A study aide that's WAAAYYY more fun than flash cards!

Jeopardy Labs has a great site that teachers (or students) can build a great study tool on. I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know who doesn't find a little guilty pleasure in stopping on "Jeopardy" while flicking through channels, just to try their luck - well now you can enjoy it in front of everyone because it's EDUCATIONAL! It's for school!

JeopardyLabs allows you to create a customized Jeopardy template without PowerPoint. The games you make can be played online from anywhere in the world. Building your own Jeopardy template is a piece of cake. Just use their simple editor to get your game up and running. Also no registration, no sign in - as soon as you get on to the site you can use it.

If you are not interested in building your own Jeopardy template you can browse Jeopardy templates created by others - mostly teachers!
I set one up for a French review, popped it up on the overhead screen and we had a good time with it - I wished I had created more than just one! I'll be looking for more ready made ones that suit me - there are quite a few of them!

Good higher level thinking skills for kids too - remember, they are only seeing the answer within a category and have to figure out what the question is...

Another One Bites the Dust!

Shoot! That's all I have to say right now! I had an almost serious setback at the beginning of class today. Stinto - my beloved easy chat that I talked up so big just a few posts ago is now down for the count. I guess that's the way it goes in web world - easy come easy go.

Luckily, there is always something similar, and sometimes better, that comes along.

A couple of weeks ago, a teacher on Twitter told me about a similar easy chat room called Chatzy. I'd peeked at it quickly, but hadn't tried it - just bookmarked it for later times.

Well, today when we went to get our Stinto chat started, two of my students, in horrified voices, hollered, "Mrs. Weisz! Stinto's down!" like we needed to give it cpr or something!

I said a calming word or two, then quickly checked my bookmark tags for "chat". Lo and behold, up popped the Chatzy site I'd bookmarked earlier. I quickly got the class back on track, rattling off the new url rapidly. They got there before I did and I quickly heard the tone change - "This is a cool chat! It's better than Stinto!" Luckily it is just as easy too.

So, we lost maybe 5 minutes, and a good friend (Stinto), but actually gained a better tool.

If you were interested in Stinto, give Chatzy a try.

Stinto takes a casual chat to a study activity

It's time for me to bust this one out - it's so simple but it's become one of my favorites recently. Stinto is a chat room, but a very simple one.

You simply click the button to begin a chat and Stinto will give you a 4 or 5 character ending to the URL - for example, your URL will go from www.stinto.net, to www.stinto.net/88b5b. You can tell, or send this URL to whoever you want to join you and if they go to that address they are in your chat room. This ensures that you will have a private chat. No sign-in, no accounts, no registration necessary.

Why would you want to use Stinto? Well, one way I have been using it is for a 5 to 10 minute review at the beginning of French. I need to spend a little time at the beginning of each class reviewing the new vocabulary from the previous day, but was having difficulty getting the students to volunteer (orally) in French. So at the beginning of each class, I have a student open a Stinto chat and write the URL on the board (just those last digits as everyone knows the Stinto address). Now I get 100% participation in these short reviews, and the students are really willing to guess and take chances (this is a short clip from yesterday's class chat).
At the bottom of the chat page is a disk icon so that you can download and save the chat to your desktop. It will download as an rtf file (rich text). Once it is on your desktop, all you have to do is change that .rtf to a .doc, and voila! It becomes a WordDoc (see above example). Besides the student engagement benefits, it's also a great formative assessment tool. I have a good running record of who participated, how they participated, and what they know.
Once the chat is inactive for an hour or two, it simply disappears! I have been encouraging students to use Stinto as a way to get study groups together in the evenings as well.
There are lots of ways to incorporate Stinto into your class. You could use it for small groups that have to brainstorm together - it would be quieter if you had a large class, more kids contribute - you have a record of who participated and what kinds of contributions they made to the group. Think of it as group notes.

Use Cramberry to help your students study the right stuff

Cramberry is a very easy to use online flashcard tool. The really great feature about Cramberry is that after you set up a stack of flash cards, you can share it. That means, you can have your students sign up for Cramberry and share your card stacks with them. They can study them any time. To register - they just want a username, password, and email. Then you're ready. Just start a stack of flash cards. For elementary students who don't have emails, you can just log them in on your teacher password and they can do a little independent studying by themselves.

This is a great tool for when students have to know and remember steps, procedures, main points, facts, or specific vocabulary. When they see a card, they can guess, then check to see if they were right. If they were, they hit "correct". If they weren't, they hit "incorrect". Cramberry keeps track of which ones they are having trouble with and keeps bringing those back.