Twitter Advent Calendar, Day 19: Education Games

I did a series of posts on gaming Advent Calendars, but I haven’t yet included those for teachers and educators and home schooling, which are both useful and entertaining! I didn’t capture screenshots of every tweet that lead me to these, but please believe me, I did not make this up, I found every single one via Twitter! Here is a half-dozen plus a bonus.

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TEXT: Roselink: ESL Advent Calendar 2011 – Christmas Quizzes, Games and Activities

An advent calendar for English as a Second Language includes tips and tricks and games for engaging learners in the language, often with inexpensive and easy resources. The example shown is on using Youtube music videos for language learning.

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TEXT: Little Wonders’ Days: Reindeer Games, Advent Day 8

Little Wonders’ Days focuse on preschool education with a variety of teaching, learning, engaging activities and games.

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EducationCity is a UK-based commercial education resource providing learning resources and games that seem to be targeting the grade school age child. They have both UK and US oriented websites, however the Twitter stream appears to be managed by the UK team, as does their main blog. The US team hasn’t posted to their separate blog in months. If you go to the US site you are unable to locate the Advent Calendar, and really need to get to it through the EducationCity Twitter stream. Some of the free activities provided have potential, while others are primarily a sale price on their other services.

“Join us each week day until the 16th December and open a door to reveal a special treat; from festive fun makes, to cultural fact sheets; competitions to offers, we’re bound to delight with our advent countdown.”

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This is kind of a daisy chain of found items which I think spun off from the previous entry as one of the things to which they linked. I’m not sure about that, though. The blogpost here is just the beginning. At English Learning in Our World we see here the beginning of a series of posts on educational activities to use in a classroom. They are all pretty clever, and this first one is a real gem.

She was inspired by the Macmillan Education Advent Calendar shown below.

The Macmillan calendar has each day giving ideas for educational activities themed around the holidays, such as this one brainstorming how reindeer might fly to foster creativity. Sharon then took the idea and made a Powerpoint template to make her own version of the Advent calendar to use with her students.

Even better, she provides the Powerpoint template as a free download! Now that is quite generous. Check out some of her other ideas.

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TEXT: StephanyKouJou: @coolcatteacher @edgalaxy @scribbled_au You might like my advent calendar and inform some parents about it. [link] Thanks!

Stephany is a dyslexia trainer, and her remarkable advent calendar provides activities for working with students in this area, many of them quite creative. The example shown here, “Finish the Christmas tree,” is an exercise to build many needed skills – fine motor control, visual awareness, mirroring, the ability to reverse both simple and complex shapes, working with lines, and so forth. Impressive.

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I think all of the rest of these came from @CoolCatTeacher, so I am going to combine them in one section. @CoolCatTeacher used Visibli to share the links. The example shown here is from Michelle Green, who used Livebinder to organize her collection cloud-based interactive e-learning tools and resources.

BONUS:

TES Free Teaching Resources: 12 Games of Christmas. Play the games either on the web of via a free iOS app.

Twitter Advent Calendar, Day 18: Comics!

Yesterday, at a meeting, I saw Dave of @DaveReadsComics and Yet Another Comics Blog. I warned him about my very meta-meta- Twitter Advent Calendar, and that a comic issue was coming up, in which he’d be included. Then I thought, since this was on my mind, I might as well just do it right away! The idea of these every increasingly long lists of Advent Calendars and such appearing in Twitter is to provide inspiration and show some of the range of things people are doing, from predictable to effective to truly extraordinary. Today’s collection is of Advent Calendars on the theme of cartoons and comics.

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This is from Abrams and Chronicle Books who are using Twitter to lead folk to their Facebook page, where they encourage people to compete in a contest to win free copies of books. According to Twitter, the Facebook page is their main online presence, which is confirmed by the Facebook page having links to several other websites for different branches of the company, but no other unified over-arching website to collect and direct appropriately across all of them. I found that surprising and worthy of further thought.

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Gibbo Comics is creating a comic strip throughout the Advent season which seems to be gearing up to culminate in some fantastically surprising end scene. I’m rather dreading it. It starts off broad, swerves through various cultural references, pokes fun and allusions at long-loved holiday characters, and drops broad hints that the dramatic climax may be rather dreadful. I know — the picture looks rather innocent. It isn’t. Gibbo is definitely using Twitter effectively, engaging in conversation, answering replies and comments, and generally being human. The Advent Calendar links in the Twitter posts point directly to the relevant pages, but the Twitter account points to the main website, where they also mention a blog.

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I found Comics Should Be Good first via other folk mentioning them, which is usually a good sign, showing they’ve done something worth mentioning. Always a hopeful sign! I love their incredibly short Twitter handle of only four letters, CSBG! The main power behind the account seems to be Brian Cronin, who evidently has WAY too much time on his hands! CSBG has so many different series going on in their blog right now that I was confused about which ones are for the Advent Calendar series. Even more delightfully confusing is the Advent Calendar itself. You know how a traditional Advent Calendar has one picture with many little doors to open, with a surprise behind each door. In the CSBG Advent Calendar, each day has a picture with the obligatory 24 doors on it. A different picture! Yikes! And you have to click on the right door for that picture, matching the door number and the day number in order to find the prize. The prize will be a picture from a classic famous comicbook cover, usually from one of their earlier blogposts in prior years. Clever marketing strategy. As if that isn’t enough, he also has a separate series going of the top 50 most memorable Marvel covers, AND several other blogposts EVERY day! I may be frightened. This is quite a lot.

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Multiversity Comics is almost a relief. A Twitter account. A website/blog. An Advent calendar that is one picture with one door each day. Even better, they are ALSO doing a daily countdown for the Menorah Candles as well. They have an interesting and slightly confusing approach for both the Advent Calendar and the Menorah Candles. They have the same core image for the main picture. Each day a new part appears on the image. If you click on the images, you don’t get something neat, just a bigger version of the same image. So where is the new unique content that goes with that day for the Advent Calendar or Menorah? In the blogposts where the image is posted.

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This is interesting. Comic Book Critics is a Twitter account for the Comic Books Critics website that aggregates or collects posts from 16 different comic book blog, and sends tweets everytime any of they make a post. It seems to be a very active account, but is probably mostly content generated by the software rather than anyone who holds a conversation or replies or makes comments. All pretty passive. The Advent Calendar they are tweeting about is actually from one of the blogs they call a contributor — Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog. Chris is known for identifying comics that have weak points, and making the most of those. Chris’s Advent Calendar is a very simple and effective concept. He posts a Youtube video a day, of Christmas music, sort of. As you might expect, most of the videos are parodies or suggestive or in questionable taste or otherwise designed for humor, and fans of Dr. Demento. I bet you never expected to hear Dr. Demento mentioned in this blog. Just goes to show you never know. But remember that idea. A Youtube video a day on a theme is a very do-able concept, and you can select the videos all in advance, make a playlist, create the blogposts all in one day, and predate them to post automatically. One solid day of good work, and your blog series is all set and ready to go.

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Last but far from least is Dave again, of @DaveReadsComics and Yet Another Comics Blog. Dave, also known locally as Superman, mentioned that he has been doing this for YEARS, an Advent Calendar of Christmas-themed comic book covers. Dave also has a weekly series in which he posts a monkey-themed cover every Sunday. I am rather fond of monkeys, so I am usually watching for Dave’s monkey cover posts. So, as absolutely required, he combined the two last Sunday with a monkey-themed Christmas comic book cover. Try saying that ten times fast! My only problem is deciding which one I like best — the Homer Simpson Winter Wedding Christmas monkey cover or the Captain Picard Saves Christmas cover