Teacher Information

Kia ora,

Thank you for visiting WickED. WickED is a website aimed at students between the ages of 7–12 years. WickED has been created in such a way that students can navigate the site and work through the activities independently.

WickED contains curriculum-based fun learning activities that you can use to support your classroom programme. This is a non-commercial site funded by the Ministry of Education and all material is quality assured – this means that all external sites that are linked from WickED have been checked to ensure they have educational content, are safe, and are free from unwanted advertisements.

Ways to use WickED in your classroom

Download WickED onto the desktop on the computers in your classroom so that students can find the site easily.
Show the students how to use the Information centre as a safe Internet search.
When planning your programme, type your topic of ‘centre of interest’ term in to the TKI search, and look through the search results for WickED links. Select tasks for the students to complete as part of your ‘centre of interest’ or topic.
Use the interactives and games as fun incentives for students who finish work early.

Topics

Each term a new topic is posted. These topics are integrated units with activities from several curriculum areas involving a range of thinking and learning skills. Students are led to quality-assured websites to complete activities or research. They then present their work using a variety of media applications including PowerPoint, Publisher, Word, Paint, or Frontpage. These activities are designed to be done independently by students to increase their IT knowledge and capabilities. Students can also have their work published on the Student Gallery.

More Topics contains a full list of the topics on WickED.

Browse through Curriculum links for a list of topics and details of the curriculum area that the activities fit within.

Interactives

This area contains a range of fun games and interactives for students. Activities include crosswords, multi-choice madness quizzes, and interactives, in English and te reo Māori.
Interactives include:

The Zoo This language resource comprises of an illustrated story and accompanying activities, designed for students learning English.
The missing words activity, where students fill in gaps in from the story text, is useful for assessing and improving the students’ comprehension.
The word search, where students find words that are hidden in a grid, provides practice in recognising words and improving spelling.
New activities will be added throughout the year.
Survival on Niu Island This interactive takes you on a journey to the Pacific Islands where two Kiwi kids have crash landed on Niu Island in the year 2170. Activities include making a house out of coconut leaves, making fire, searching for food, and much more.
Pasifika Patterns Learn about symmetry by investigating tapa and weaving patterns.
Newspaper is an interactive where students navigate the newspaper and learn all about how newspapers package words and pictures to inform and entertain their readers.
spellBinder’s aim is to help students learn to spell the commonly misspelt words listed in NZCER’s Spell-Write (Croft & Mapa, 1998). Students can practise words in three different ways: copying, filling in missing letters, and completely spelling the word. Then they can choose either to draw their own picture to write about or write about one of the images provided. Select About spellBinder for further information about spellbinder.
Wharenui teaches students the different parts of a wharenui/meeting house (available in English and te reo Māori).
Matariki describes the significance of this Māori calendar event in Māori life and is accompanied by a set of teachers’ notes (available in both English and te reo Māori).
Hangi tells students how to make a hangi using science skills and is accompanied by a set of teachers’ notes (available in both English and te reo Māori).
Te Wānanga explores the art of taiaha and the movement of birds (available in both English and te reo Māori).
He Hui Tā Tātou demonstrates how cooperation is important in a successful hui (te reo Māori).
Te Papa Pānui shows there is a lot to learning through reading stories (te reo Māori).
Tui Time This range of activities about the adventures of Tiaki tui provide a unique context to explore aspects of New Zealand ecology.
On Earth is a series of six interactives related to the science strand Planet Earth.

Kokona Māori

Kokona Māori provides access to all the Māori resources on WickED as well as other educational information and interactives in te reo Maori.

Tāngata rongonui is a collection of profiles of Māori role models – each topic includes several activities in te reo Māori.
The Māori interactives provide curriculum-focused interactive learning games in Māori.
Rauemi Māori contains links to a collection of quality, online Māori resources.
Tui Time This range of activities about the adventures of Tiaki tui provide a unique context to explore aspects of New Zealand ecology.

Cool Kiwis

New Zealanders, who are outstanding in their field, are our Cool Kiwis. The interviews can be used when focussing on interviews in oral language as a class, or as information for individual research on well-known New Zealanders.
We welcome your suggestions of New Zealanders to interview to add to our Cool Kiwi section.

Student Gallery

The Student Gallery features work sent in to us from students who have completed topic activities, or work that they have been working on at school. If you would like to contribute some of your students’ work on the site, read details of how to contribute (Word 54KB) here.

WickED TV

WickED TV provides a forum for students’ video clips to be shown. It also includes information to help you with the video-making and editing process.

Information Station

The Information Station provides a safe way for students to use and search the web. Included are:

lists of great maths and language websites
child-safe search engines, an online dictionary and thesaurus, maps, atlases, online newspapers, encyclopedias, and links to New Zealand libraries
search hints
Webhunts
instructions on how to use Frontpage to create a website.

Tutorials

The WickED team provides telephone tours of the website for individuals or groups. These can be scheduled for a school staff meeting or planning session.

Contact us to arrange a suitable date and time. For a group tutorial it is best if you can organise a speaker phone or polycom telephone to be set up close to a suite of computers so that the staff can hear the WickED tutor direct them around the site.

To make sure we pitch our tutorial at the right level for your staff, please include the following information with your request:

How many of those participating in the tutorial have used WickED before?
What curriculum level and focus, if any, would be most useful for your group?
How long would you like the conference to be? (30–45 minutes seems to be a popular length of time).
Are there any other factors that we should be aware of?