Zondle in a Primary School Setting
This post is designed to go through the simplest and quickest steps to get www.zondle.com making an impact on children’s learning in a primary school classroom. If you have not heard of Zondle or you are not sure what it does, this post will give you an overview. In short it basically lets you create content (topics) in the form of questions and serve them up to users interspersed with an ever growing range of short games that can be chosen by children.
Beyond questions Zondle has a unique Phonics Builder which allows you to create content to support basic skills in reading and writing and that is at the core of my use within our school. Below is a streamline way of getting Zondle making an impact in your classroom.
Getting your pupil data in
Send you the details of those you want set up to use Zondle to doug.lapsley@zondle.com using their specific teacher and children spreadsheets (At some point this will all be possible to do online from within the system). You can do this manually but they have excellent customer support and are very quick at setting everything up. Consider how you want to use Zondle in your classroom and across your school when sending off the details. I originally set up our school with 1 ‘group’ for each year group but am now extend this to have different ‘groups’ set up for each ability group in class. That way I can personalise the experience more and target specific content (topics) at specific groups of children. Don’t worry too much though as once the data is in the system you can change everything around later on as you can see from the school manager screen shot below. It’s all drag and drop with the handy feature on the list of learners on the right of being able to start to type in a childs name and the list will dynamically filter, only showing the child you are after which makes adding to groups pretty quick.
Setting up content for children to use Zondle
If you have made content you will see it on the left as soon as you log in. The other ways to find content (as you can use other peoples) is to click on ‘my friends’ in the green drop down list (top right) or to use the search box to search everyone’s public content. As I have created a huge amount of content to support Letters and Sounds using the phonics builder (if I do say so myself) the plan for my school is for all teachers to ‘friend’ me in the system and then they will have easy access to all the content I have made. The great thing is so can you. With anyone’s content, mine or otherwise.
Once you have found the content you want to add, simply roll over the green ‘+’ icon and click ‘class ready allocations’ and tick the group associated with you as a teacher to be able to have access to that content. Job done.
Removing content previously set for children
I have started to use Zondle on a daily basis in the classroom and so need to regularly change the content I am making available for children. To do this roll over the green drop down list (top right) and choose ‘my class’ then ‘learner progress’ and choose yourself from the drop down list of teachers in your school. A list of the content currently set for groups in your class will now be displayed on the left. To remove the set content, roll over the content (topic) green ‘+’ and press ‘class ready allocations’ and untick.
Getting the children using Zondle Junior
A major development of Zondle that I have been proud to be a part of is the ‘Junior’ element. This gives Primary children a more tailored environment to their needs. Zondle Junior removes all the Facebook, Youtube links of the standard version and generally makes everything nice and ‘Primary’. It allows children to use their username and password at home in a safe environment to carry on with content you have set for them. More than this though, If you login to Zondle Junior in the classroom with your teacher account, or choose Zondle Junior from the green drop down (top right) you will be presented with a list of groups that you are associated with which the children can just click to access their account. In other words there is no need for them to type in their username and password so their time actually learning on the system is maximised. It also means you don’t have to worry when children need support logging in as they just click there Zondle avatar after choosing their group. To give maximum flexibility I would recommend hunting out a great function buried in your teacher options in the standard Zondle version. To get there, roll over the green drop down (top left) and choose ‘my profile’ then on the left click ‘my preferences’. Ticking the bottom option means that when you log in to Junior with your teacher account it will stay logged in. It also pretty much gets round the ‘time out’ issue as well. This means that if you load up the next day and visit Junior your children can hop straight on without you logging in. If you use Zondle then have lunch and a PE lesson before coming back to using Zondle, you are still logged in and the children can jump straight on. Your account is still protected as if you are logged into Junior and click back the the standard version, you are asked to log in again (stopping the children from accessing any other data). Below are screenshots when you log in to Junior with your teacher account and when you click a group:
If you would like to gain access to the content packs (topics!) I have created using the Zondle phonics builder (covering everything from phase 2 to 5) to support early writing and phonetic awareness, search for me (primarypete) in Zondle and add me as a friend.
So what are you waiting for? Get it set up and used in your classroom today!
