Hello and welcome back to my Charlie’s Lessons blog! This week I have been playing ESL learning games in the free version of Educandy.com and my students love it!
Educandy is very easy to set up and start making word games to share with my students. So in today’s post, I will share with you how I’ve been using it this week in my classroom. But also exactly how you can use it too.
Getting Set Up
Step 1
To use Educandy for classroom ESL games, we first need to download an app – you can pick from Educandy Play or Educandy Studio.
Step 2
As the teacher, we would select the Studio option to download onto our phones, tablet or desktop. This is available via the App Store, Google Play and Microsoft.
Step 3
Once we open up the app, we can then Create a free account in the usual way and Sign In.
Step 4
We can now ask our students to select the Play option if they preferred. But, these games can also be accessed directly from the website via an activation code. We can pick from Word Search, Noughts and Crosses, Crosswords, Spell It (aka hangman), Anagrams, Match Up, Multiple Choice and Memory Games.
Creating Our Games
Now that we are all set up, we select the Menu option from the top right-hand corner of the app. There is now the option to select from My Account, New Activity, My Subscription, Search Activities, Support and Logout.
The Search Activities facility allows us to browse through community created activities that we might also like to use for our students. Instead, let’s create a New Activity and from here we can see that there are three types of activities – Words, Matching Pairs and Quiz Questions.
If we do a Words task then we get to choose between three fun activities. If we do a Matching Pairs activity then we get to choose between another four and if we do a Quiz we get to choose the multiple-choice style activity.
So, let’s pick a Words activity and design this around food vocabulary – under Activity Name I’d put “Food Vocabulary” and under Activity Subject it will naturally be “English”. Now we select Create and we can begin adding each of our chosen category-based words. For this tutorial, we will use fruits, so include – “banana”, “melon”, “strawberry” and “apple”.
Now that we have over three entries, we can add optional hyperlinks and activity instructions by selecting Details from the menu. I also like to run a test myself on my activity before sending it out to my students by selecting Play. To test our games, we can pick from Word Search, Spell It! and Anagrams.
Formulating A New Quiz
Words
I teach a lot of young learners. So, we spend a lot of time in class making sure they get the correct spelling of the English vocabulary. Giving them these fun activities drills home how each word is spelt in a fun way.
So, we can play these games together as a group in class. Or we can Share to everyones’ devices back in the Activity menu. The Share function generates a hyperlink, which we can then send to our class alongside a password code.
With the Wordsearch game, we can see our four fruits on the right and a timed Wordsearch to the left. When we have found a word, we click and select dragging the mouse over the entire word.
Now, let’s test the Anagrams. Again we are timed but this time we have a scrambled word in front of us. We click on the letters in the correct order to create the words.
Matching Pairs
The Matching Pairs game is really easy to set up too. All we need to do is pick a name and subject again (yes, it’s still English!). Unfortunately, we can only add text in the free version of this app. But with the paid-for premium version, you can also add images and links too if you wish to.
Now we select Text and from here we can add our selected Word (or Question). Then we match a paired word or the answer 9 to 10 times. We can then see our questions on the right with our answers in green.
With Words, you are restricted to the spellings. But a typical Matching Pairs activity can be translating one language into another, such as food in Spanish. So, we can start to branch into areas like getting students to think about definitions of words. Or, even translating one language to another.
Quiz Questions
The third and last activity that we can create in this app is Quiz Questions. If you use Kahoot or Quizizz then you’re probably familiar with multiple choice quiz style activities already.
Again, you probably know the drill by now, but we simply select Create. Then we give our Quiz an Activity Name and Activity Subject (English!). To create our questions we write out the questions and then the correct answer first. Now we can create up to three alternatives to the incorrect answers. We need at least three questions to play.
Top Teaching Tip: I like to ask my students to think about synonyms by giving them a question in the form of a word, alongside four options. Three are not synonyms and one is. This is a great way to encourage students to build their range of vocabulary.
With the free version of Educandy, we can create up to 10 activities. But if we go over this number, we need to delete them as we go. We do this via the Create Activity menu, ticking the box next to our old quiz and selecting Delete Selected Item(s).
Using A Community Quiz
Like me, I’m sure you don’t have time to be creating all of these fun activities from scratch for every lesson. So, I’m going to show you know how we can search for community activities that are ready to be used in the classroom.
Firstly, we select the Home Screen. From here, select the top right-hand corner and click on Search Activities. Let’s put in a search term like ‘food’. As we browse the results, we can see icons that accompany each activity title, as below:
Words = Green book icon
Pairs = Red jigsaw piece
Quiz = Yellow with four options
Once we’ve selected our preferred activity we are presented with three options to play each game. If you notice in the top right-hand corner, we also have the sharing code that we can send to our students.
We can also click on share game in the bottom right-hand corner and here we are presented with a link. So, if you’re using a learning platform like Google Classroom or Class Dojo then we can copy this link and send it to the students directly to the activity.
My Final Thoughts
Educandy is easy to create, share and set up fun games with students of all ages. If we have more advanced students, we can even ask them to create their games to share.
For me, one of the best features of Educandy is the bank of resources that we can use and how simple it is to use. But, the feedback is a bit restricted and there isn’t a reporting function, unlike Kahoot or Quizziz. So, you may prefer to play your games together in the classroom.
I hope that you enjoyed today’s blog! Remember to subscribe and share all of your links to your TEFL games in the comments below.