National Geographic for kids as an ICT resource

My choice of an ICT resource is a website, http://kids.nationalgeographic.com. It is a website sprung from the magazine, National Geographic. They have a special website for kids. On the site you can learn more about our planet, Earth. We can learn about animals, cities, countries, climates and much more. This site is probably suitable for children from ten years and up. It is a well-filled website with lots of different functions and activities. To use this site you need a computer with a web browser. At the start side of national geographic for kids there are ten different headlines. There are games, videos, animal and pets, countries, fun stuff and more. They are all useful for different purposes. I am going to present some of the possibilities that you can find on this site:

Games: on this side you can play many different games. You can also quiz your noodle on many different subjects. The quiz side is kind of a quiz game, were you play and learn things at the same time. I think this part can be useful if you have a group of pupils that could work by themselves as a group and answer the questions together.

Video: amazing, funny and beautiful short movies. Some of the videos have an informative text, and some of them are without text. I think these movies might be nice to use when you are training pupils in English reading comprehension.

Animals & Pets: facts and photos on wild animals and pets. In every class or group of pupils there are often some of them who have animals as an interest, or passion. This side is great if you want them to do some research about a certain animal. They can write a short summary of their favorite animal and then make a presentation to their classmates.

Countries: facts and photos on countries and cities all around the world. It could be useful in your geography education. The pupils can do some research practices. Could also be a platform for an ICT-based presentation, for example PowerPoint. It can also be good if you want to put the emphasis on training the presentation technique instead of emphasizing on the research itself. You could use a projector or a smartboard to make a nice presentation around.

Fun stuff: Here are nine subheadings with fun stuff kids can do at home or in school. For example; cartoon pictures where you fill in your own text, craft activities and science experiments.

How the resource can be useful for teachers. One great benefit with this website is the possibility to train pupils’ presentation skills. Another great benefit is the opportunity to use the website for learning the pupils some new words.

I think this is a quite nice web site to work with. Of course the site has some flaws, but all in all a positive and useful site, that have a place in my ICT-based classroom.

By: Carolina Carlsson