I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. – Dr. Seuss
April Fool’s Day is coming! Now is a great time to engage your learners with humor. Humor makes learning fun, is a great way to ease the anxiety of preparing for tests, makes boring topics more bearable, and prepares the brain to learn difficult topics. Below are our some free web tools, resources and apps your students will enjoy. Use these resources to spice up a lesson or get your learners to use them to present what they have learned in a fun way! For ideas on how to effectively use these tools for learning, check out my webinar recordings, Engage Learners with Humor and Teach English with Jokes, or my articles in the GO Teach magazine and The Education Horizons Journal, LOL! Teacher! Using Humor to Enhance Student Learning. If you like these ideas then be sure to check out my new book published this summer with more ideas, Hacking Digital Learning Strategies: 10 Ways to Launch EdTech Missions in Your Classroom.
Get your copy of my books, The 30 Goals for Teachers or Learning to Go. Ask me about training your teachers, ShellyTerrell@gmail.com!
Tips and Resources
- Check out my infographic on Integrating Humor in the Classroom.
- Incorporate fun icebreakers. Check out my digital icebreakers here and icebreakers for kids here.
- Try these tools to get students creating with humorous characters in comics- Makebeliefscomix, Toondoo, Friendstrip iOS/Android app, or the ComicsHead iOS/Android app.
- Grammarman Comics is a great resources to learn grammar with the fun videos and comics.
- Show funny video clips! Here’s a list of the funniest TedTalks and the Epic History Rap Battles.
- Big Hug Labs has many different ways to create humorous photos and presentations.
- Create Memes with Meme Generator. I recommend this for adults and not students.
- Students can create games including humorous characters with TinyTap app, Hopscotch, or Code Monkey.
- Bill Nye has a new video series #EmojiScience where students learn about physics and science theories in a fun way.
- Teach with humorous literature! Try the OMG Shakespeare series with teens and adults. Find some of my favorite humorous authors in this Pinterest board of books for young learners.
- Teach with jokes! Find tips and activities in my article, Let’s Laugh! 10+ Resources for Inspiring Laughter. Feel free to use my Joke Bingo template as a fun icebreaker.
- Talking Tom and Ben News is an iOS, Android, and Amazon app where students act as newscasters. They report the news in pairs as either Tom, a talking cat, or Ben, a dog. Check out the other talking characters from Outfit 7 to get your students speaking English via funny characters.
- Quizizz is a web tool and app that works on any device to create fun games and quizzes. Teachers have the option of showing a meme after a question is answered.
- Showbie is a web tool and app that allows grading with Emojis.
- MouthOff is a free iOS and Android ($1) app where students choose a mouth, put the phone in front of their mouths, and talk to watch the mouth move.
- Voki is a web tool and app for students to create animated talking characters and animated presentations.
- Blabberize is a website students can use to upload their drawings and images and draw a mouth to make the images talk.
- YakIt Kids and Chatterpix Kids are iOS apps where students upload their images and drawings and add a mouth to animate the images.
- Plotagon is a web tool and app that allows students to create animated avatar videos.
- SockPuppets is an iOS app for creating short movies with talking socks.
- Puppet Pals and Toontastic are iOS apps for creating short videos with fun characters that students animate.
- ZimmerTwins is a web tool for young learners to create fun videos.
Challenge: Try one of these resources to integrate humor in your curriculum this year!
If you enjoyed these ideas, you may want to get your copy of The 30 Goals for Teachers or my $5.99 ebook, Learning to Go, which has digital/mobile activities for any device and editable/printable handouts and rubrics.
