Shaun Wilden

Gosh been a while since I posted, sorry folks lots of travelling but while on the road have been collecting links and trying out stuff with groups of teachers but before I get to them, I have a number of people ask me what happened to the flash games links I twittered about some weeks ago. Tis a good question ,the post seems to have vanished. My favourite games are in superteachertools.com.  This website has a selection of games flash game templates for you to use on and offline. Since any resources made automatically go online that also means there is a wide selection of pre-made material (though the downside to this is that they are not well-organised and labelled). I have used the millionaire template quite a lot in teaching (and if you come to my iatefl talk  you’ll be playing it my session). Since it is based online, it also some thing you can give students for homework as they simply have to go home, access the template and type 15 questions. They can then save it as txt.file. The flash is very both colourful and recreates the game music.  Here’s a screenshot:

The site also has templates for games such as jeopardy and hangman as well as offering other tools for teachers. However for Jeopardy (probably my all time favourite quiz), there is another site jeopardylabs.com. Again this allows you to store templates online and offline. It does require more interaction as in the correct answer has to be said to the teacher but again has home study uses and students can make games templates for each other. As I said in a previous post, the technology allows use to give a new lease of life to our old activities – both of these games I have played for years in class but now with these sites, I make the quicker and more professionally and motivate my students to make their own.  The added bonus is that you can use them on your computer, in a computer room, with a dat projector or on an IWB.

Another site I’m enjoying playing with is more aimed for kids  - kidsspell.com. There are a number of small games (some more fun that others – I don’t like spellasaurus), each game practices spelling, they claim to have 6000 words to spell but the real bonus for teachers is that you can type in your own list of words for the students to play with  - or again the students (or even a supportive parent) can make their own lists.

There are a large number of flash-based activities out their – esolcourses has a number of activities as does manythings.org and there is a long list of games to be found on the Interent TESL journal.

As always enjoy