.

How to integrate Wordia into the classroom: Wordia is a great place for students to build and practice vocabulary and word knowledge. The games are fun to play as a class or individually and beat a vocab worksheet hands down. Wordia has a pretty impressive search engine. It would be an excellent site to keep bookmarked on classroom computers as a resource center in the classroom. Any time students run across an unfamiliar word, they can immediately run a search that brings them the definition, a video, a game, and related words. If a video doesn’t already exist, your students can record and contribute their own video! The same option exists for games. You and your students can easily build a game on Wordia to share. Just upload a word list, select a game type and voila!

Why not share spelling and vocabulary words every week by building a game from the word list? Much more fun than the boring word list that gets lost on the way home anyway.

Tips: You (the teacher) will have to create an account before your students can save their progress in Wordia. Searching the site and viewing content can be done without a login.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Wordia in your classroom!

Gudli: learning games for math, language, science, puzzles and fun

June 9, 2011Kelly Tenkely4 Comments5307 views

What it is: Gudli is a collection of games for kids that makes learning fun. Students can play these interactive educational games while developing skills in math, logic, memory, words, creativity and more. Gudli is free to use and a fantastic learning space for students in kindergarten, first and second grade.

Learning games include:

Math

Color Addition
Learn Shape
Color Subtraction
Number Series
Number Wheel
Add Numbers
Match Shape
Minus
How Many
Number Writing
Spider Counting
Color by Number
What Number Missing
Billing Counter
Time Zone
Table Memory
Mission Subtraction
Tick Tock Time
Quick Match
Math Story
Pattern Match
Counting Coins
Mission Addition

Language

Simple Sentences
Lead the Way
Rhyme Time
ABC Words
Word Rhyme
ABC Jigsaw
Word Trail
Sight Words
Labeling
Save Panda
Letter Blox
Word Hunt
The Blank
Opposite Adjectives
Spellathon
Scramble
Phonic Train
Googly Balloon
Alphabet Writing
What Letter Missing
Word Search
English Memory

Puzzle

Connect Pipe
US Map
Jigsaw Wonders
Stardoku
Shape and Shadow
Jigsaw Puzzle
Tetris Mania
Tricky Shuffler
Tic Tac Toe
Sliding Puzzle

Science

Butterfly Life Cycle
Grow Plant
Water Cycle
Animal Quiz
Jigsaw Safari

In the side bar student will learn fun “did you know” facts, Math tricks (like “Multiply by 9: Multiply by 10 and subtract the original number”) and grammar hints. Each game is labeled with the grade level and has a short description of the game and learning goals.

How to integrate Gudli into the classroom: Gudli is a fun way for kids to practice learning in math, English and science. These games make great center activities to support learning. The games are short enough that they can be set up on classroom computers and students can take turns reinforcing learning and skill practice. Gudli has enough games that students can play several in a lab setting where each student has a computer. Students can choose the games that best meet their learning needs.

Gudli is a great site to share with parents looking for some ways to reinforce learning over the summer!

Tips: Gudli has a brand new virtual world coming soon! Students will be able to explore a fun virtual world, “chat” with their friends, play in an interactive environment, challenge friends to games and of course learn!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Gudli in your classroom!

Pilot Handwriting: Turn Handwriting into a Font

March 7, 2011Kelly Tenkely7 Comments4695 views

What it is: This is a fun site. Pilot Handwriting let’s students turn their handwriting into a font of their own. The site is easy to use: print the template for students to fill out, take a picture of the completed template with a webcam (scanner and digital camera options also available), click on individual letters to adjust the look, save the handwriting by creating an account, click “let’s write” to use the font. Writing completed on the Pilot Handwriting site can be emailed. Saving the handwriting does require students to create an account. The account has no age limit but asks for an email address. If you are teaching students who don’t have an email address, they can use a @tempinbox.com or @mailinator.com ending so they don’t have to create an email account.

How to integrate Pilot Handwriting into the classroom: I’ll be honest, I am not a big fan of handwriting worksheets- this is due to my own experience with them. I remember feeling like the practice page was endless and in the end didn’t give me a good feel for handwriting (especially in cursive) because I was writing letters individually; how often do you do that in real life? The Pilot Handwriting font creator would be a fun way for students to end those handwriting practice sessions. When they have a letter down, they can write it on the template. The template could be filled out over several weeks as they learn and practice new letters. At the end, they can turn all that practice into their very own computer font…as unique as their fingerprint! The finished font can be used for learning how to write a friendly letter. Students can compose a letter to a teacher, another student, or a parent using their font and send the finished letter via email.

Pilot Handwriting let’s students create multiple fonts within one account. Students could create a font at the beginning of the school year and again at the end of the school year (or in subsequent years) to compare their growth. Handwriting can tell us so much about how students are developing and thinking. This is a great way to record that development digitally.

My students love creating their own font, it makes all writing and practice more fun. I caught a fifth grader typing out her spelling and vocabulary words just so that she could use her font. In that one exercise she was practicing her handwriting, typing, and spelling/vocabulary. Not too shabby 🙂

Tips: This is a neat site for students to share with their families. I have great handwritten notes from my grandmothers, recipes from my mom, and birthday cards from aunts and uncles. There is something about a handwritten note that feels so personal and meaningful, it is capturing a piece of who that person is. Students may want to ask their family members to create a font with their handwriting. I had one student who was creating a family tree for class, he had each member of his family fill out the template and create a font. He then asked them to send an email to him with the information needed for his tree using the font. He cut and paste these onto poster board. It was honestly the coolest family tree I have seen, he had his family get involved and created a keepsake in the process.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Pilot Handwriting in your classroom!

World Spelling Day

March 2, 2011Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment1716 views

What it is: World Spelling Day is brought to you by the same folks who hold World Math Day. This year (2011) World Spelling Day is taking place on March 3. Don’t wait, sign your kids up now and they can start practicing! World Spelling Day is a world-wide competition between students where they engage in live games of spelling. Each game lasts for 60 seconds and students can play up to 100 games to earn points for their personal tally. Students can play more than 100 games during the event but only 100 count toward the Spellometer. Students who answer the most correct question will appear in the World Spelling Day Hall of Fame. World Spelling Day has 5 levels to play and 20 games at each level. Just like World Math Day school age students (4-18 years old), individual children, and homeschoolers can register and participate. Register as many or as few students as you want (for free!). Even better, if you already registered for World Math Day, your login credentials will work on the World Spelling Day website!

How to integrate World Spelling Day into the classroom: It couldn’t be easier to get your students involved, just sign them up by registering, pass out usernames and passwords and away you go. Students can play in a computer lab setting (they like to try to login at exactly the same time so they can play against each other in games) or on classroom computers in 60 second rotations. The 60 second time limit on games makes it easy to pass all of your students through a World Spelling Day center on classroom computers. In addition, students can take their login information home with them to play at home. World Spelling Day takes place every March, now that you know it is coming, plan to make it an Olympic type event in your classroom. I have been known to hold opening ceremonies in my classroom prior to the event.

Since your students are competing against students from around the world, why not use the competition to practice using a map and identifying countries? Since I had a Promethean board, I did this digitally with a Google Map. Each time a student competed against a country, they would come up to the board and put a “pin” in the map. Don’t have an interactive whiteboard? The paper map and actual pins are just as fun!

Tips: There is a free World Spelling Day app for the iPad, you can get it here.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using World Spelling Day in your classroom!

Color in Motion- Exploring Color

January 31, 2011Kelly Tenkely9 Comments3773 views

What it is: Amazing really doesn’t do this site justice. No really, this might be my favorite site of the month…that is saying something! Regardless of if you teach about color or art, Color in Motion is a must see just for the creativity and brilliance of the site. Color in motion is a wonderfully animated and interactive experience of color communication and color symbolism. Have you ever looked at an art website and thought, “really, this is the best they could do? It is a site about art for crying out loud!” No? Just me? 🙂 Color in Motion is not one of those sites. The minute you begin exploring you know that this isn’t just a site about color, it is a work of art. There are three activities on Color in Motion. The Stars introduces students to the color stars (primary and secondary colors personified). When students click on a color stars profile they learn about their blood (the color(s) that make them up), what the star is hired to represent (the feelings the color gives), the positive and negative traits, and what the color represents around the world. In the movies, students can sit back and enjoy the show as they learn about the symbolism of each color in a fun animation. In the Lab, students have the opportunity to interact with the different stars. Students can direct a scene acting as a movie director based on a word that represents the color choice. In project 2, students are a color star manager. It is up to them to decide which production their star is going to participate in based on what they learned about color symbolism. Project 3 is a kaleidoscope where students can just have fun and “play” with color in a virtual kaleidoscope.

How to integrate Color in Motion into the classroom: Color in Motion is a fantastic place for students to learn more about color in a highly interactive, engaging, and fun way. Students learn about color through story. They meet each of the colors as a different character being cast for a production. The site is great for any art or design class but could be equally wonderful for a creative writing project. After your students have had some time to explore the site and interact with the different characters, ask them to choose a character to write a story about. Students should write the story based on the character traits they know about the color.

As a getting-to-know-you activity, students could choose a color that they feel best represents them personally. Students can list all of the color attributes that they feel describe them. Are they a mix of colors? Have students write down what the mix is and why.

Looking for a way to spice up spelling/vocabulary practice? Have students assign each word a color based on the word meaning and the color character traits that match. Students can compare and contrast the colors they chose for the words with the colors other students chose for a light persuasive argument.

As students study historical and literary figures, they can assign each a color based on the matching character traits. It would make a really neat bulletin board to have a color wheel with pictures of historical/literary characters on each color based on the similar character traits. These types of activities help students draw parallels and think about history and literature in new ways.

Younger students can think about what color an animal would be if it was the color of its color character traits. The creative possibilities with Color in Motion are endless.

Oh yeah, in addition to all of those “spin-off” ideas, there are great creative activities right on the site many of which would be great for whole class with a projector-connected computer or interactive whiteboard, for small groups in a center activity, or individually in a one to one computer situation.

Tips: Color in Motion can be viewed in both English and Spanish. If you have students learning English or Spanish as a second language, the colors and adjectives on this site are wonderful!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Color in Motion in your classroom.

Tag Galaxy: Visual Word Relationships

January 4, 2011Kelly Tenkely9 Comments5484 views

What it is: Tag Galaxy is a neat little tool that helps students to explore relationships between words and ideas as well as view pictures related to that word. Type in a word to search and immediately you are transferred to a galaxy with the original word at the center and the associated ideas orbiting around it. When you click on the word in the center, a globe populates with pictures from Flickr that are tagged with that word. Click on one of the orbiting words and tags related to that word start to orbit. Tag Galaxy is a very neat way to view information!

How to integrate Tag Galaxy into the classroom: Tag Galaxy is a brilliant way to visually explore word relationships. Students can use it to type in spelling or vocabulary words and discuss the relationship the related tags have to the original word. Students can click on the original idea to get a visual understanding of the word in the form of a picture globe. The connection with Flickr helps students to visualize words, ideas, and concepts by providing a variety of pictures that match the tag. Tag Galaxy would make for a fun story starter. Students can type in a word tag to get them started, view related words, and then click on the globe of pictures to spark creative writing ideas. Tag Galaxy can be set up on classroom computers as a creative writing centers, or used for whole class inspiration with a projector-connected computer or interactive whiteboard.

Check out science, math, art, or geography vocabulary on Tag Galaxy, the resulting collection of images will help your students attach meaning to those tricky science concepts like my photosynthesis example above.

As a side note, Tag Galaxy also offers a pretty good visual aid for learning about orbit 🙂

Tips: ***Very important*** Whenever you are using tools that pull from other sites to populate, it is important to test out the words prior to using with students. You never know how people will tag an image and the image might not be appropriate for all age groups. When using Tag Galaxy with elementary students, have them suggest words that you test before using with the class. In my classroom, whenever students wanted to do an image search, I had them fill out an “image wish list” first. On the wish list students write down words they would like to search. I would do a quick test of the words and sign off on them. This worked well as there were a lot of similar requests (i.e. animals!) 🙂

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Tag Galaxy in your classroom.