Stickers for your kids: print them or make them?

Customisable Mr Men stickers from the TES site...

One of the resources sites I suggested in the technology session on our very young learners course this week was the Times Educational Supplement (TES) site, which has over 30,000 free resources, for all subjects (not principally ELT).

From TES, I took two examples (registration required to view them): a PowerPoint Jeopardy template, and some customisable Mr Men stickers. For very young learners, note that you can edit the text, or eliminate it altogether (see image above).

Both would be huge time-savers: the former would require a minimum amount of prior knowledge of PowerPoint, but would still save you hours of work; the latter not much more than a bit of fiddling about to get them to print out on sticky labels...

But would you actually want to use them...?

That would be a very definite YES!, to judge from the comments about them on TES, but personally I have my doubts. In both cases it would the teacher using the technology, but it surely ought to be the learners doing so. You could, for example, have (older) learners write questions, which would certainly be a start, if you wanted to play Jeopardy.

As for the stickers, personally I'd either create my own (as, see image below, you did at the start of my session) or else I'd get my learners to create the labels for each other...

Mr Personal: it's so easy to make your own!

There's also the question of the time it's going to take: it was so much quicker to produce our own -- and so much more personal!

Sometimes the resources technology offers are in fact not necessarily the best solution...