Online Tools that make a task fun!

There are many online web tools that can make learning fun for the student and are valuable resources for teachers.  With the tools listed below, teachers can actually be giving students a variety of activities such as pre-task (getting to know), formative and summative tasks.  Well planned tasks can assist teachers easily gather student information and see how they are progressing once set up.  

Prior or pre-testing, also known as entry tickets, is to gain the background knowledge of what your students know if they are a new class or before introducing a new topic.  They can take the form of just simple questionaires or surveys and usually short.  For example, if I was to teach a new class of Year 7 (1st year high school) Chinese, I would pre-test them to see what knowledge and language ability they had.  You can find the example I created in Socrative, if you have a Teachers or Students account, you can search for it on Socrative and search for SOC-12288269.  

Socrative is an easy to use web based application for teachers and students.  You can download the apps for iOS and Android and there are lots of support and forums out there.  Socrative's power is not only the smooth and easy way you can design your activities, but also in the way that you can include games and most important of all for teachers, the feedback function.  As soon as the activity is finished teachers can at the press of a button receive an emailed spreadsheet of the results.  You can download from other teachers from the generous list of shared, prepared activities at Socrative Garden.  Student can access the activity via the web or download the app. 

Kahoots  is a fun tool that is similar to Socrative.  The interface is different though and once in the activity it is very engaging.  Students find it very entertaining and it has a count down function that really engages students.  It also has a feedback facility for teachers with a new download to Google drive function.  You can log onto the Kahoots website and create an account for free and then start designing your activities. 


Google Forms are incredibly powerful as an online tool that you can create a multitude of activities with. When you download the Flubaroo or Doctopus add-ons, it is an even more powerful application.  Teacher feedback, like in Socrative and Kahoots, is sent via the email in a Google sheet and then you can check out the data.  To log onto the activity, the student can be sent the link or it can be hyperlinked on your webpage. 

Quizlet is a useful addition to this list of free web tools for teaching and learning.  Similar to the ones mentioned above, Quizlet can be used to support student learning by creating lists for vocabulary and sentence pattern activities in a variety of languages.  It's test feature is a good summative and formative tool that gives a variety of options to how to set up the test.  The only negative aspect of Quizlet is that it does not have the teacher feedback like Kahoots and Socrative in the form of an excel spreadsheet.  I have mentioned this to the Quizlet people but their response was to get the students to screen shot and send it which I don't think is a good option.  For such a good product and if you pay for the teacher's version like I do, I think an excel feedback facility for teachers would make Quizlet one of the best out there.  Besides this gripe, it does have several great feature for example, it has is that is provides native speaker audio for the texts and a few basic but fun games, even on the free version!  The iOS and Android apps work well as well, but do not have all the functions the web based platform has.  

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