UpToTen.com is a well known site with lots of free fun and educational activities for children of, well, up to ten years old! Part of the site is BoowaKwala.com, which is the best known area of it to me both as a teacher of very young children and as a parent. A ‘premium’ account is available at a price, but even better, a free adaption of the premium site is available for use in schools.
Well over 6000 schools already use the service, but there’s many more schools than that in the world so I’m still going to write about it. Clicking the ‘More Info’ button for the schools section leads to a sign-up enticer page.
Sign up! It’s worth it. The free site has lots of good features, including a choice of French or English soundtrack. Boowa and Kwala, the mascots for the up to six year olds’ section are very cute and engaging for children. The activities are fun, lighthearted, and promote good values like friendship and enjoying family life together. The school version has the added benefits of a full-screen window and not having adverts in a sidebar; children cannot easily click off the page and cannot click on links to other sites.
Once you are signed up you can click on the schoolbag to log in:
Click ‘Go’ after entering your data and a ‘thank you’ page appears:
Click ‘Go’ and the full-screen student window opens.
Actually, my one gripe with the service is going through the above three page, one email address and one password process on every computer before each lesson I use the service in. It does take a while. It would be great to have a direct, one stage process to log in; a username and password field on the Up To Ten front page, for example. Also if that field was part of the the regular website instead of the flash section then the browser could remember the username and password between sessions.
EDIT: see this post about the above paragraph. Automatic login IS a feature and now has started to work for me. I guess that if using multiple user-names on networked computers children should sit at the same computers each time unless you have roaming profiles set up.
Each teacher in the school will need to sign up for their own account. They must keep their password secret; a student finding it out and using it at home would mean they had gone against the terms of the service.
Here’s what you get. The full-screen window has a menu of fifty structured lessons for developing ICT skills. The great thing is that the first lessons do not assume any prior skills, so they are perfect for very young learners:
Each lesson contains four flash activities. The site suggests clicking the button at top right to explore the rest of the site after completing them.
Below is one example of a mouse control skills activity from lesson two in which children have to colour moving lizards. Lessons get progressively more advanced as children work their way towards lesson fifty.
Have fun!
Posted by Shrimp Farm 