12 ICT Ideas for Christmas

It’s a month before Christmas and while the shops have been full of the spirit since September, we’ve waited until now to showcase some ideas for the next month of school. Here are some ideas to integrate technology in your classroom for the festive season. This list was started in 2010 and each year we try and update it.

Christmas Carol Video Conference

Host a video conference using Skype, OnlineMeetingRooms or any other application with another school.  Each school can sing a couple of Christmas Carols to each other.  This is even better when schools have a different ethos to each other.  Read about a Church of Ireland school who conferenced with an Educate Together school here.

Visit a Virtual North Pole

With loads of great activities to do on an Interactive Whiteboard, the North Pole web site is a great place to visit with younger classes.

http://www.northpole.com

Make your own Christmas Cards

This can work out as a good fundraising idea.  Get children to design Christmas cards in their favourite painting package.  The best one(s) can be sent to a printing company and the cards can be sold to families in school.

DIY Christmas Cards from Channel 4

Christmas Podcast

Why not get your children to record some Christmas stories or songs and podcast them to the world.  This is easily done using programs like Audacity.  Podcasts can be uploaded to the school’s web site or even on iTunes!

YouTube Nativity

Get the children to design and record a Christmas Nativity.  Because it will go on YouTube, it will have to be less than 10 minutes! A great challenge for older classes.

Nollag Vocabulary

Why not teach the world some Gaeilge? Using PowerPoint, OpenOffice or Keynote, make some slides with Christmas clipart. When a user clicks on a picture, a recording of the word(s) is spoken.  You can also create a SoundBoard on http://www.soundboard.com/. This is a cool project for children of all ages.

Follow Santa on Twitter!

Santa’s gone all Web 2.0 and updates his progress on Twitter.  Check him out on: http://twitter.com/#!/noradsanta

A Christmas Field Trip

Find out about Christmas all around the world on this Virtual Christmas Field Trip: http://www.tramline.com/tours/cross/xmas/_tourlaunch1.htm

Write a Christmas Story Online

Storybird.com is a brilliant site for writing stories in general.  Because it has lots of professional quality clipart (and it’s free too), it can make a shared writing exercise highly motivating.  Children can create their own Storybird stories too if they have access to a computer.

A Christmas Blog

Blogs don’t have to last forever.  They can be quite specific.  For example two schools in Ireland and Italy did an eTwinning project about Christmas Carolling around Europe. Have a look here http://carollingineurope.wordpress.com/ to read about their project and maybe come up with some ideas of your own.

Use the web to learn about other festivals of light

Christmas is known as a festival of light, which Christians celebrate.  However other religions have their own festivals of light too.  Jewish people celebrate Chanukah, Sikhs and Hindus have Diwali and there’s Kwanzaa, which is an African-American festival too.  There’s plenty of others around the world including special ones in Sweden, Mexico and Brazil.  Children can spend time researching different festivals of light on the Internet and making interesting projects based on them.

If you have found any good ideas to celebrate Christmas using technology, why not add them to our comments?  If you have some good links to share for teaching about Christmas, go to our sister site,  http://www.mash.ie/christmas and add them there.

Looking to Decorate your Classroom

Look no further than Seomra Ranga’s Nollaig Shona site, which offers hundreds of Christmas resources. If you can think of it, it’s probably already there!

Last Update: August 17, 2017  

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