Why should I use Spark Island?

What's Spark Island for? Why is it relevant to me as a teacher? Why should I spend some time looking at it?

Because we believe that it will make your teaching more effective and more fun, for both you and your pupils. You'll also be using ICT as a tool to solve some practical problems. Spark Island activities and their accompanying resources are designed to do the following:

Provide resources to help primary school teachers and pupils consolidate and practise very specific curriculum learning outcomes;
Allow teachers easily to integrate ICT into their classroom;
Use ICT where it provides a real, practical benefit to the learning process.

Toolkits for teachers

Our activities are not just standalone 'games'. Every activity, with its accompanying resources, is envisaged as a toolkit to use in the classroom when you are teaching a particular part of the curriculum. We provide teaching suggestions on how you might use the activity in a classroom setting and printable resources for use away from the computer - perhaps as part of an introductory task, for those who are waiting their turn for the computer, or as homework. Our activities are designed for use in all primary school classrooms which have a computer in them, be they fully-equipped ICT suites, areas equipped with an interactive whiteboard, or a room with one or more computers in a corner.

Built with teachers, for teachers, in the UK.

Our resources are built, from the start, with practising teachers working in UK schools. Before we commissioned any activities, we asked a range of teachers across Britain which areas of the curriculum they found most difficult to teach. We work with our team of teachers to decide which of these areas to focus on, given that we are using ICT. Finally, our team of interactive designers, illustrators and programmers build our activities, consulting with the teachers before publishing the activities on the site. The resulting activities are tested in classrooms, and we incorporate feedback on our activities into updated versions which we publish periodically. We also publish new activities as they become available. Classroom testing is done by our Spark Lab schools: if you would like to participate in this programme, in return for a free subscription, click here for more information. We have also been evaluated by the DfES/BECTa and by TEEM: click here for details of what people have been saying about us.

An interactive cartoon world

We knew when we were building the first activities for the site that interactive activities for primary school children needed to be more exciting than some of the material we could see on the web: worthy, but perhaps without the highest levels of production values. We felt that the way to make our activities truly involving was to set all of them inside a cartoon world, with its own characters, landscapes and quirks. When you play a Spark Island activity, you are not just counting things on a screen: you're helping Farmer Rumtum count his things in time for lunch. He'll be pretty happy when you've done it: try it and see.

Why we don't cover the whole curriculum

Spark Island activities do not cover the whole primary school curriculum. This is quite deliberate. It is because we believe that ICT should only be used when it is useful. Consequently, we do not try and do what a textbook does better than a web page: we focus on the places where computers can really add something to the learning process. We are, however, continually developing new resources, and will tell you about them by email if you register and allow us to do so.

Try it, and let us know what you think

If you have any comments, questions or feedback about Spark Island - positive or negative - please let me know. We can only make the service better if you tell us what you think.

If you haven't tried Spark Island, please register for a 14 day free trial now. It is free, commits you to nothing - and could be very worthwhile for you and your pupils.

Nicholas Kind
Publishing Director

Click here for a printable version of this page.