'Screentime' is your ally
5 great apps to reach your learning goals whilst having fun.
Hi! I’m Laure, a passionate tutor with 2700+ hours of experience helping students navigate through their learning journey.
Over the last 7 years, I’ve seen parents through the ups and downs of the screen time rollercoaster. ‘Should I allow screen time to my child? From what age? And how much time a day?’ ‘iPads at school are the worst, I don’t know how to encourage my child to make a better use of it’.
I’ve also seen students being sometimes enthusiastic about their screens, and sometimes clueless about how to make it an ally in their learning experience.
So here are my top 5 apps and websites to help you all as a family navigate through the digital learning journey.
All free, of course, because we all have enough monthly subscriptions already.
5. LearningApps
LearningApps comes with many different games already, available for free, in French, Math, and all school subjects.
Its greatest strength resides in the fact that you can create your own games quickly and efficiently, based only on what you or your child needs to focus their revision on. This feature makes it a super powerful tool to revise efficiently, and to gain motivation and engagement in the learning process.
Why am I not ranking it higher? Its design is a bit old school, and the user experience could be improved, which makes it a tool that students do not go spontaneously to (at least from my experience). They don’t mind working on it if someone reminds them, but they are not attracted by it, which doesn’t make it a natural reminder for them to work.
4. CoolMathGames
CoolMathGames has great games in all areas of math: numbers, logic, etc.
These games are suitable for all ages and levels, which allows you to engage fully with your child in the learning process.
Why am I not ranking it higher? Because whilst these games help develop skills which are very important for math and logical reasoning, most of them are not directly related to the math curriculum required by schools. Therefore, their impact on your child’s grades at school will be limited.
3. Françaisfacile
Françaisfacile has countless exercises about every single point of grammar and conjugation in French. It is a great resource to practice anything you may have to study in French, with recaps of the rules at the beginning and many exercises available for each subject. Exercise pages all have a correction button, which allows the user to check at a glance how well they did.
Why am I not ranking it 2nd or 1st? Françaisfacile is very useful to practice pretty much anything French-related, but it is closer to an exercise website than a game website, so it is not as engaging and fun as others can be. Also, the platform is collaborative, so it could happen that some answers provided are wrong, or that some questions are not perfectly phrased. However, I never fell on something wrong on it yet, although I am using it on a regular basis with some of my students.
2. Quizlet (and the likes)
Quizlet is a great app to create flashcards.
What are flashcards, you may ask? Flashcards are two-sided cards filled with one piece of information on one side, and a related piece of information on the other (for instance, a date and the event that occurred on that date, or a word in your mother tongue and its translation in a language you are learning, etc).
Why are flashcards a powerful revision tool?
They force you to work on your long-term memory and not only your short-term one
They allow you to work only on the notions that you are struggling to remember, and not all of what your teacher asked you to study
They force you to sequence a big piece of work into smaller pieces of information, which makes remembering them feel like a more reachable target, and thus a less stressful task.
Quizlet and the likes are apps that allow you to make your own flashcards, and take them everywhere with you (or at least, everywhere you take your phone).
Why not 1st? Because as far as Quizlet is concerned, some useful functions are in the paid subscription (such as using a picture). Also, the tool doesn’t explain how to do good flashcards, so the efficiency of the app chosen will be limited if cards are not well filled by the user. Last but not least, although flashcards are very powerful and efficient, they are not as entertaining as number 1…
1. The MathPlayground
The MathPlayground is the ultimate website for math games, from primary school to… forever!
Why it has it all:
it is all free (although ads on the sides can get a bit annoying)
it has a multiplayer function, that can be limited to only people you know through a passcode system
it’s engaging and fun
it covers all areas of math and is curriculum-based (you can even specify which year your child is in, so it offers only games adapted to what they already covered at school).
My favorite game on the website: Make A Number. Just go ahead and test it!
With that platform, your child will (finally) know their timetables in no time.
So, screen time, any chance we could get along?
My view on the subject as I see families argue over screen time is this: pedagogical apps and websites may allow you to open negotiation. Ok for more screen time, but only if it’s useful screen time.
Because screens are not bad per se, what makes them bad is the use we make of them. Encouraging children and teenagers to use them for education purposes is a great way to help them develop a healthy relationship with screens, which will most likely follow them for the rest of their lives.
Screens are great to revise in any setup: have to wait a sibling for 15 minutes in the car? Stuck in the bus for the next 30 minutes? Waiting for a friend to arrive at your place for some playtime? That’s typically when these websites can allow you to make the most out of that time, and gain time in revising timetables over the weekend for instance.
However this article is in no way a love letter to screens. A gentle reminder that public policies discourages the use of screens before the age of 3, and that screen time should be supervised from 3 onwards.
Public policies aside: screens and their engaging apps will never replace the feeling and engagement towards learning your child develops when they laugh with you and see pride in your eyes. Yes, even when they pretend the contrary.
Really useful article, thanks Laure!