Looking for free remote learning activities this holiday?

During the Covid-19 social restrictions ELC has moved temporarily to remote learning to keep our students’ safe while keeping their hard-earned progress from being compromised.

From Term 2 2020 we are once again running in-centre tuition with increased hygiene measures and limited students numbers.

But if you’re looking for more to keep students occupied while they’re cooped up in the house…

Here are three online learning sites we have used and like. And minimal supervision required.

Improve touch typing at Typing Club

Most ELC students have a Typing Club account – whether they’ve accessed it or not. We use it sometimes as a short interstitial when we need a psychological “pallet cleanser” activity, but students these days do need to develop good tying skills early on. It pains me to see seniors trying to get though an essay with pointer fingers only, and their eyes not on the screen. A keyboard shouldn’t be a barrier between thoughts and words on screen, it should disappear – with proper typing skills, our thoughts just appear on the screen.

To start or continue their ELC Typing Club progress, students can log in at elcau.typingclub.com. Check with us for their log in details.

Improve a foreign language at Duolingo

This won’t get you all the way to knowing a new language, but it can be a great start. It’s not intimidating at all, which is one very common barrier to language learners. Works for kids and adults. The whole family could race each other to learn Español! Or French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch… so many.

I used Duolingo personally for 6 months solid before moving to Germany to teach. It meant that I could learn much more quickly when I actually started German classes – I could enrol straight into intermediate.

Improve maths, science, engineering or computing at Khan Academy

A hoard of graded videos and automatically assessed practice questions to guide students through many, many, many topics. There are suggested paths, but students can browse around too to see what interests them. Quizzes jump students past content at which they are already proficient, move students on when they’re getting the hang of it, and revise things recently learned.

I use Khan Academy when I need to sneakily refresh my knowledge on any rusting maths topics. Then I find myself addicted and wishing I had more time just to sit and explore more around the fringes of my mathematical and scientific understanding.