Gaspar's PLE - ICT - Starting point

Starting Point

This is a simple website that you can use to change and make everyday choices in the classroom a bit funnier. It’s a like a wheel of fortune and can be used to pick topics of discussions, order of students/teams to take the floor, words for spelling contests, etc.

The site is very friendly and easy to use. You can customize the number of choices and their labels, also you can choose whether to eliminate the option or not, how many seconds will the wheel spin and colours and even include pictures in the options.

Activity proposed:

One practical way of using it is for vocabulary revision. If you are working with first or second grades you revise the traditional topic of school objects and there are two ways to use the wheel.

1) You can include the names of school objects and even write the colour. For example: "a red crayon" and then you ask your students to draw.

2) You can work on their writing skills by using different pictures of school objects, for example a sharpener and them to write the names of the objects they see.

(Click on the picture to see the website)

Wheel DecideCan't decide? Wheel Decide for you! Set your own custom choices and then spin the wheel to make the random decision (lunch, movie, anything!)

Power Point provides a variety of tools and allows combining texts, pictures, movies and audios. You can make presentations in different slides with all the previous elements combined.

The main use of PP with educational purposes is delivering Lectures and Presentations, but it can also be applied to create learning materials by introducing interactive elements and diagrams, as well as multimedia integration.

Of course you can ask students to make presentations, too. It is a great tool that used properly can help organizing students’ ideas, developing communication skills and collaborate with peer learning.

It is a great tool to support different learning styles (visual, auditory, reading/writing).

Activity proposed:

When students start learning about the use of "going to" to talk about future plans, they tend to be asked to plan a trip with a limited budget and time of travelling. A good way to introduce PowerPoint can be to divide the students into groups so that they can present their planned holiday and then make the students vote for the best presentation.