Integrating Technology in the Primary Classroom

StoryIt is a website that doesn’t look amazing with its simple layout and advertisements but has some great resources for the junior primary classroom.

While there are stories to read and print, seasonal resources, printable shapes and more – the resources I’ve found most useful are the word games.

There are about fifteen word games available to play online that involve making sentences, making words, spelling, changing words etc.

In the Wiz Game, the goal is to make as many words as you can from the letter tiles. Get the question mark tile to the bottom and a vocabulary question appears. Select the best meaning of the word and earn extra points.

The Odd One Out: Word Family game involves choosing the word that doesn’t belong.

There are games on the StoryIt site that would be suitable for students in at all levels of primary school.

These games could be used as a lesson introduction or closure on the IWB, with a small focus group or individual students could use the games on classroom computers.

Have you used the StoryIt Word Games?

How could you use these games in your classroom?

I recently came across the site Kubbu. This is a site where teachers can make games and online activities for students. The activities can be made available to individual students or groups of students and the teacher can view and analyse results.

Kubbu is free for teachers although is limited to using with 30 students and 15 activities at a time. If you wish to use Kubbu with a larger group of students or create more than 15 activities you can purchase a year’s membership.

The types of activities you can create on Kubbu include matching, sorting, crosswords and a range of quizzes. Activities are stored for 30 days and you can print paper copies of the online activities.

This is an example of an online synonym matching activity.

It may seem time consuming to create new activities for students but there are also shared activities available that others have made. I couldn’t find many activities that would be useful for my students in the shared section although hopefully these activities will grow as Kubbu becomes more well known by teachers.

Kubbu could be used with students of all age groups and could be a handy tool for practice, revision and assessment both at school or as homework.

Leave a comment if you have tried Kubbu. How did you find it?

As we’re now getting into “Christmas mode” at school, here are some sites that might be useful in the primary classroom.

Primary Games has a wide range of flash style Christmas games for kids. Great to use on an IWB or classroom computer.

North Pole is a great site for kids and teachers. There are stories, games and all sorts of interactive activities. Children can even write a letter to Santa and he will reply.

Kelly Tenkely has written a post on interactive Advent calendars which would be great to use with children on an IWB on the countdown to Christmas.

Fanpop has a collection of links to 100 classic Christmas videos. Great to watch on an IWB at the end of the school year (be warned, I have found a couple that have been dubbed in foreign languages!).

Origami Club has some step-by-step animations and printable instructions for Christmas origami such as santas, reindeer, stars etc.

Leave a comment if you have any other good Christmas links.