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Teaching online has become more popular, yet challenging, for many students and teachers. One of my friends told me about Wordwall.net, as a wonderful tool for my English online classes. Today, I will give a personal look at some significant pros and cons of this site.

What is Wordwall.net?

Wordwall is an online platform where teachers can create interactive activities for online or face-to-face classrooms (for printables). Wordwall provides teachers with a variety of templates, ranging from the common multiple-choice quiz like Kahoot! Or Quizizz (if you have ever heard about) to matching pairs, anagram, sorting out, or cloze questions. Teachers can create resources and host activities by sharing an assignment link with students. Students can do the activities as an interactive in-class part or as homework. Teachers can track students’ activity result when they finish.

What benefits does Wordwall offer?

• Saving teachers’ preparation time: It doesn’t take much time to design an activity on Wordwall.net as long as you have your content ready. There are also some templates (such as match-up) where you simply need to insert words and meanings (or pictures). The site will help you generate tons of exciting activities.

• Making online classes interactive: Making students engaged in an online class is a big challenge to many teachers. Using Wordwall can help since it can be a substitute for face-to-face class worksheets. We can now get students to do wordsearch or matching exercises without having to print the handouts.

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• Taking over paper worksheets: At the dawn of technological breakthroughs, worksheets are no longer limited to papers. Teachers are now supported in distributing and marking worksheets. Either in online or offline classrooms, using exercises on Wordwall properly can reduce teachers’ workload on paper stuff like printing handouts or marking papers.

• Allowing students to study at their level: There are undeniably quick and not-very-quick students in a class for many reasons. Wordwall allows students to do the exercise at their own pace without being pressured by other students in the class. Students can move on as soon as they finish the previous questions. Students can also do the exercise again if they are not satisfied or want to review the lessons.

• Helping teachers in tracking student performance: Once students submit their answers, teachers can view the result in their own file. The result sections indicate how much time each student spends on the exercise and how many correct answers they get. Also, there is a score distribution for teachers to have an overview of the class result.

• Providing many choices of interchangeable exercises: As I have mentioned, Wordwall is not limited to the regular multiple-choice quiz. There are tons of templates for teachers to choose from. An interesting thing is that some templates are interchangeable, helping teachers create various activities without having to “input” the content repeatedly. The visual appearance is also varied and catchy. Teachers can easily choose as they assign the exercise to the students.

If you are looking for ideas to apply Wordwall in your own English online classroom, view my previous post here.

Why is Wordwall not suitable in some cases?

• Lack of instructor-paced feature: In some classes where teachers want to control the learning pace of the whole class, Wordwall is not ideal. It doesn’t allow teachers to move from question to question like Kahoot! or Quizizz, so if you are going to give detailed explanations after each question, this is not a good choice.

• A limited number of free activities: One teacher can only create 5 resources (but unlimited assignments) with a free account, and printables are also not allowed. In this case, I normally use the “edit content” functions. That means I change the questions of the available resources I have created. However, the cost is that you will lose your previous content. Another suggestion for this is to search for available public resources created by other teachers and use them.

• Absence of “import” feature: I have used Kahoot! and Quizizz for a long time, and it is very easy to import hundreds of questions from a sheet file. However, this is not possible on Wordwall. Instead, you have to copy your content and paste it into the question or answer boxes or type it directly into the site.

• Format limit for the multiple-choice quiz: Such features of font like underline, bold, or italics are not allowed on Wordwall. Therefore, it may not be convenient for some teachers.

How can teachers start with Wordwall from scratch?

I have come across this wonderful introductory video about Wordwall for you to consult. Hope this help!