Thursday, February 26, 2009

Battle of Wits...JeopardyLabs Online

Secretly I have a dream to be with the mustached one known as Alex Trebek and take down Ken Jennings as the most winningest person on Jeopardy history. However, deep down I know my dream may never become reality.

But I can get a little a closer (and so can you and your students) with JeopardyLabs Online. Before now there were two ways to play this highly interactive game in the classroom. You could buy the actual game with controllers, scoreboard and question cartridges. Often, I have found, that teachers need lots of help setting that up. The other way was through Power Point. I can not tell you how many Jeopardy templates I have for all sorts of grade levels. I usually do a workshop to teach teachers how to make them.

No longer! JeopardyLabs does the work for you. Now teachers and students don't have to worry about making sure slides are linked correctly or making sure the questions disappear after they are answered. All you need is to go online, fill out the board with your dollar amount, categories and questions and you are ready to go. I created one in about 10 minutes! But JeopardyLabs takes it one step further in that you can share your board with other teachers and you can search boards other teachers have made. Looking for weather, Civil War, or Romeo and Juliet? There are several boards that others have all ready made. So if you are in a pinch use the search and find your board. But what if you find a pre-made board but one or two of the questions don't suit you. No problem! You can edit it and save it as your own!

But wait there is more! How is this site kid and classroom friendly? There is no registration! All you need to do is pick a password so if while you are building you need to come back. No need to create email addresses for your class. This could be a great way for kids to interact with each other and demonstrate learning after a lesson or unit.

Here is a board that I modified as if I was teaching a unit on Chemistry. I simply searched for Periodic Table, found what I wanted and modified it for me.

I encourage you to add this site to your arsonal of creative ways to assess student learning.

JeopardyLabs

1 comment:

  1. Love it! And can't wait to try it with my students. I love the subtitle "This is...not PowerPoint!"

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