Triptico - Word Magnets

My dear fellow teachers (especially those in Hong Kong), do you find the interactive whiteboards in the classrooms a bit redundant as most of the teaching tasks can be done on blackboards and whiteboards? Or if you want something more interesting, a computer will do, right? Well, maybe you will want to use the interactive whiteboard again with the help of this site, Triptico!

Triptico is a site with a suite of resources/tools (or games to be exact) for teachers in conjunction for interactive whiteboards. These tools are easily edited, adapted, and saved for later use. This time, I will introduce one of the game to you - Word Magnets.

Word magnets is basically a tool which helps teachers to create movable word tags. Teachers can be creative by using this tool for ranking, sorting, grouping, labelling and so on, for any topic and in any language.




This tool is really user-friendly. Even for teachers who aren't tech-savvy (like me!) can handle it like a pro. As an English teacher, I have designed a grouping activity for transitive and intransitive verbs using this tool.

The steps of creating the activity are really simple (as shown in the picture above). Basically all the buttons have told you what you need to do already. Firstly, click on the "add word magnets" button (the one in blue rectangle). Then, a white typing box will appear on the right hand side where you can type the words you want. After typing a word, click on the green button down below the typing box with the words "make word magnets" and ta-da, a word magnet is created!!!  The last step which is also the most important step is to click the "save" button to save this activity in your account. Easy, isn't it?

So this is the list of transitive and intransitive word magnets I created. Students can go to the interactive white board to divide these magnets into two groups - transitive verbs or intransitive verbs.





With this tool, teachers can make sure they can maximize the use of the interactive whiteboards and interactivity can be guaranteed for each lesson.  Don't think that after saving this list of word magnets it is the final version - because you can always edit on the list of word magnets you have created. This editable nature of this tool allows teacher to have incidental teaching as they can always add the words that students come up with during the lessons.

So you may ask if there is any drawback of this website. Yes! The major drawback I would say is it requires you to pay to subscribe to their website and the amount is quite a lot. But if your department has sufficient funding, this resource is definitely worth paying for!!! Besides, there isn't a function for answer checking. So if (touch wood) a teacher forgets the correct answers, it would be quite embarrassing.

P.S. This game works perfectly fine in classrooms without an interactive whiteboard  - of course the activity will be less interactive but you can still ask your students to move the word magnets using the computer on the teacher's desk.

Sources

Interactive resources, interactive whiteboards, e-learn, feltag,. (2015, June 25). Retrieved January 28, 2016, from http://procatdigital.co.uk/interactive-resources-for-interactive-whiteboards/