Web Games with a Little Twist: Academic Skill Builders

I have often introduced games in this space before. But recently I found a site that has two types of educational games. One type is single-player games, the sort of Flash or Shockwave games that are very common on the web. The other type is multi-player games that any learner visiting the site can access. With these games, learners can play competitively with 2 or 3 other players. The games that would be of interest to language learners are mostly spelling and easy grammar games found on the Language Arts page. There are also games for other subjects.

froggame

Collaboration Tool: Board800

board800

There are many drawing tools. Most computers come with one drawing tool pre-installed and there are free tools available on the web (Open Office’s Draw is very good, for example). But Board800 is a little different. For anyone who would like to have a web-based drawing tool that can be used simultaneously by multiple users, it’s a nice application. You don’t need to download anything and you don’t even need to register or log in. Though it’s not a powerful drawing tool, Board800 can be a nice tool for online collaboration and I could imagine many uses for it in CALL rooms with learners in virtual groups.

Presentation Software: Prezi

perzi

The ubiquitous presentation software PowerPoint is so common that it would be hard to imagine watching or giving a presentation without it (apologies to Mac users who have been living happily without PP for years, but I’m speaking mostly to PC users here). And though PP abuse is rampant and a whole generation of learners is coming through the school system now having experienced content organized on slides, usually more for the benefit of the presenter/teacher than the learners themselves. Having a visual element in a presentation offers countless options and benefits if done right so let’s be clear: good PP=good, bad PP= bad. And by good I mean not only eye-catching, but organized and constructed in a way that makes the content easier to understand and harder to forget. But PP is so commonplace these days that it has lost much of its power to grab attention. Indeed it probably has more of the opposite effect on people. So strong is this that when you see a different style of presentation it can be really impressive. At an Adobe conference last year I saw a Flash presentation that featured items floating in space and the screen zooming in on them one after another. It was impressive, but it was out of reach for anyone but someone with advanced Flash skills. But now there is Prezi. Prezi lets you create presentations much like that Flash presentation I saw. You put all your “slides” on one large sheet and zoom in and out of individual items. It’s kind of hard to understand unless you see it. Take a look. Give it a try and impress everyone at your next presentation.