online games: club penguin

Club Penguin Make friends and play games in wonderland that is Club Penguin.

Play this free game now!!

Games are a great educational tool. They appeal to:

Gardner's multiple intelligences: they are audio/visual, bodily kinesthetic, logical mathematical and can be either interpersonal or intrapersonal.

Piaget and Vygotsy's use of language and culture are essential elements here, as is Prensky's digital natives: today's children naturally inhabit the world of ICT games.

Bruner's scaffolded learning, where mastery of one step naturally leads to the next level.

Spady's specific outcomes learning, as you can chose or design a game with a specific learning goal.

Connectivist: Different types of game tasks can be drawn together to form a complete end goal, or win.

This particular game is quite good for young children, my 7 year old loves it. It teaches children a number of real life concepts: they can chose a character and inhabit their space; they must do specific "jobs" to earn money to buy goods; they must save what they earn to afford the more expensive items in the catelogues; they must feed and care for their pets, or they run away! ; they can meet their friends in specific meeting places.


The kids get together and discuss at school where they are up to and how to achieve tasks.

inspiration mindmap

Mind mapping is a great way to show ideas and engage different learning styles, as it uses pictures, texts, connections and hyperlinks. However the technology has to be compatible - if not then you may not be able to view it adequately. This happened in our pedagogy presentation, we could not see the mind map clearly enough to engage with it

Slide show Harmony Day

Slide shows are a great learning tool as they are visual cues. They can be used for school projects, or outings to remind the students of what they saw and did, or as inspiration for a class topic. They are very engaging and fun, especially if the students see themselves in the pictures!! As with this show of "Harmony Day", you can use them for school celebrations, which is a great way to enhance the positive aspects of your schools culture, in this case, diversity, inclusion, acceptance and harmony - and of course FUN!
A blog is a great way to use this type of technology as it can be viewed by parents as well teachers and students

movies: teacher rap & Gore interview

Movies are a fantastic learning tool. They can be used as fun and engaging art, inspiration in English or Drama, like the teacher rap, or for more serious research on specific topics, like the Gore interview.

They are particularly good as learning tools in view of Prensky's digital natives, who learn best form technological sources, Gardner's multiple intelligences, as it engages audio/visual, interpersonal and intrapersonal learning styles, Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, because it broadens the scope of interaction between the learner and the number of possible teachers. It is a connectivist tool that draws in sources first hand, that would have been impossible without ICT

Resources for Online games

Memory game Maker - http://www.education.vic.gov.au/languagesonline/games/memory/index.htm Become the designer and make your own online games at Sploder - http://www.sploder.com/ Funbrain is a great site full of activities for K-12 http://www.funbrain.com/ For short educational activities online try Quia http://www.quia.com/web http://www.bne.catholic.edu.au/public/learning_objects/ChurchSearch/ChurchSearch.htmlThis is a simple learning object that allows children to explore and name some of the key objects within a church. Suitable for student background. Contains teaching and learning activities

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Wiki

Online information
Colaborative and editable by anyone
Supports hyperlinks which helps to focus information and allows access to information on all sorts of related topics to be instantly accessed from the page. A whole lot of pages like a scroll that can be easily manovoured around via hyperlinks
Editing can be by word or page
Easy to Use
Free
Evolving
World wide communication, this makes it an ideal: tool for international research; international ideas and sources at an instant
No copywrite (however not to be used for profit)
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