The interactive interface

WordWall is an interface for interactive whiteboards and data projectors. But unlike most
whiteboard software, it makes it easy to create activities rather than just static slides, so the focus is on teaching rather than lecturing.  These activities are made up of interactive tiles containing text, images, shapes or whiteboard annotations, which can be swapped, flipped, hidden or marked. As a result, WordWall offers a much greater range of tactile interaction, than other whiteboard interfaces.  It also has all the usual tools you’d expect, such as pens, highlighters, erasers, auto shape and screen capture.  Using the spinner, swapper, text tools and in-built timer, you can easily create dynamic games.  Plus, in this new version, its new Office-style interface means creating bespoke resources is straightforward – or if you want minimum hassle, you can use the in-built wizards.

The wordwall wizards

WordWall’s nineteen wizards make it easy to create the most common classroom activities in seconds. All you have to do is fill in some boxes and you’re done – there are no complex tools or formatting to get to grips with.  Some wizards make great starters; like the sentence maker, category quiz or oddone-out. Others, like definition match-up and multiple-choice quiz, can be used either as a main activity in class or given as homework. To engage higherorder processes, such as categorisation, differentiation and evaluation, the table and opinion wizards can be of particular use.

Another feature of the wizards is that you can convert information from one activity type to another. So, for example, you could start off with a text grid and then recap it as a wordsearch – but you only have to enter the information once.

There are also dynamically generated wizards, available online. These are empty grid sentence maker simple text code breaker seating plan number machine wordsearch arithmetic category quiz data generator odd-one-out image grid match-up table quiz opinion crossword word machine hot image webwizards driven through search queries or created from news feeds. The 40 news wordwalls are available in 11 different languages and are updated three times each day. In addition, the search-driven webwizards draw on a variety of online data repositories to create on-the-fly wordwalls. For example, the global photos webwizard collates public-domain photographs of any area you specify. Or there’s the dictionary webwizard, which performs a reverse dictionary look-up to produce words which feature your search term as a definition – useful for brainstorming ideas.  These are just two examples, but there are many more, all available via the wizards tab, in the lefthand dock.

Resources at your fingertips

One guiding principle that puts WordWall far ahead of other classroom tools, is the fact that it’s designed to save teachers’ time. In part, it does this by making it easy for teachers to access teaching resources. The three banks allow you to construct slides and activities quickly, by dragging resources from online databases and into your lesson. 

• The image bank doesn’t just save you the hassle of flipping backwards and forwards between WordWall and your web browser, copying and pasting images. It aggregates content from all the major image search engines and filters out unsuitable images. Plus, you can drop the images on top or underneath tiles, or place them as a background image for the entire wall. 

• The text bank provides access to 2.6m encyclopedic articles in thirty different languages (although the majority are in English). It contains useful bite-sized chunks of information on every topic on the school syllabus, which can be easily incorporated into your wordwall resources. 

• Entering a search term into the activity bank, will throw up results from thousands of wordwalls, created by other teachers. The changes are, whatever resource you’re creating, someone else has done it already. Plus, if it’s not quite right, it can be easily modified for your own purposes, by using the wizard conversion tool.

What’s more, over 100 resources are being added to the activity bank every week. It’s really easy to contribute; when you save a file, with one click on ‘Allow Sharing’, your file will automatically be uploaded. Other teachers can then search for your file and edit it. Over time, the resources diversify and improve through a process of peer review.  By using WordWall in their lessons, teachers can work smarter, not harder.  This means they can put more energy into teaching classes rather than preparing them.