Digital Resources for the Primary ESL Classroom

Using a soundboard can bring storytelling to life. You can have the children create a short story or play using a selection of, for example, 5 sounds from the sound board. This works well at Halloween but can be used at any time of year with different themes, like space or adventure. Find a good soundboard and choose five sound effects. Give the children the introduction to a story. They have to write the rest of the story in pairs or groups and then act it out using the sound effects to make the story more realistic and funny. You can record the results with your phone and put them on soundcloud, or send them to the parents.

Image generators can be used in all sorts of ways as well. They are particularly useful for older students preparing Cambridge Exams, but they can be useful for normal language classes too. You can use them as a basis for short writing activities, speaking activities, role-plays, etc. An easy game would be the following:  Divide the class into teams of 3. Show one of the pictures, and give the class 30 seconds to write down anything they can see in the picture. Then go from group to group asking what they can see. They get a point for each word they get correct. The game continues from the next team with the next picture. The teacher can use this to expand vocab, explaining any appropriate language the children didn’t know.

A word generator can be used in all sorts of different ways. For lower levels it can be used for Pictionary , and for older students it can be used for the game ‘hotspot’ where the team has to describe the word to one student without saying it, similar to Taboo. In all of these activities the teacher can use their own discretion as to whether the word is appropriate for the class, and if not, they can click to find another, or search for another word generator online with more appropriate words.  Pictionary Using the word generator you show the word to one student, or a pair of students. The students draw the word and their teams, or all the class, have to guess what the word is. Hotspot Place a chair in front of the digital whiteboard facing the class.  Project the word onto the board The class or team has to describe the word without saying it. The teacher can help the students with turn-taking so that quieter children have an opportunity to speak.

Liveworksheets is an incredibly powerful tool for online homework for children. It means that you cana assign a digital worksheet to your whole class, they can do it at home and you can see the results automatically in real time. Go to liveworksheets.com and set up a teacher’s account Creat accounts and passwords for all your students. Show the students how to sign in and sent a video or letter home with the children so their families can help them sign in.  This process can take a long time, but once it’s done it’s super easy to organise. Assign the children’s accounts to workbooks and assign any worksheet you’d like them to do to that workbook. You can use preexisting worksheets (there are thousands) or you can easily create your own. When the children sign into their accounts they will see any worksheets you’ve assigned to their workbooks.  Check the notifications section to see how everyone did on the task. They are automatically given a score out of 10 but they can repea...

Baamboozle is great for practising vocab and grammar. It’s basically a quiz game when the teams have to pick a number, which corresponds with a picture or question. You have the option of dividing the class into two groups and having them compete against each other, or kids can work together as a group. One of the features I really like is that the teacher decides whether the team got the correct answer or not. Sometimes with other quiz games, the computer decides whether the answer was correct or not, and sometimes there are two possible correct answers or the error in the answer was insignificant.  Go to https://www.baamboozle.com Select an existing game by typing in the search box OR create your own game… it doesn’t take long. Start playing. Beware: Some of the numbers correspond to extra points or loosing points. It’s not always the best team who wins. This can sometimes make the loosing to angry. If the children know how to loose it’s fine, but in many cases it might be a goo...