Saturday, December 3, 2016

Jeopardy Rocks


I tried a new online game this week with my German 4 students.  We had been off of school for a week of Thanksgiving break and unfortunately they were due for a unit test that we hadn't been able to get in before break.  So, they needed to do a lot of review, in a fun way if possible

One of my colleagues (Danke, Giselle!) shared this web site with me.  It's called Jeopardy Rocks and is free, though you do have to create an account.  

Once you do, you can create your own Jeopardy game for 1 to 4 teams.  You create the categories, questions, and answers, so it's completely customize-able.  

I decided to try it for the first time in German 4, where I only have 13 (very cooperative) students so that I could see how it worked and work out any bugs.  

Only one team can get credit for a correct answer, and rather than making it a race where I would have to judge who raised their hand first, we took turns among our 3 teams choosing the category and dollar amount.  The team that chose the questions got the first opportunity to answer a question.  If they got it right, they got the points.  If not, they lost the points and the next team had a chance to steal.  This gave everyone a chance to answer questions and encouraged teams to discuss and focus on correct answers rather than just being fast.

My students loved it!  It took quite a while to get through all of the questions, but I think it was a good review.  I'm not sure how well it would work in my German 1 classes of 32 students, but I may try it for finals review with my German 2 classes of 25 students.