Educaplay

Educaplay is an educational service that allows teachers to create short activities for their students. All those activities become public and make up a bank of resources for other teachers to use.

An example:


Tutorials

Types of activities:

1. RIDDLE: guessing a word
Example:
Money
2. FILL IN BLANKS: gap-filling
Examples:
There is / There are
Shops
Dialogue
3- CROSSWORD
Example:
Opposites
4. DIALOGUE
Example:
Introductions
5. DICTATION
Example:
English dictation
6. JUMBLED WORD
Examples:
Animal 1
Animal 2
7. JUMBLED SENTENCE
Example:
Tongue twister
8. MATCHING GAME: association
Examples:
Family: match male and female nouns
Oviparous / Viviparous
9. WORDSEARCH PUZZLE
Examples:
Animals
Clothes
10. QUIZ
Example:
Vocabulary
11. INTERACTIVE MAP: labelling for identification
Examples:
Bugs in English
Parts of the face 
Home Sweet Home

Pictures to practice vocabulary and description

These are a couple of websites that provide panoramas that can be used for games such as 'I see with my little eye', 'Find something that starts with the letter...' or as a trigger for oral and written descriptions.

Panoramas dk

Arounder

Image search engines

These are three three engines that allow online image search according to criteria such as colour or topic:
Multicolor Search

Wylio and FlickrCC search for 'creative commons' pictures.

Photo edition

These are three tools that allow the user to edit and transform pictures online:

Photofunia is an online photo editing tool that works like this: you upload any photo and the technology automatically creates photo montages.

It is not necessary to sign up.

Tuxpi Photo Editor is also a simple tool that allows to change colours, create montages, add text to pictures, edit photos with many different effects...

Registrations is not requested.

Photovisi is very appropriate for creating collages.

A free account must be created in order to download the picture.

European programmes

Information about deadlines to apply for the different activities of the Lifelong Learning Programme (Comenius, etc.) has been published.
In Basque
In Spanish

'I Like Pets' eTwinning project

I Like Pets is one of the eTwinning projects awarded last October with the European Quality Label.Details about the aims, organisation and outcomes of ths activity can be found on this wiki.

Christmas activities

These are some online activities related to Christmas from the British Council's Learn English Kids site:
'Santa's Little Helper' story
Whose present?
Balloon Burst Christmas

Smories: new stories for children website offers recordings of stories and nursery rhymes told or sung by children (mainly girls!). These are several examples:

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

A Sailor Went To Sea

Can You Jump Like A Kangaroo?

A video presentation by students from Elatzeta school

KATEA city from Elatzeta 2.Zikloa on Vimeo.

Link to Elatzeta English blog

A blog on teaching English at nursery levels

El blog de Espe collects a good number of resources that can be useful for teaching English in Nursery.

Garammar and Vocabulary

Grammar and Vocabulary from the Teens section of LearnEnglish offers several sets of interactive activities aimed at working on different vocabulary fields.

Draw a Stickman

A couple of interactive cartoon stories can be tried on the website of Draw a Stickman app. The layout is simple and attractive and the language of the instructions can be useful for reading and vocabulary work on the interactive whiteboard.

Flocabulary: educational videos

Flocabulary is an online learning platform that delivers educational hip-hop songs and videos. Some samples can be watched without subscription.

A couple of  examples:
Gimme 6    I Ate 8 

Drawing like Picasso

Picassohead website allows to create portraits made up with a variety of features drawn in a 'picassian' style. All features can be altered with regard to size, colour and position. The tool can be used for oral dictation of instructions (e.g. make it larger/smaller, change into blue, drag it to the left...) when using the interactive whiteboard or as a pair activity when sharing a computer.

CLIL units

The Catalan Department of Education has fostered the creation of CLIL units throughout the last years. Resources related to this task carried out by primary and secondary teachers of English can be seen and downloaded from this link.

A CLIL project

Teachers from Escola Maria Osso in Sitges explain their CLIL project in primary education. They reinforce English teaching through maths and science. A video and specifications on the project can be accessed from here.

Webinar on eTwinning

'Abre tu aula con eTwinning' webinar, held on 18th October, was aimed at explaining what eTwinning is to teachers interested in getting to know this European project. The recording and slide presentation can be seen or downloaded from this webpage.

Hallowe'en pictures

Spooky Spot the Difference and Frankenstein colouring pictures from a couple of books published by Usborne can be used as a treat on these late days of October.

On autonomous learning

At the beginning of this month, from 4th to 6th October, the 11th Nordic Conference on Autonomous Learning was held in Donostia. Furthermore, a session addressed to teachers interested in getting to know more about the issue of learners' autonomy was organised on 3rd October.

Two well-known experts in this pedagogical approach, Leni Dam and David Little took part in the event. A selection of video and slide presentations by these two lectures can be accessed from the links below:

Leni Dam´s slides on types of activities and basic tools

David Little's slides on the principles of autonomous learning and the use of portfolios

An interview with Leni Dam

Parts of a lecture by Leni Dam: on the use of coursebooks 1 and 2

Parts of a lecture by David Little: on students' motivation and engagement 1 and 2

Story Monster

ACMI Story Monster website allows students to design monsters by choosing different features (eyes, wings, body size and colour...). Once the monster is created, the student uses arrow keys and the space bar of the keyboard in order to choose a verb and a noun. A short sentence is generated and uttered.

  

The activity can be useful to work on definitions, pronunciation, or as a start for creative writing.

Use of pictures in the English classroom

This article presents some ideas about the use of photos in the EFL classroom.

Some websites to find copyleft photos:

Flickrcc
10 banques d'images libres
INTEF: Banco de imágenes y sonidos

Pronunciation dictionaries

Howjsay website provides the sound of English words in quite a quick way. Users write the word they want to listen to into a box, click on 'submit' and choose it from a list.

Dictionarist also provides a good list of English words with their corresponding pronunciation and translations to other languages.

Macmillan Dictionary (monolingual) includes audio clips showing the British English spoken pronunciation of the requested word.

Questionnaire for seminar participants

You can access the form about your teaching situation and interests from this link.

Online program for creating activities based on texts

Textivate is an online tool that allows to create exercised based on text reconstruction. An explanation on its use can be read in this blog post.

This is a simple example:

Click below to access the activity. (Opens in a new window on touch devices.)

Click here to open the above activity in a new window.

Reading: All About Me

It's Fun to Read: All About Me activity allows children to choose the features of a character that would represent them, a pet, a bedroom, and a toy. They can also work on vocabulary related to the house.

Reading about art

It's Fun to Read: Starfall Art Gallery web site presents six texts about different painters accompanied by pictures showing their artwork. Children can listen to the pronunciation of each word by clicking on them.

Story Starters

Story Starters generates sentences at random to begin a story.

PicLits

PicLits website allows users to write on a set of pictures. It can be useful to create short stories, haikus, picture labelling...

An example:

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

Short stories for children to teach values

Bedtime Stories website presents a set of stories aimed at working on values. Most of them can be listened to in different varieties of English and Spanish. Audio recordings are accompanied by the corresponding text and pictures.

A couple of websites to learn and revise vocabulary

Learning Chocolate

Language Guide

Interactive whiteboard resources: Topmarks

Topmarks Education website includes a selection of resources suitable for using them on an interactive whiteboard. Although it is addressed to native speakers of English, many activities can be useful in the EFL primary classroom.

Songs and rhymes for very young learners

Muffinsongs video channel collects a good number of children's songs and nursery to sing along.

Another collection of similar songs -this time in an interactive Java format- can be accessed from this blog.

Some online resources for young learners

In this blog post there are links to a set of Flash digital activities aimed at nursery or first levels of primary education.

Some resources for promoting early reading skills

Reading is Fundamental web site includes a set of resources (readings, games, songs, colouring images...) aimed at pre-school children. Some of them can be also useful in the primary EFL classroom. These are a couple of examples:

Caterpillar, Caterpillar song.

House for Sale story.