Make your own languages games with 2Simple DIY

[Jo Rhys-Jones]

Yesterday at the Hampshire ICT conference at Horndean Community College I was introduced to Katherine Smith, an educational consultant for 2Simple software. They were keen to show me their new 2Simple French product and I was rather rude about it, but Katherine insisted I take a copy home to play with.

Well I did and I admit the kids liked it a lot; there are some lovely games with embedded soundfiles. Also it's a great resource for a non-linguist to bung on the interactive whiteboard and dip into every now and then. But as a specialist teacher I am not entirely happy; in my opinion there is too much vocabulary introduced at the same time, no real structured progression and the usual misconception that QCA unit = topic (ie unit 4 must be animals), so the games never really get off the drill-vocab-and-set-phrases level. My biggest bug bear though is the sound which seems to have been recorded word by word - as a result there is no liaison and certain words such as 'table' and notably 'quatre' thus appear to be pronounced with 2 syllables.

However, my kids really did love it and they were able to play everything unaided. They even begged to be allowed to play more. Also there are some nice little creative opportunities which would work well for motivating children who struggle to put pencil to paper but are ready to move on to sentence and text level. I did notice that while there is no phoneme practice at all in 2Simple French, there is however in the catalogue a product called 'Alphabet Soup' which is available in Welsh, Italian, French, Mandarin and even British Sign Language - well I've not seen that but I am intrigued and if anyone has seen it then let me know what you think please.

Now while 2Simple French may not be quite perfect - the next piece of software I wanted to tell you about just might be - check out 2Simple Do It Yourself. This software makes it ridiculously simple to create your own flash games, quizzes, puzzles and activities in minutes. You can then save them onto your website, a school vle, onto the interactive whiteboard or email them to people and 2Simple are happy for you to do this. So in just under 8 minutes I made this pairs game below - I know the recorded sound isn't up to much as I did it right here at the laptop without a microphone just to demonstrate how easy it is to create your own activities to teach and test exactly what YOU want to teach and test. It does mean you can make your own resources to go beyond vocabulary and practice phoneme/grapheme correspondance or cloze exercises or knowledge about language and sentence construction. I think it's ideal for teachers who may be delivering primary language lessons and then wanting to leave 'parcels' for the class teacher or for a KS3 class to create for Year 6 as a transition project perhaps and exchange for powerpoints made by year 6. What do you think?

numberstotenpairs.swf

(You will need adobe flash to play it which if you do not already have can be downloaded for free from www.adobe.com alternatively if you get a computer message saying it does not know which program made this in order to open it blah blah message, tick the choose a program from this list option' and then choose your interent browser or Internet explorer and tick the box that says 'always open these types of files with this program')

[Jo Rhys-Jones]

Ouch Deborah - back already on the 17th!

[Deborah Masson]

Thank you for this great tip. I like the end product and am now off to have a play myself. A great way to add original activties to our MLPS pages in GLOW, ( Yes I am almost back in work mode as August 17th fast approaches for us guys in Scotland.

[Laure]

Hi Jo!
I really like what you made... Looks good! Great work from you . Thanks for sharing once again!!!!

[Lorraine]

Ooh like the look of this second one- the capacity to be able to produce a quiz to test to your specific needs would be fantastic.Unfortunatley as I'm not attached to a school so unable to copy to a website or VLE (even our island one may apparently not be available for supplies) unsure how I'd go about this. I notice there appears to be a box to subscribe but will have to chack out if that allows me to use in schools.
Thanks for the info though