One of the things I have done is to get kids to use emoticons (smileys) as evaluation tools – especially useful for commenting on a piece of work they have completed or just for recording how they feel about school each day. (happy, sad, tired, ‘cool’, angry, worried etc). There is so much emphasis on evaluation and a lot of the time it just means kids writing stuff to show you have ticked the boxes.

Emoticons are fast, fun, child friendly and give you surprisingly accurate feedback.

If you have Skype, MSN, Facebook etc – or are using other software that displays emoticons, this makes this very easy.  Otherwise, they can just type the keystrokes in or even draw the emoticons. Or you can print off sheets of emoticons and let the children stick them on their work, their diaries etc. Letting children design their own emoticons is also great fun.

Designing and making Skype emoticon pictures is also great fun!

There are also lots of non-tech things to do with emoticons

• talking about words to describe emotions
• making a collection of emoticons to express when you are happy /sad / angry – then find some pictures on google to represent the same thing
• games where children take a card with an emoticon on it and try and act it out, others in the group have to guess